The Consumer Society

Does anyone have more info on this (from SEP)?
>Baudrillard's thought is radically dualistic and he takes the side of the pole within a series of dichotomies of Western thought that has generally been derided as inferior, such as siding with appearance against reality, illusion over truth, evil over good, and woman over man.
>Most controversially, Baudrillard also identifies with the principle of evil defined as that which is opposed to and against the good. There is an admittedly Manichean and Gnostic dimension to Baudrillard's thought, as well as deep cynicism and nihilism.[8]
The footnote references a Smith but it's not the bibliography.

Will this book make me a minimalist non-consumer who only buys essential food and lives in a minimal-spaced home?

No, you willl merely lose all hope

No it won't, it'll make you however realize that even "minimalist" lifestyles are a form of consumerism

So what's the point in reading it?

Yes but they are better than the average consumer who wants to accumulate things.

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No, it will make you enter into potlatches with your local supermarket

Baudrillard was a fatty who refused to lose weight. His views on consumerism are obsessive and worthless.

Honestly seems like libel or a massive misreading of him.

t. addicted mcdonald customer

It's from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy though.

which is fallible

Could have just typed "t. Baudrillard" and saved your fat desperate fingers from a few extra keystrokes.

>So what's the point in reading it?
What's the point in anything?

I may be the fittest user of this board and I never stepped into a McDonald or Burger King in my life.

I’m eating a McDouble and I could squash you

So why the need for a philosophy to help cope with consumerism then? I'm not buying what you're selling, kid.

To have a point.

>Yes but they are better than the average consumer who wants to accumulate things.
you should read it

Baudy is abstract theory. For concrete praxis you need to learn from the master.

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Enjoy being brainwashed by corporate media and consumerism culture then I guess.

Yes.

yikey

Friendship ended with Consumerism.

Now Producerism is my best friend.

A great work of sociology that analyzes waste, consumerism, advertising and credit in a very contemporary and forward-thinking way. Also some sharp passages on pop art and film. It's Baudrillard's most clear and conventional text (it was written for commission, and cites mainstream American sociology like Galbraith, Veblen, Boorstin).
He is probably referencing an article on the International Journal of Baudrillard Studies website, which is edited by Richard Smith. The passage you quoted is a fair assessment.
>consuming your own body as a commodity for productivity and status
not gonna make it

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Amazing how well it predicted the 'woke capitalism' surge of the 2010s.

Today's bourgeoisie's whole class identity, the 'collection of products by which sociocultural standing is determined', is pretty much comprised of things come back 'first as tragedy, then as farce', the original real version destroyed by capitalism then resurrected by capitalism as signs.
Ex:
>Going out of their way to buy expensive organic local produce or grass-fed free range meat - the stuff medieval peasants ate by default before corporate industrial agriculture became the norm
you don't see poorfags shopping at whole foods
>taking pilates or yoga classes / going to the gym, in an age when the sort of physical exertion which used to be part of everyone's daily life has been completely erased
obesity rates drop as income level rises
>reading books / newspapers as recreation, now that they are no longer a dominant medium of information
See Neil Postman for the nightmarish effects of television (or youtube videos, or social media) being the main channel of info shaping peoples' worldview rather than the written word

what does it mean to make me O wise one

*make it

Baudrillard was not a therapist.

non sequitur
I'm not asking baudrillard I'm asking you/No.13735354, the person who brought up the concept of making it

suck my balls, that's how you'll make it

wit

Kondo is endgame-tier

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Are there truly useful books or just memes?

You're the one that sounds pozzed, dude.

seething

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Idk, but I think he was 100% right when he said the twin towers were asking for it

woah based

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STFU don't want any pseuds here getting ahold of K*ndo. She truely demonstrates that Forms can be corporeal just by being.

He never talked about Walter Benjamin, as far as I know, which is annoying considering that Benjamin's critique of Marxism seems to align with Baud's

They are truly great. Start with the original—The Life Changing Magic of Tidying Up—as it places the praxis in its theoretical situ. The benefit of the illustrated follow up are visual depicitions of specific folding techniques, which are better demonstrated on video/youtube. The "why" of the storage techniques are explained in the original:
1. You never have a storage problem, everyone has enough storage space, even Japanese coffin apartments. You always have a too-much-stuff problem.

