Hello Lemmygrad. I’m trying to understand the labour theory of value, and one thing I’m wondering about is the value of ‘status symbols’. For commodities like this, it seems the price is always higher than the same commodity that’s not a status symbol (like fancy cars or whatever). Those commodities seem to have disproportionately more value than the extra labour needed for the non status symbol version. How does LTV explain that?
My thinking is that LTV assumes that people will choose the cheaper between two equivalent commodities, but the opposite is actually true for status symbols (like, between 2 necklaces that are exactly the same, demand for the more expensive one will actually be higher). Does that sound about right? Or am I missing something deeper?
I should really get around to reading Capital…
Chapter 1 book 1 of capital gets into this, I just started reading it, this is my understanding. Marx says commodities have two values exchange value (what it sells for) and use value (he gives a weight of steel or something as an example). This exchange value is also influenced by the use value. The example he gives is that diamonds (I assume they didn’t have as much industrial use back then) if they were not coveted by the wealthy, they would not be worth Labor time necessary to extract them from the earth. So he says the labour theory of value is wrong because the labour time needed to extract diamonds would not be worth it if commodities didn’t have a dual nature of exchange.This is just a couple pages of capital vol 1 btw. The version I have is in German and if you can speak German I suggest it it’s put out by anaconda press, it has an old introduction and it suggests that you skip book 1 and move on to other chapters first because that’s where the heavy theoretical stuff is.
I edited it a bunch to clear up my thoughts