the_dunk_tank

LMFAO these people think gold and diamonds just spawn on the surface like Monster Hunter resource gathering points and all you have to do is pick them up

what is mining? sounds like Tankie Misinformation to me lol

Those people are deeply unserious

I wonder if there’s some sort of monopoly on diamonds artificially inflating their price. Does Marx talk about supply/demand and explain that this can alter prices but not value? I wonder.

Anyways, this person thinking it takes no time/effort to “produce” diamonds/gold is funny (esp. with the case of lab diamonds).

Marx does talk about precious/luxury goods in Capital volume 1 actually. If I remember right he specifically talks about pearls and paintings. But if I remember right he doesn't define paintings as commodities, since their value can't be reproduced through the same methods, since the value comes from the rarity associated with the artist. He says something similar about pearls too.

But that poster is completely wrong. Gold doesn't take labor to mine out of the ground? Diamonds don't take labor to mine or synthesize? What

Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much the source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which itself is only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power. The above phrase is to be found in all children's primers and is correct insofar as it is implied that labor is performed with the appurtenant subjects and instruments. But a socialist program cannot allow such bourgeois phrases to pass over in silence the conditions that lone give them meaning. And insofar as man from the beginning behaves toward nature, the primary source of all instruments and subjects of labor, as an owner, treats her as belonging to him, his labor becomes the source of use values, therefore also of wealth. The bourgeois have very good grounds for falsely ascribing supernatural creative power to labor; since precisely from the fact that labor depends on nature it follows that the man who possesses no other property than his labor power must, in all conditions of society and culture, be the slave of other men who have made themselves the owners of the material conditions of labor. He can only work with their permission, hence live only with their permission.

Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme

It feels like a weird joke. Like this is how I would do a parody of someone who refuses to read Capital. I'd make statements exactly like this, mentioning things that Marx explicitly mentioned in the first chapter as a joke.