2. You in-part purchase things because you don't know what you already have. Always store things so they are immediately able to be visually inspected at a glace so you always know what you already own. Fold and store things so they are never buried or covered or hidden by other things. Always store things of the same nature in the same space, don't split storage similar things in different locations (eg some tools in the kitchen, some tools in the garage), you want to be see everything you own in a specific category of things at a glance, which requires they be stored together in the same spatial location.

The full anti-consumerist philosophy is elucidated in the original, without veering into the neo-Fraticelli heresy of "you don't need to own any goods or tools" the small brained ITT are LARPing as.

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He did in Simulacra & Simulation

imagine falling for this

Nah. Read Simulation and Simulacra (appearance vs reality, illusion vs truth) Passwords (clarifying the woman thing, though that's somewhat too literal a reading of him) and The Agony of Power (on good and evil, and one of the last, if not THE last, bits of his writing to be released).

I don't tend to enjoy overly abstract and jargon ridden french theorists. Should I read this sissy?

no pleb

Bump

Do you think Baudrillard was bothered Deleuze and Foucault ignored him?

not true

based

Why would he be?

We live in a consumer society.

Have you finished it yet OP?

Yes to stop being such an idiot

Bump

How do I stop being a consumer without starving my self to death?

I don't agree with Baudrillard. His concept of sign value is fundamentally wrong, and like all post-modernists, he approaches his questions with an idealist point of view. You cannot just mix marxism with idealism, it doesn't make sense.

You live a current-year society. You have to either find enough people to start a new one or destroy it.

Imagine being so fat you see consumption everywhere and see all of it as a bad thing.

What does that even fucking mean? There are different forms of value, sign value makes perfect sense as a concept.

Further, while Marxism is largely materialistic, its applications are almost wholly idealistic. Marxism is constantly mixed with idealism.

Furterer, Marxism is a form of simulation, and behaved in a manner that Baudrillard analyzed/critiqued/predicted. The bastardization of the "natural world", the mockery of it using self-reference, then finally the departure from it entirely followed by the collapse of the systems that called themselves "Marxist". From a purist perspective, perhaps the debate within certain realms of marxist thought that never encountered reality don't mix with idealism, but I'd hazard to say that Marxism largely comes with elements of idealism, especially in application.

No it doesn't. If he proposed *only* sign value exists, then it would be fine, but he also accepts value, use value and exchange value exist, which fundamentally contradicts sign value because the LTV is predicated on materialism whereas sign value is predicated on idealism, that things can gain value just from human perception. That is idealism. Marxism rejects idealism because historical materialism argues that matter has primacy over spirit, and not the the other way around. Baudrillard's system of simulacra seems to assume humans can change the world through their thought. They cannot, well it is true simulacra exist, they are the half-remembered and confused replicas of something that happened in the material conditions originally. That's doesn't change what really happened, even if what happened is forgotten by humanity with no way to recollect it.

So you're sensing a dichotomy that considers Marxism as a root reality/system of thought as much as Baudrillard's disassociation, and I'd consider Baudrillard's system a root which encompasses Marxism.

I can see arguing from within structural frameworks within Baudrillard's thought with the caveat that everything in these systems of sign is departure from some root which may not be touched. More an associated network of discrete symbols capturing meaning from their relationships with one another. Within this framing, meaning can arise which is useful to differentiate between these objects, including use-value, et al. So Marxism, here, exists within the context of Baudrillardism.

That being said, I know he changed his views over time, and I know I've not read nearly everything by the man, and barely any by Marx himself.

I think Baudrillard at times devolves (or perhaps expands brilliantly, can't decide yet) into a mystic conception or the world as a network of concepts, the manipulation of which actively manipulates reality within the framework of our understanding, and thus "base" reality as it changes behaviors.

I can see how these would contradict if expressly considered on the same fundamental plane. Sign value makes sense as an overlay of a kind when considered next to or with a materialist system, or even as something that can be roughly quantified if one compares each of the other values with what the actual price was (sorry for this rough-as-shit thinking, I'm posting at the front desk of a hotel during a rush).

But I don't think such a thing as sign value can be argued as nonexistant.

I think Marxism can explain what Baudrillard proposes within itself. There's no need to invoke sign value. Baudrillard wasn't wrong with what he observed, its his proposition as to the origin of what he observed marxism considers wrong. Baudrillard in his discussion of sign value does not mention several key things: first, these status objects need ground work labour to establish themselves as "status symbols". A white t-shirt endorsed by Kanye west not different from any other being extremely overpriced might appear to come from nowhere, but there is teams of marketers, advertisers, studio executives, Kanye's stage crew from the DJ to the man who does the lights for the venues he plays at, royalties specialists and scores of other people who have to do the labour necessary to *make* Kanye famous enough to justify selling plain t-shirts for £160. This "sign value" never just comes out of nowhere. Baudrillard see's the trees but not the forest.

