I like to play MtG, and some of those cards are expensive as fuck, while others cost pennies, but they literally are all require equivalent amounts of labor. I also saw a Louis Vuitton dice case that costs $720. I’m no expert on dice cases, but I highly doubt it took significantly more labor than any other dice case I could buy at Walmart. Also how does artificial scarcity affect prices, and how does that work with LTV? Like, amiibos, for instance, iirc, are very expensive simply because Nintendo doesn’t want to make very many.

TL;DR why come some things so expensive? Even if they use the exact same amount of labor as less expensive things?

  • lemmygrabber
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    64 years ago

    According to the LTV, the production price of a commodity is determined by the aggregate of average socially necessary labour-times but the price of the commodity in the market is still subject to fluctuations based on supply-demand and cultural phenomena.

    • @veganarkiddieOP
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      54 years ago

      Okay, so it’s about production price rather than the price a thing sells at?

      • lemmygrabber
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        54 years ago

        It’s about value to be precise. But value itself manifests in an abstracted form (the price) in the market. I said production price here because in most cases there isn’t an inflation in price due to scarcity or monopoly in the manufacturing process of MTG cards. That happens after the WotC sells card packs to game stores, card sellers for sale to players/collectors and the second-hand sales after this.

  • yethira
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    2
    edit-2
    4 years ago

    Supply-demand.

  • T34 [they/them]
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    14 years ago

    There are two different values here, the values of the means of production and labor power (a.k.a. constant and variable capital, c+v) and the surplus value (s). What you’re noticing is that having monopoly/oligopoly power and “intellectual property” (a sort of protectionism) lets capitalists increase the surplus value without changing c+v.

    Marx’s LTV says that labor created the surplus value s, not that labor will be paid for it. The surplus value is the unpaid value created by labor. Basically capitalists are using their monopoly/state power to exploit labor more severely.