What Creates Value?

Liberal

Much of the functional and symbolic value created by the manufacturer

• Means that the bean itself has little bearing on what customer wants - creates very little value, as measured by how much someone is willing to pay for it

• but, many people are willing to pay for chocolate, plus specific candy bars with third party labels

Solutions:

• Get society to value the bean more

• One solution might be to create “terroir”

  • Selling the place in which the commodity is produced

  • ex. To buy scotch whiskey, it must be created in Scotland

  • enforced through trademarks

Marxist

What creates value is labour

• Value is not a market based expression of social worth (the price of the product)

  • It is the Socially Necessary labour time required to produce the commodity

  • Often in capitalism commodities are produced at less than this value as firms seek to cost minimize

• Every person needs to be compensated the socially reasonable amount of time

• The value of the cocoa bean is the labour it went into it

Solutions: What is needed to improve the lot of producers is to improve their class power

• Better land distribution, unions on plantations

• Need to increase the price that the producer gets

  • a lot of these producers are on very small lands