Baudrillard again is correct that in the western world, people often relate to each other through what they consume rather than as human beings. We do not need a system of symbols to explain this in marxism. The reason for this is that society is deliberately engineered to be this way. Capitalism inherently overproduces, its makes far more than we need, and all of that tat has to sell otherwise the capitalist who owns that stock wasted his money and time. In the western world, there is an army of marketers and advertisers whose chief task is to convince people that they want to buy this stuff. This "overproduction" is the root of the western consumerist culture. If capitalists cannot keep this never ending consumption going, they will have to stop overproducing. And if they stop overproducing, they stop making profits. And if they stop making profits, it doesn't bode well for capitalism. This culture of endless consuming garbage we don't need and putting more stock in items than other human beings isn't a mere incident: its vital to the survival of capitalism.

>LTV is predicated on materialism whereas sign value is predicated on idealism

I appreciate the point you just made on the value of objects under sign value might be explained by the collective unseen efforts of armies of marketers, laborers, social media whores, etc. It's a valuable point. I think that the raw mechanism of the Marxist system, doesn't fully account, however, for the psychological aspect, and the raw value that language and association can impart to things separate from labor. I understand that the labor of generations might go into expanding the value of a single concept, object, or brand, and that this association may reduce in value over time according to the thing's use-value or labor-value decreasing, however even accounting for all the bits of labor a system devotes to its objects does not fully account for the disparity between perceived value and ltv. I think there is a growing disparity between these.

Huh. I'm seeing your point, and I've a naggling feeling that I'll try to word that Marxism's isn't a full accounting of value, but give me time. I'm at work. I'll post this for now to bump.

I find the most utility in his sense of language and the separation of the thing from the perception of the thing, and the metaphysical interactions of simulations (the interactions that take place between hyperrealities), but I'd not deeply considered sign-value vs other Marxist values.

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Do you think raw labor output, exchange value, and use value can be used in totality to explain away sign value?

I don't think sign value needs to be explained away, I think its unnecessary and contradicts the LTV.

tidy up bucko

Bump

I feel this discounts the arbitrary nature of the sign value, in how subjective it is. The sign value holds specific meaning within specific contexts/systems, and even in individual estimations. This does not exactly trace LTV, though one might be able to find a general correlation. I find that the sign value has utility separate from an entirely materialist perspective.

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I don't have a problem with sign value as a concept. I don't agree with it, but by itself its not necessarily a bad concept. You can get quite far understanding the modern world through Baudrillard. Not as far as with marxism though, which is why I'm a marxist. But mixing sign value with the LTV just doesn't work. You're blending two ideas that mutually contradict each other.

Can you give me some good literature on the subject? It seems useful. I have a copy of Capital vol 1 on my fucking shelf that I've picked up and read the first 4 pages of like twice then put down for other more passionate shit like baudrillard and barthes and debord and blah and blah. Kind of on a postmodern kick, going into delillo and ligotti and started on bauman but there's just so much shit to read and never enough time.

It is appearing to me you consider sign value to be more a heuristic than something exacting.

Good place to start?

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If you can't tolerate capital, read some other of marx's works first. I don't blame you for avoiding capital, its a dense monster that is difficult to read even for good readers because it assumes you already have read Wealth of Nations and are familiar with classical economics. You should read Engles, Lenin, Stalin and Mao, all of them have a far more straightforward and approachable writing style, especially Stalin and Mao.

This might be unconventional, but I'd recommend reading The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State by Engles and Foundations of Leninism and Dialectical and Historical Materialism by Stalin first. They might help you get your head around and acclimatize you to marxist concepts and the terminology better. I know Stalin is "controversial", but aside from Mao he has a far more clear and straight to the point way of writing, and his works all contain liberal use of primary sources and quotations you can go and look up and read for yourself. You don't need to trust Stalin, merely go and look up his primary sources if you don't agree or believe him.

>It is appearing to me you consider sign value to be more a heuristic than something exacting.
I don't consider it a heuristic, I think Baudrillard has made very correct observations, but used the wrong method to explain where they come from.

