I think I've seen discussions about this before, and obviously the USSR produced art because we still see statues of Lenin today. But how does this translate in modern times with the instance of obscure art or other modern art? Often the purpose of that art is to explicitly go against societal norms for aesthetics.
I don't get that argument because the mudpie has no commodity value either. Why are people laboring to make things they or nobody else can use? Just because all value comes from labor doesn't mean all labor produces equal value
Right, today it’s a bad-faith argument by liberals who have never read Marx and don’t care to learn, they just want to think “haha Marx thinks any sort of labor adds value”.
In Marx’s time… political economists before him understood that labor was the source of value, but couldn’t actually work it out. Marx did that with his concept of socially necessary labor time. He solved the riddle of value. From that point, economists were left with two choices. They could accept Marx’s ideas, or they could try and pretend they didn’t exist. Since all science reflects the ideas of the ruling classes, they went with the later. Thus, the emergence of marginalism and neoclassical economics. They basically said “why are we even talking about ‘value’, supply and demand and price is all that matters”.
It's not labor that Marx cares about but socially necessary labor. So the mudpies argument falls apart by simply noting that making mudpies isn't socially necessary labor because nobody fucking needs or wants mudpies lol
I'm going to type up a huge reply, but I have to punch back in for my government-mandated 8 hours of mudpie baking