From: DavidWelch-AT-pseud.pseud
Date: Wed, 11 Oct 2000 22:27:12 +0100
Subject: M-INTRO: Re: Value theory 


DEAN-AT-pseud.pseud
>
> DrUSA, you say that Marx's theory covers items such as Beanie Babies 
> etc in his section on commodity fetishism.  This may be true and I 
> won't pretend that I know a lot about Marx and what he thought.  But 
> you've got to admit that there is no way that marx could have forseen 
> the introduction into the market of commodities such as Beanie Babies 
> or even things like baseball cards or Star Wars action figures.  By
> citing these examples I mean commodities that have such a ridiculous 
> amount of value placed on them by "collectors" that there can't be any 
> correlation between that labor time spent producing them and how much  
> people are now willing to pay for them.
>
I imagine there were items like this at the time Marx was writing too, even
if less of the population had income to spend on non-necessities. The point
I was trying to make in my first reply (obviously not very well) was that capitalism
as a society is based on a correspondance between price and socially necessary
labour time. Of course there are items for which this isn't true, but if we
are interesting in studying
the underlying logic of capitalism (rather than providing some general
calculus of price) then it's reasonable to concentrate on the
majority of commodities for which it is true. If we were discussing
a Pacific Island cargo cult (the closest example to a 'beanie baby
society that I can think of) then it wouldn't.


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