>postmodern neomarxists

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He references Benjamin on multiple occasions (including in one of his most famous essays, "The Order of Simulacra"), and always maintained an admiration and appreciation for him. Benjamin was a major influence on him.
He seemed to be ultimately indifferent to Deleuze. Being ignored by Foucault is more interesting, because Baudrillard's challenge, on some level, fails if his opponent does not respond. But Foucault's failure to respond also confirms what Baudrillard thought about him reaching a point he couldn't get beyond after The Order of Things. But I doubt he was personally bothered, and I doubt he had any regrets about saying what he did.
>"...Forget Foucault almost certainly led to Baudrillard's exclusion, rather like that of Derrida's, from those sectors of academic influence under the increasing patronage of the Professor at the College de France. The text of the piece was originally a book review for the journal Critique but was sent to Foucault himself for possible response. After a long delay Baudrillard published it with Galilee. Foucault was not amused and is reported to have said, 'I would have more problems remembering...Baudrillard.'"

>he also accepts value, use value and exchange value exist,
Have you even read his books on Marxism? He explicitly rejects all three, especially use value, in The Mirror of Production.

Bump

well, did you finish it yet?

There are too many inconsistencies for me to take the LTV seriously. It may work if you take all labor associated with any product in any way to be part of the objects value, but that makes it useless for analyzing a products price since an unexpected increase can be written off by referencing the bribes a coyote placed to smuggle in a migrant to drive the truck delivering the good.

Also curious about this

Read auxiliary bibliography on the subject. Actually, to understand LTV you only have to read the first two chapters of capital. Pay special attention to the fetishism section, that's the key to understanding the whole thing properly. If you don't understand something, read mixed chapters of "The making of Marx's Capital" by Rosdoslky.

You can still consume to survive, just know what your limits are and don't go over them. Divide your attention to want/need

That's totally fine. You are not supposed to explain 100% of the price of every commodity, because random events can change demand and supply and affect the price. The thing is, that even with all those permanent fluctuations, prices still gravitate around a "natural price" like Smith called it. A shoe is historically cheaper than a car, despite the changes in the concrete price of the shoe. So the relative price is more stable. And LTV explains relative prices. A neoclassical economist criticized LTV because it only explained "93% of the price". But that's exactly the point. It wouldn't explain anything if it only told you by something is worth $100. Read Shaikh for more about this or chapter 2 of Capital.

The amount of labor that goes into something increases the cost to make it, thereby moving the supply curve left and raising the cost. That's why a car costs more than a shoe even if supply and demand are the same for both, because a car has higher material and labor costs
That's what you need to understand about supply and demand, it's not just units supplied divided by units demanded. It's a very common misconception, especially among Marxists

Labor is part of modern economic theory but it doesn't explain all the value of traditionally manufactured goods, and for the modern service based economy LTV is totally unworkable

>because a car has higher material and labor costs
Then you're accepting LTV. Welcome then. Shaikh measures the value of as the sum of the vertically integrated labor cost.

>The amount of labor that goes into something increases the cost to make it, thereby moving the supply curve left and raising the cost
So a shift in the supply curve determines a rise in the value of a good. But what determines the initial value? In other words, what determines the equilibrium points? The supply and demand graph doesn't explain anything. It doesn't tell you why an equilibrium is standing in a concrete point in the space. The only thing you can do with those graphs is comparative statics: see how a change in any variable would affect the other. But there's no theory of relative prices contained in those graphs. Of course, a neoclassical would talk about subjective preferences and technological frontiers. At least that's a theory of value, not the one that I endorse but it still it's a theory of a value. The graph per se its not.

>but it doesn't explain all the value of traditionally manufactured goods
It does. It has been empirically proved. See Shaikh and Cockshott.

This should be an automatic ban. It would improve the quality of the board instantly.

>and for the modern service based economy LTV is totally unworkable
Indeed, but what other factors are there except for labour? Monopoly power? Gov. intervention/international competition? Frauds?

