This comment is making me so mad. How can someone speak so authoritatively about what Marx did or didn't explain when they obviously haven't read anything of his? Marx spoke of supply and demand regularly, particularly in his book Value Price and Profit.
In my reading of this section, Marx does not diverge from the vulgar economist's understanding of supply and demand that we all are taught at some point, ie that the price of a given commodity naturally fluctuates based on a variety of factors of supply & demand, and that in a 'fair' market (one without price fixing or collusion) these factors (namely the entry and exit of firms/investment into a market) drives the commodity's price towards a specific price where economic profit (not accounting profit!) is zero.
Where Marx does differ in this matter, is that he does not view the price given by supply and demand at every single moment as it's value. He says that supply and demand drive a fluctuation around it's actual Value. Marx said that the Value of a product is the quantity of 'Socially Necessary Labour Time necessary to produce it.
> "Price is the money-name of the labour realised in a commodity. Hence the expression of the equivalence of a commodity with the sum of money constituting its price, is a tautology, [14] just as in general the expression of the relative value of a commodity is a statement of the equivalence of two commodities. But although price, being the exponent of the magnitude of a commodity’s value, is the exponent of its exchange-ratio with money, it does not follow that the exponent of this exchange-ratio is necessarily the exponent of the magnitude of the commodity’s value. Suppose two equal quantities of socially necessary labour to be respectively represented by 1 quarter of wheat and £2 (nearly 1/2 oz. of gold), £2 is the expression in money of the magnitude of the value of the quarter of wheat, or is its price. If now circumstances allow of this price being raised to £3, or compel it to be reduced to £1, then although £1 and £3 may be too small or too great properly to express the magnitude of the wheat’s value; nevertheless they are its prices, for they are, in the first place, the form under which its value appears, i.e., money; and in the second place, the exponents of its exchange-ratio with money. If the conditions of production, in other words, if the productive power of labour remain constant, the same amount of social labour-time must, both before and after the change in price, be expended in the reproduction of a quarter of wheat. This circumstance depends, neither on the will of the wheat producer, nor on that of the owners of other commodities.
Magnitude of value expresses a relation of social production, it expresses the connexion that necessarily exists between a certain article and the portion of the total labour-time of society required to produce it. As soon as magnitude of value is converted into price, the above necessary relation takes the shape of a more or less accidental exchange-ratio between a single commodity and another, the money-commodity. But this exchange-ratio may express either the real magnitude of that commodity’s value, or the quantity of gold deviating from that value, for which, according to circumstances, it may be parted with. The possibility, therefore, of quantitative incongruity between price and magnitude of value, or the deviation of the former from the latter, is inherent in the price-form itself. This is no defect, but, on the contrary, admirably adapts the price-form to a mode of production whose inherent laws impose themselves only as the mean of apparently lawless irregularities that compensate one another."
- Karl Marx in volume 1 chapter 3 of capital.
> "But to consider matters more broadly: You would be altogether mistaken in fancying that the value of labour or any other commodity whatever is ultimately fixed by supply and demand. Supply and demand regulate nothing but the temporary fluctuations of market prices. They will explain to you why the market price of a commodity rises above or sinks below its value, but they can never account for the value itself. Suppose supply and demand to equilibrate, or, as the economists call it, to cover each other. Why, the very moment these opposite forces become equal they paralyze each other, and cease to work in the one or other direction. At the moment when supply and demand equilibrate each other, and therefore cease to act, the market price of a commodity coincides with its real value, with the standard price round which its market prices oscillate. In inquiring into the nature of that VALUE, we have therefore nothing at all to do with the temporary effects on market prices of supply and demand. The same holds true of wages and of the prices of all other commodities"
- Karl Marx in Value Price and Profit under the section titled "supply and demand"
Volume 3 of capital, to my understanding, touches on this further, but as I have not read that far yet, I cannot quote it.
And of course, for the other part of that comment, "In a socialist system would you pay for things by use-value. i.e. What does the concept of use-value do in any practical sense?" is also ridiculous.
Use-value is the real, physical, material use to people which an object holds regardless of it's relationship to human society and to production. A stick will always be able to poke things, and a coat will always keep you warm. This is what the concept of use-value "does".
Exchange value, meanwhile, only exists in the ideal, in the relationship between 2 commodities being traded for eachother, either directly through barter, or indirectly through money (a commodity is traded for money, which is then used to purchase another commodity). It is an expression of the product's Value, meaning the quantity of 'Socially Necessary Labour Time' necessary to produce it. This is not to say that exchange value is not real, it is merely to say that it is not a physical tangible property of the product itself. In fact, the social relations expressed through exchange value with its social and non-physical nature still decides through its consequences the fates of all of our lives under capitalism, and decides whether we will eat or die.
A commodity is a product that has a use-value and an exchange value, and is produced with the intention of exchanging it rather than with the intention for it to be used.
In a hunter-gatherer society, a hunter who took down a deer, would not take the meat and skin back to their tribe and demand any "payment" for it, they would simply share it with their tribe while having some themselves, under the understanding that when another member of the tribe also brought home meat or berries, they would not have to "pay" for that either, for their wealth was held in common amongst them. These products made under the hunter gatherer society are not commodities, as they only have use-values, and do not have exchange values, as they are not exchanged, but shared.
The same applies to when you bake a fresh loaf of bread in your own home. You do not make the bread to sell it. You make it for your own personal consumption and enjoyment, and for the consumption and enjoyment of the other members of your household.
Commodities have existed since tribes begun to have enough surplus of a given product that they had the means and motive to trade with other tribes for their surpluses. Ie, commodities have existed since the dawn of agriculture (and as a consequence, class society).
But it is only under capitalism, which emerged with the industrial revolution, that the production of commodities, as in the production of goods for the purpose of sale, became the primary way in which goods were produced and consumed. Capitalism lead to many great things, such as great leaps and bounds in technological development previously unimaginable, and the creation of vast sums of material wealth, which are shared with all of society, however inequitibly. But the misalignment between what's societally useful and what's profitable to produce has also lead to a wide array of social ills, which are too numerous to count here.
Socialism, and Communism, according to Marx, are the mode of production meant to come after capitalism in the history of mankind. In socialism and Communism, we would move away from the production of commodities for sale, and back toward the production of goods exclusively for their value in use. This is similar to how they were produced before capitalism and before agriculture, but now they would be produced with the productive power of the technology developed under capitalism (and all other class societies before it).
The exact form that this industrial production-for-use, socialism, would take is a question that Marx deliberately avoided, because he believed that any attempt to describe it would be what he called "utopian" and a waste of time. For he thought that socialist society would 'naturally' arise in whatever necessary form decided by future workers through the eventual violent revolution of the "proletariat" (people who work to produce commodities for a wage or salary) against the state (and organ of the suppression of one class by another) which currently represents the "bourgeoisie" (people who own the means by which commodities are made, and are only paid through this ownership).
This question, however, has been discussed as length by communists after Marx, and various attempts at realizing it have been attempted. The answers that people have come up with, and the success of all these experiments, is far too broad a discussion to be fit in this post.
Okay this was originally just an angry rant about some stupid YouTube comment that upset me, but I kept adding caveats and clarifications to make my view, and the Marxist view, clear and I ended up with allll this. I might edit it a little bit and post it as an actual reply to that comment. If not to change their mind, then to educate and passerby who happen upon the comment.
To any one who has read this all, I am open to critique, please let me know if I have made any theoretical blunders in the form or in the content. Thanks.
