hsiuman's notebook

There are tons of farm games on Facebook, two of my favourites being Happy Farm and Country Story. When I was an undergraduate I had to study plant morphology as well as memorising the Latin and common names of different plants, and when sitting an exam we had to recognise those plants merely from their leaves. Happy Farm captures the characteristics of different crops precisely, which is kind of nostalgic to me and makes this game educational. Although it may not help you pass your plant morphology exam, at least kids will no longer think rice and potatoes are grown on trees.

And Country Story is (probably) the only game that takes into account the reproduction of labour (to be fair, I haven’t done a thorough market survey). In order to plow 6 acres of land to sow, grow, and harvest 6 units of corn, you need to spend about 100 stamina, and in return you earn 468 profits by selling your corn. However, in order to regain 100 stamina you need to eat a loaf of bread, which costs you 1120, so at the end of the day you can hardly make your ends meet!

So it’s very difficult to make a fortune in this game (in the beginning), which pretty much represents the situation in the real world: food prices must be kept as low as possible whereby the costs for labour reproduction can be kept low, which means capitalists can pay lower wages to workers; and in order for them to do so, they need to source raw materials for food at the lowest prices they can get.

And how do capitalists manage to do so? In the real world they do so by importing raw materials (i.e. the crops you grow in your farm) from so-called third world countries, which forms the basis for unequal exchange.

So next time when you play this game and find it difficult to make a fortune, let’s remind us why we should say no to unequal exchange.

[Reading Marx's Capital with David Harvey, Class 1, Introduction]

Harvey mentioned about Marx could have started the writing with money or labour or any other things, but he then decided to start with commodities [from around 00:33:55 to 00:36:00], which is an interesting point I have never thought about. Maybe Marx thought it would be easier for people to understand the set of abstract concepts if he started with something concrete (as contrary to money), or maybe he thought it would be impossible to anylise the appropriation of profits and exploitation had he not introduced the concept of use value and exchange value in the beginning, but at any rate this starting point is highly relevant to our current society.

Today the prices of commodities are extremely not pegged to their costs of production, but it came as shock to me that everyone seems to take it as granted. For example, you buy an audio CD from amazon.co.uk for £13 and buy the same CD from amazon.com for $13, yet most people just take that for granted, and it looks like people widely accept the notion that the price of an item is supposed to be pegged to domestic purchasing power but not the production costs. Amazon is an online company and probably sources and dispatches the same products from the same places, which means the costs for sourcing the CD are the same, so that CD is sold almost twice more expensive in the UK yet no one seems to care. So customers, why are you not angry?

In this regard, to begin the investigation with the analysis of a commodity is exactly what we need in our current society. From analysing the value of a commodity, we shall hopefully be able to demystify the sources of surplus value.