So many more factors. Labour to value is the shittiest larp ever and is only latched onto by commie faggots who've never worked a day in their lives and who never ever built a business and sold a product. It's the ultimate Jew way of valuing prices.
If and when any of you larpers build your own business, here's a list of factors that'll inform your pricing strategy in more or less an order of importance, most valuable at the top:
>time your product saves for the consumer: more time saved, more valuable the product.
>demographic your product is targeted at: higher earning customers? Whack up the price till they stop buying your product/service. (This also informs how sophisticated your product needs to be, and therefore deciding on if you're making a product out of barebones cheap materials or a fancy product out of gourmet expensive shit; making a €500 phone for elite biz-men needs to be more sophisticated than a €200 phone for housewives on Facebook)
>convenience: does your product make doing something easier or less hassle (yes, there is a difference)
>size of potential customer base: larger base means more unit sales means lower prices are needed to generate total profit margins that allow you to buy a yacht, and vice versa, of base is small, price needs to be higher because you still want that damn yacht
>supply and demand: the ultimate meme but it's still valid, if your product is scarce and in high demand, your price must rise or you are sacrificing profit margin
They're the main factors.
As you can see, all of these are antithetical for Marxists.commies, and that is why commies always fuck up their economies. Because if you notice, these factors account for both high-priced and low-priced commodity products. The high-priced products pay for ever increasing sophistication, i.e. R&D to make better products. Over time, that R&D sophistication filters down to the low-prices products. And thus, over time, products get better, customers are incentivised to continuously buy products, which keeps the economy ticking over and keeps money flowing to workers via wages.
The actual value of labour involved is literally one of the last things to be looked at, it's usually not even a consideration if marketing has done its job properly and identified the demographic accurately, determined how much they'll pay and selected appropriate product features that need to be provided to get those consumers to spend their cash on our product as opposed to a competitor's.
Does that help anyone? I can elaborate if needed. This is obviously super brief rundown, and kinda jokey, but it's accurate. And will be far more useful to you than LTV if any of you open your own business whether it's a coffee shop or a new Google competitor.

The Millennial Left is dead"?

youtu.be/tkR-aSK60U8

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how important are Democratic Socialists of America to Dem voters in practice?

>Arbeit is Jewish value
wtf? I love Jews now.

Products? You said services, I expected some sort of analysis for Silicon valley-type operations, banking systems and marketing, not this brainletism.

>time your product saves for the consumer: more time saved, more valuable the product.
If customer was to make his own bread from scratch, he would spend shitton of time growing crops, milling the flour and baking the bread. Yet bread isn´t as expensive as a dishwashing machine that saves less time.
>demographic your product is targeted at: higher earning customers?
Marketting tricks that break down when dealing with thinking customer.
>does your product make doing something easier or less hassle
Pretty much same as the first point.
>size of potential customer base:
How much does air and water cost again?
>if your product is scarce
Why should it be scarce?
>Does that help anyone?
No.
>I can elaborate if needed.
Please don´t.

Platonic Shinto Wholism is not for chapo infants.

Haha noooo, I meant that the linking between labour and value is a a Jewish trick. Just a typical trick, to fool people with don't understand what value is or how economics or businesses work into believing that the ideology that confirms and conforms to that trick, is valid and beneficial for the people that provide that labour.
It's not, and it never can be. Because labour is one of the least important factors when considering the value of a product or service.

>I meant that the linking between labour and value is a a Jewish trick
OK, so tricking customers is perfectly OK, but measuring price of something by how much labour did the workers put in it is "Jewish"? I still love those Jews.

>that provide that labour.
The..Jews? I through they were bad because they were bankers and tricksters, not because they were hard working or because they acted in well being of the cca. 80% of society.

>Because labour is one of the least important factors when considering the value of a product or service.
OK, you got me there. Well done, I lefit through you were serious.

user, I know you mean well, or at least I hope you do. But please. Calling someone else a brainlet only to produce brainlet-tier commentary is just silly.
Firstly: a service is a product.
>air and water are free
lol
If you're using either in an industrial process, they need to be cleaned, filtered, stored, etc, they have costs associated with them even if the input falls from the sky.
>bread and washing machine have different prices
And they are bought on different schedules too, and made from different materials.
>the thinking customer
Yes, if you feel that you're being ripped off, don't buy that product. That's literally the right thing to do. Keep the businesses you buy from honest by voting with your wallet, that's all they really listen to. Just look at Gillette. However, some expensive products do have aspects you may feel like paying to avail of those features, e.g. you may spend €5 on a loaf of bread from an artisan baker but you'd never spend more than €2 on a loaf of bread from Walmart. Or you may buy a perfectly functional washing machine for €200, or you may choose to spend €1,500 on a washing machine that matches your home's decor and also comes with a fancy smartphone app that allows you to control it from your phone and gives you notifications.
>Why should it be scarce?
Billions of reasons. The HDD market was flipped upside down when the 2 major factories were taken out by a natural disaster, I think it was the 2004 tsunami but might be misremembering. RAM prices are volatile af too due to various demand/supply factors related to industrial demand exceeding production capacity and have spiked and fallen like a drunken sailor for the past couple of decades. Sugar and wheat prices spike if the weather goes crazy and wrecks crops. All of those product spikes fund the times where the price caves.
>didn't help
Sorry it didn't help. Boo hoo. Thanks for the (You).

