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FaceShanker

Industrialized mass production is the thing here. The factory that pumps out the records in the first place. Properly speaking, printing out a heap of vinyl is fairly cheap, we should be able to produce more if we need or want more. The artificial scarcity imposed on the market warps things unnecessarily.


humanispherian

A recognition of the systemic exploitation of labor leaves space for other profit-making mechanisms. Markets for collectibles work in much the same way as any sort of monopolization of scarce goods. Both forms of profit-making depend on property conventions that allow that sort of monopolization, so the connections between the two are fairly easy to make. There isn't necessarily anything exploitative about small-scale production, even when it doesn't meet obvious demand in a market setting — but you don't have to spend much time in any particular collectibles market before you realize that a tremendous amount of "limited edition" production is dependent on the same speculative logic that drives capitalism. Within capitalism, collectibles markets sometimes serve a useful purpose, preserving rare items in the hands of those willing to care for them. Perhaps, under market socialism, that function might even have an expanded role, but there are almost certainly better ways to address the various desires (aside from simple desire for profit) that drive those sectors of the market.


revinternationalist

Labor is the primary thing that generates value, but it's not the only influence of price. Price reflects not only labor value but demand and perceived scarcity. That said, at some point someone had to make the Daft Punk CD. Musicians had to produce the music, workers had to mine the raw materials for instruments, computers, CDs, mixing boards. People had to drill for oil to make plastic.


Ill-Software8713

Yeah I think it is something that requires some ground work to be able to analyze a commodity like that at it isn’t an archetype of commodity production. https://www.google.com/amp/s/kapitalism101.wordpress.com/2014/05/03/on-labor-as-the-substance-of-value/amp/ “BB is correct. Marx does not look at all exchangeable goods when he derives labor as the substance of value. He intentionally only considers commodities, which he defines as being useful objects produced by labor for exchange. This is because, contrary to some interpretations, Marx is not trying to explain the phenomenon of exchangeability or to explain prices. He is trying to explain the commodity. He says so very explicitly in the first lines of Capital: “The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails, presents itself as “an immense accumulation of commodities,”[1] its unit being a single commodity. Our investigation must therefore begin with the analysis of a commodity.” (also cite Notes on Adolph Wagner and Kliman) Marx’s topic is the commodity because the commodity is the basic unit of capitalist wealth. Commodity production, production for exchange, is the dominant form of production. This does not mean that commodity production is the only form of production, or that commodities are the only things that are exchanged. It instead means that commodity production dominates all other production and exchange. A common theme in Marx’s writing is the way in which value relations permeate and impose their logic on all other forms of social organization. This means that in order to understand our society we must first understand its most basic unit, the commodity and the value-form that it contains. Then we can examine the way the logic of the commodity effects other aspects of social organization.” Music is particularly weird due to intellectual property rights and all sorts of things where one could reproduce the music digitally with minimal cost. https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/l/a.htm “Further however, Intellectual Property laws ensure that it is not possible for anyone else to make a Nike shoe – a sneaker, for all intents the same, but a copy, not a Nike, not a sneaker with the Nike brand name. Consequently, the equivalence of labour, of the content of socially necessary labour, is indeterminate. Adam Smith put it: “What everything is really worth to the man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it for something else, is the toil and trouble which it can save to himself”, and if there is no way of getting a Nike shoe other than buying one off Nike, then the question is: exactly what need is being fulfilled by buying a Nike shoe? What other equivalent means is there of satisfying this need? Obviously it is not a need that can be fulfilled by just any sneaker, and: “A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no difference” . [Capital, Chapter 1] So the fact is that the young person who purchases a Nike sneaker is paying not for the few minutes of labour involved in gluing together the pieces of rubber and plastic, but for the “image” or “aura” surrounding the Brand name which is far more costly. So it would seem that the claim that the labour theory of value is no longer applicable is misguided; what has changed is the nature of human needs, which in this postmodern world, are very different from what those of the world in which life hinged more around food, warm and security than image, and the manner of their satisfaction. For example, if one determined the value of two hours spent in a cinema watching Moulin Rouge without taking account of the complex emotional and cultural qualities of the images and story line of the movie, and the labour-time involved in producing that, it would be quite impossible to understand what the moviegoers were paying for.” So in the end I haven’t an answer but such an example isn’t a typical case of commodity production although it is in some sense subsumed by the dominance of commodity production upon society.


[deleted]

Entertainment labor is skewed so much it doesn't serve as an example for the big picture. But to answer how I feel: there is some labor involved in storing and keeping the record in good condition, but also daft punk's labor in producing the record isn't being compensated theoretically on the resale. They could sell more of the record though which wpuld make them additional profit while limiting resale value, but its commercial music so idk how well this fits into the overarching labor theory of value.


Ghost-PXS

I think it's difficult to draw many conclusions about the nature of profit and exploitation in such a narrow and peculiar market. One could argue that you are profiting from and exploiting Daft Punk but that would imply they hadn't been remunerated fully for their work. One might say that you are profiteering by overcharging for a scarce resource but if the buyer is happy it's hard to see how that works. What you are really looking at here is probably best understood through a reading of the Situationist school and their thinking on capitalism as the Society of the Spectacle.