2. No, I cannot dismiss them; but I can exclude them from consideration for the time being, particularly as I have inside knowledge that they will be discussed later.

3. I am not ignoring the difference between cost and value. On the contrary, that is one of the central points we will be dealing with–when we get to cost. So far, I haven’t brought up cost, and don’t care to engage on it when we are trying to discuss value, because they are different. And if you were paying attention, we went over skilled labor as a multiplier of unskilled labor. Your argument is like saying that I cannot measure a football field in feet because it is measured in yards. As for the amount of training required for different skills, that is, indeed, something we’ll be getting into. For now, suffice it to say that, if labor-power is a commodity, then putting more socially necessary labor into the creation of that commodity, ought to produce a commodity of higher value, n’est-pa?

1. You’re proceeding from the point of acceptance, and thus are only performing an exegisis, not an analysis (on Chapter 1.)

2. You can’t dismiss the reality of things not brought up in your book yet. The existence of a person named Jesus can’t be dismissed from a careful reading of the NIV version of Genesis.

3. Completely apart from the difference between cost and value (which you are ingenuinely dismissing, to your own incredulity) you’re also missing (or simply discounting dishonestly) the amount of skill that goes into tailoring vs. weaving. Skill is a variable commodity that takes more training (at least), and so the amount of labor to be capable of producing is unknown. (The amount of training required is also variable, being based partly on talent, but we can leave that out for now.)

Commodities, as skzb points out, are interchangeable things, or to use a term from contemporary (capitalist) economics, any one commodity, say a DVD of a particular movie, is an absolutely perfect substitute for another DVD of that same movie.

Yet consider something, such as a dining table. One could purchase one made by machines with relatively little human contribution, and the perceived value is X. Then take a table of the same dimensions, made by a craftsman who obviously spent X + a lot of labor to create the table, and the value of the table will also be X + a lot.

In that example, “price” and “value” correlate rather better than simply looking for the best bargain for a coat between one store and another.

I think this would have its corollary in Marx’s analysis, and which helps support his theory of value, when one compares a shirt made in a factory and one made by a tailor. If it involves 100 people, each of whose tasks is 30 seconds long, to take linen and turn it into a coat, then we’re talking about 50 minutes of direct human labor, and some additional contribution by congealed labor (i.e.,. machines). Contrast that with the several hours a tailor would expend in labor to make a coat of the same dimensions.

There is a ring of truth to the theory of value when we compare a factory commodity with that made by a craft. Both are coats and therefore potentially commodities, yet we recognize the value of the latter as greater than the value of the former. No extensive analysis needed. We just know. Marx would despise the preceding four sentences, I think, but that doesn’t make them any less true or any less supportive of his theory of value.

The point may appear trivial (and, in many ways, it is), and it might seem silly to do this much work to establish that beef comes from cows; but it becomes important when you are surrounded by people who are convinced that steak grows in grocery stores.

“Then, a subtle trick happens. It somehow goes from being empirical to being definitional.”

What saw was a series of conclusions based on facts, all of which match up with observed phenomenon. If these conclusions are then used as the basis for further conclusions, I can see how that might look definitional, but I respectfully disagree.

Try this experiment. Go to a mall. Take a look at the different coats in different stores. Go to a Walmart too, and look at the coats there. Then go to some discount outlet (it actually takes extra labor to get something to the discounter) and look at the coats in each of these places. Ask yourself whether the labor involved explains the difference in the worth of the coats (even the ones that look very similar). I think the answer is clearly “No”, either that or the word “value” doesn’t correspond to what actually goes on in the various coat stores.

Here’s the problem more generally. Marx’s labor theory of value, at first blush, looks like its an empirical proposition. The only trouble with it, as an empirical proposition, is that it is pretty obviously false. Then, a subtle trick happens. It somehow goes from being empirical to being definitional. In this context, it becomes more of a moral statement than an empirical one. People want to say, a thing SHOULD be worth the amount of labor it took to get it to market. And perhaps that’s true, but it’s not a statement of fact.

But you don’t need them to make the point. Just take your basic Topps trading card, say a 1959 Mickey Mantle. The correlation between labor and value simply falls apart here. Or for any collectible. Maybe you can say that all of these things just stopped being commodities. But there are tons and tons of these markets, and there are just way too many gradations between stuff that is purely new and interchangeable, and stuff that gets value from other considerations.

On the other point I was making, lets say that one artist normally sells a million units, while another sells 100,000. The labor done by each artist is the same. Now assume that the cost/unit of each item is also the same. (It would actually be more for the lower selling artist because of economies of scale, but with today’s technology, the cost/unit for delivery actually approaches zero, so its probably a fair assumption). Under these assumptions, using Marx’s theory, it seems that each copy of the lower selling artist has 10 times the value of a work by the higher selling artist. Of course, this simply is not true. The labor that an author or artist puts into his work basically has nothing to do with its economic value. And here, we definitely are talking about commodities in Marx’s sense.

Yes. And these are not commodities.