No.
>The..Jews? I through they were bad because they were bankers and tricksters, not because they were hard working or because they acted in well being of the cca. 80% of society.
'The people that provide that labour' refers to the masses, who are being duped into believing that communism will be good for them by the muh LTV larp. Communism only leads to a system where a group of elites lord it over a population of serfs, its bad for everyone except that group of elites. Yet that group of elites fool the masses into supporting communism by propagating the LTV lie.
And labour is one of the least important factors in deciding the price of a product, it's not irrelevant, but it's nowhere near as important as LTV would have you believe. My previous posts explain the real important factors with regard to the price-value relationship and how profits fund R&D to improve products over time, while also ensuring that workers get paid and continuously productive meaning that products are always available on the shelves for you to buy.
The system we live in isn't perfect, but I like buying whatever I want whenever I like with a steady wage coming into my bank account as opposed to being put on a waiting list to get a car in 8 years time.
And Jews aren't all bad, the Jews I work with are wageslaves for the big bosses and the shareholders just like myself, but if you haven't heard of Jewish tricks then I can't make you unsheltered, you'll hear of them eventually as you make your way out into the world. If you make some Jewish friends, they'll even banter with you about tricks they've heard of too.

>Calling someone else a brainlet
I´ve called your post brainletism,. But please. Continue to prove it by your level of reading comprehension.
>air and water are free
Said who?
>cleaned, filtered, stored
All done by human labour.
>And they are bought on different schedules too, and made from different materials.
Doesn´t challenge what I said.
>Yes, if you feel that you're being ripped off, don't buy that product...
That again doesn´t challenge anything what I said. Marketting schemes can increase price of an otherwise shit product, but it doesn´t change the fact the marketting is still done by human labour and it doesn´t always work. e.g. it´s not that hard to rip off an individual customer, but it´s much harder to pull it off against a big company.
>The HDD market was flipped upside down when the 2 major factories were taken out by a natural disaster
Sounds like something that rocked the market out of equilibrium, it explains why is the component more expensive than it was but it doesn´t explain why did the commodity cost the money it cost during normal operation or why was the spike as high as it was..
>Sugar and wheat prices spike if the weather goes crazy and wrecks crops
Yet 1kg of wheat isn´t more expensive than 1kg of steel. How come? And how come the average consumer doesn´t notice the difference?

>The people that provide that labour' refers to the masses, who are being duped into believing that communism will be good for them by the muh LTV larp.
>being duped into believing
Nice copout faglord. You said explicitely " is valid and beneficial for the people that provide that labour".

>Communism only leads to a system where a group of elites lord it over a population of serfs
Are you an American or something? The elites under commies lived in much worse conditions than the elites of feudalism or capitalism.

>My previous posts explain
Your previous post was retarded bullshit.

Where does Yea Forums get their ebooks from?
Is there a good way to get hentai ebooks as well?

Bump

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>You can get quite far understanding the modern world through Baudrillard. Not as far as with marxism though, which is why I'm a marxist.

the absolute state

Bump

>he will never write about internet memes

I think I'm a shitpost-modernist.

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I fear you've gone too far doe the brainwashing rabbit hole. But! I am hopeful that you will eventually find your way back out again. You're clearly intelligent, you've just got some ideas mixed up, from what I can see.
>it´s not that hard to rip off an individual customer, but it´s much harder to pull it off against a big company.
Um, user. You've clearly never worked in the environments you're proselytising about if you believe this. Big companies get ripped off and overpay for goods and services all the time. They do their best to avoid that from happening, but happen it does all the same. One of the ways they try to avoid it is by hiring a lot of staff who can scour the market for alternative sources from competitors. Yes, that's labour. But it's an intangible cost of doing business and varies in cost depending on a lot of market-conditions factors. That's another example of how labour is not inherently related to inherent product price.
>but it doesn´t explain why did the commodity cost the money it cost during normal operation or why was the spike as high as it was..
No, that first part is true. The second part is explained by the supply-demand curve. For the first part, as per my last posts, price is targeted to a demographic and based on input costs versus what that demographic will consider to be value for the benefit provided by the product. Ultimately, the overarching goal of the business is to make a profit. When looked at from that level, every business function is a relatively simple ratio of input costs v revenue. The ultimate goal being to maximise the ROI from any given input cost. Input costs are a broad range of costs that include design costs, material costs, production costs, land for the factory, storage, energy, transportation, legal costs, advertising costs, sales commissions etc, there's dozens of input costs.
>Sugar and wheat prices spike if the weather goes crazy and wrecks crops
Yet 1kg of wheat isn´t more expensive than 1kg of steel. How come? And how come the average consumer doesn´t notice the difference
Well, I don't know who you've spoken to. But everyone I know understands that 1kg of steel is more valuable than 1kg of wheat. Steel is relatively rare, wheat is common. Wheat grows everywhere. The iron ore that makes steel is only found in certain locations. Wheat is easy to produce. Steel is not. When the market prices wheat, there comes a point where both products hit a price where it'll be cheaper for a purchaser to just produce their own instead of buying it. That acts as a ceiling for the price. As wheat is easier to produce, its price ceiling is lower. There's also a time factor to commodity prices, those price ceilings only apply for long term purchases. In the short term, there is no time for a purchaser to produce wheat or steel, so if there's restricted supply, purchasers will need to pay more to compete with each other for the right to purchase.

>The people that provide that labour' refers to the masses, who are being duped into believing that communism will be good for them by the muh LTV larp.
>being duped into believing
>Nice copout faglord. You said explicitely " is valid and beneficial for the people that provide that labour".
Not a cop out. Who do you think provides the labour for almost every industry? The masses. Who got duped into believing that their labour was the most important factor relating to pricing? The masses.
The business owners don't factor labour that highly into their pricing strategy. They know that. They wouldn't be duped into believing such nonsense because that's not how pricing works. The masses don't deal with pricing, so their innocence is taken advantage of by deceivers.
Stop doing mental gymnastics.

>Communism only leads to a system where a group of elites lord it over a population of serfs
>Are you an American or something? >The elites under commies lived in much worse conditions than the elites of feudalism or capitalism.
Lol you are a Westerner, I can tell from this line! My family hail from a former communist country. All the system did was impoverish it's people and develop a clannish network of elites in record time. Communism does not benefit the common man. Food shortages/rationing were common. Electricity shortages/blackouts were common. The extortionate black market was ridiculous, a common part of every day purchasing but with none of the protections offered by regular market purchases. Planned economics just cannot account for the fluctuations experienced among a population over the short term, this is why there's so many shortages. Long term, planned economics can work, but only if the planners focus on productivity, which is pretty much impossible when your working population is dealing with short term shortages because that's when they start calling in sick to work so that they can take up a black market job to earn enough to buy food or goods or services on the black market. It's a vicious circle.

>My previous posts explain
Your previous post was retarded bullshit.
That's ok, I'm just trying to educate you. I do understand how brainwashing works, see above about where my family hail from. The harder a subject is is brainwashed to believe something, the more angry they get when they hear information that counters the brainwashing. I can imagine how angry you were to have lashed out like that, but it's ok. I understand your pain. It's not your fault, it's just how brainwashing works. You'll feel much better in time, if you ever snap out of it. There's no anger involved when dealing with the truth. Some say the truth is liberating, I guess that may be where that phrase comes from.

shut up fags, take it somewhere else

>I fear you've gone too far doe the brainwashing rabbit hole.
Said the American.

>but happen it does all the same.
Of course it happens, but at lower rate which is what I said. Learn2reading comprehension before you attack me sideways again.
>That's example of how labour is not inherently related to inherent product price.
And that´s why this cognitive rape is an interesting part of modern economy. Which is what OP is about.
>The second part is explained by the supply-demand curve
Supply demand curve has certain parameters. If there wasn´t much labour needed to set up new plant the spike would be small, if these factories are hard to rebuild it´s going to be steep. Largest non-labour price influencer for PC components would be the likeliness of monopoly power and cartels.
>design costs, material costs, production costs, land for the factory, storage, energy, transportation, legal costs, advertising costs, sales commissions etc, there's dozens of input costs.
Only non-labour cost here is land.
>The iron ore that makes steel is only found in certain locations
>Wheat is easy to produce
Bingo. The rest is just obfuscation.

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>Said the American.
>replying to post where labor is spelled labour
????

>Then you're accepting LTV.
>Indeed, but what other factors?

I thought I explained that in my comment, but apparently with Marxists you need to spoon-feed them this shit.
Labor costs affect PART of the price by lowering the supply. There are many, many, many other factors that go into the price of a good. Literally anything that affects the supply or demand of a good affects its price.

For example: technology, material costs, transportation costs, prices of other goods, brand name attractiveness, anything related to government policies, etc, etc, etc
Like I said, LTV is completely untenable in the modern world. How the fuck are you going to use LTV to predict prices of Apple products, for example? Video games and movies? Gamer girl bathwater?

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>For example:
>technology
labour of scientist and engineer
>material costs
mined with labour
>transportation costs
moved with labour
>prices of other goods
Created by human labour
>brand name attractiveness, anything related to government policies
OK
I wish people trying to criticize LTV stopped thinking it´s some uniquely marxist concept. Shit just flicks the "unallowed throught alarm" and they reply with primitive arguments their handlers fed them without realizing how bad they are.

>How the fuck are you going to use LTV to predict prices of Apple products, for example? Video games and movies? Gamer girl bathwater?
These things don´t make up relevant portion of economy, but yea they largely evade the concept. They rely mostly on illusions and are the things we should focus on, if we were to return to OP´s topic. Take movies for example, they are virtually infinitely reproducible without worthwhile labour, where was the last time you paid to watch a movie? For me it was back in the days of VHS and DVDs. but since internet piracy became a thing, I got every movie I wanted for free.

American isn´t ethnicity, it´s a state of mind.

This is my last attempt to respond to you, you're clearly a brain-dead retard

>>technology
>labour of scientist and engineer
This significantly lowers cost in the long run for relatively far fewer labor hours than doing it without technology
>>material costs
>mined with labour
Almost all of the most labor intensive materials to mine, like aluminum and coal, are the least expensive. Weird? Maybe it has to do with scarcity, idk
>>transportation costs
>moved with labour
You aren't paying much for the labor, you're paying for the refrigeration, gas, tires, ex which are all much more expensive
>>prices of other goods
>Created by human labour
That's one factor for their price, but it's not that important

>These things don´t make up relevant portion of economy
Dipshit, things like these make up almost all of our modern service economy. I'm having trouble thinking of products who's price can easily be tracked with just its labor cost
What you don't get is that modern economic theory is LTV PLUS a thousand other factors which more accurately predict prices. Using LTV is just ignoring all those other factors for no reason other than trying to prove the economic theory of some guy from the 1800s who said you shouldn't have to work

>brain-dead retard
Said the guy, that can´t do basic recursion.

>This significantly lowers cost in the long run for relatively far fewer labor hours than doing it without technology
Yet it´s still labour.
>Maybe it has to do with scarcity
Scarcity and refining. Labour is the father and nature the mother of wealth to quote William Petty, yet nature doesn´t receives any money.
>refrigeration, gas, tires
Again, labour.
>That's one factor for their price
What are other factor? Please don´t tell me materials or other labour again, I hope you understood the concept at this point.

>things like these make up almost all of our modern service economy
proofster.jpeg
>I'm having trouble thinking of products who's price can easily be tracked with just its labor cost
Try more basic commodities like iron.

>some guy from the 1800s who said you shouldn't have to work
>Adam Smith
>1800s
I think this is a fitting end for your replies.

It should be pretty obvious what he would say, especially if you read the transparency of evil.

>There's no need to invoke sign value.
the utter state of marxist defense mechanisms

>It is appearing to me you consider sign value to be more a heuristic than something exacting.
lol, every concept is a heuristic fucking idiot.

unironically this. Thirty day bans should be applied for this type of stuff.

>This "sign value" never just comes out of nowhere.
that doesn't mean the concept should be thrown out, especially when nobody is adhering to Marx's "objective" (or as Baudrillard would call it, moral) use value and it's religious hatred of exchange value anymore, and Marx's system is ultimately limited and unable to see the symbolic being produced and emerging from capitalism into a hyperreality fuelled by seduction with people turning their mirages into systems that try to enact an "objective reality" filled with "happiness", and globalizes until reversibility stops strengthening the expansion and causes the whole system to implode.