zifnab25

Listen, Jack. Everything looks like a nail.

labor that is employed to produce commodities at the social average of costs, quality, the utility of the final product, etc. is what gives commodities their value?

That commodities/services are a consequence of labor applied to capital over time.

And the labor value actualized/squandered is equal to the utility of the commodities/services they produced as a percentage of the maximal utility value they could have produced.

Labor value exists as a function of potential man hours * time * most-efficient-product/service rendered. And that labor value can be realized or lost, depending on whether the laborer is employed efficiently. Thus, the goal of a well-run economy is to maximize the utility output of individuals in order to achieve a long-term improvement in quality of life for the polity.

Hence "from each according to their skill, to each according to their need". Maximize utility of labor inputs. Equitably distribute outputs.

I do feel like you're glossing over the labor that goes into sourcing and processing all of the "advanced" components that goes into more modern (and perhaps lighter) products.

I'm trying to keep it reasonably simple by confining the discussion to a single individual performing a single job with relatively uniform components. I'll happily concede that modern components can carry their own costs. But I might counter that those costs are potentially lower than their historical peers.

Consider the Chinese molten salt nuclear engine, which uses thorium fuel rather than uranium or plutonium. Or consider an engineer dedicated to building a wind turbine instead of a coal stack. Consider how much paper we've conserved by taking our bureaucracy digital. Or the wattage requirements we've reduced by going from candles, to bulbs, to LEDs. Advancing technology doesn't automatically mean creating more physical waste. In many cases, advances can substantially conserve energy.

But that's getting away from LTV and into ecological economy.

But the labor value is reflected in the cost of production all the way up the line.

A laborer who produces less utility than their peer is not less valuable as a laborer. Said laborer is simply wasting the difference in utility output. In a planned economy, administrators can recognize this waste and transition the laborer into the more efficient role, because they are fixated on utility.

the price is tethered near to the cost of production as a floor in order to make a profit.

Price can radically deviate from cost. We've seen that for years, in mark-ups between foreign wholesalers and domestic post-industrial retailers. H&M, famously, generates full multiples of the exchange value on an article of clothing it buys overseas and sells in the US. This creates a strong incentive to produce and market large volumes of textiles in an economy that is already oversaturated with them.

The labor required to make these surplus garments is functionally wasted. The disparity in pay is largely a consequence of coercion. And the labor of these workers is therefore squandered to generate items of near-zero use value but enormous exchange value.

This is not an instance in which textile worker labor is valueless, but one in which their value is deliberately extracted, exported, and destroyed in pursuit of maximized exchange value.

The distinction is that potential labor value exists in every laborer, while utility value produced by that labor can vary based on how much of the labor is successfully applied versus how much is squandered.

Again, I can point you to a laborer who is entirely unemployed. This individual still has the same potential labor value they had when they were working. This labor value is simply being wasted in unemployment.

That baby has excellent trigger discipline.

No, a 100 HP and 200 HP engine have different components that each have different amounts of value embedded in them.

True. But that doesn't mean the 100 HP engine is cheaper to make. It could just as easily be cruder and less efficient. An engine that is assembled incorrectly, for instance, can have less (or no) output relative to one assembled optimally. An engine made from improper components can have a lower safe operating tolerance. Or it may simply be thanks to advances in material sciences / engine geometry / assembly technique that we achieve more torque from an equivalent input of labor and raw inputs.

You can build a 65" flat screen TV today using less material and fewer expensive components than a 16" tube-screen TV from the 1980s. That's entirely thanks to our understanding of the physics and material science surrounding the assembly process.

In either case, the concept of labor value doesn't change. The laborer has access to a certain capital/material stock and attempts to create a useful output. The relative success of the endeavor can create more utilitarian value based on a host of factors. Recognizing inefficient labor application as waste means prioritizing a certain amount of labor education, capital improvement, and R&D in order to conserve labor value.

By contrast, in a market-based economy, all we care about is the exchange value of the components we produce. If a 100 HP motor sells for the same as a 200 HP motor, then there's no incentive to upscale and no conception of waste at the level of the manufacturer. In some cases, there may be incentives to discourage conversion to 200 HP motors, because this would require increased input costs for the producer that don't resolve as exchange-value revenues.

The labor value of the market-based economy may be equivalent to that of the planned-economy, assuming the number of man-hours is the same.

But the waste of labor value in the market-based economy is going to be higher, because the economy continues to produce lower-utility 100 HP engines in pursuit of maximum exchange value return. The real expected utility value of those labor hours is lower.

A Marxist sees this disparity in utility as an economic cost (labor value is being wasted), while a Capitalist only recognizes the marginal return on sales and therefore considers 100 HP motors and 200 HP motors as equivalent (labor value is ignored).

It is not.

Again, labor value can be wasted. An idle laborer, for instance, has potential value that is not being actualized. A laborer given busy work (the Keynesian "digging holes to justify a salary" approach to full employment) has potential value that is not being actualized.

The laborer still has value to contribute to the economy, regardless of what actions that person is performing. But whether those actions generate the maximal use value depends on how that laborer is engaged. Anything under the maximal use value is effectively wasted labor.

This feels like a prelude to some guy screaming about how Dachue wasn't a concentration camps, it was a labor camp.

It's a little more complex than that, because there's a concept of utility value to be explored.

A week spent assembling a 100 HP engine creates less value than a week spent assembling a 200 HP engine.

The LTV posits that all value ultimately derives from human labor, but it does not equate all efforts as equally valuable.

The creation of fictious capital can consume labor and produce nothing of value, for instance. The issue at hand is acknowledging this labor as wasted value.

This gets you to the distinction between use value and exchange value. Two individuals engaged in equivalent labor can create items with exchange value that differs from their use value. This creates a market-driven incentive to chase the exchange value without consideration of the use value.

This can create an illusion of valueless labor, as something with high use value (say, parental child care) is equated with no exchange value simply because it can't efficiently be exchanged.

The conclusion of LTV is not simply that all labor has value. It is that labor expanded in pursuit of exchange value at the expense of use value is a form of waste.

Under the labor theory of value, when you eat a burrito and poop, you are creating value.

Edit: Wait, I'm sorry, were we being serious or silly?

Doing an Argentinian Red Scare and a full purging of all institutions not sufficiently loyal to Milei, because we must defeat all these insidious Marxists.

Soon you will all learn to clap.

Signalling a genuine crack up in the Atlantic block, as politicians are increasingly inclined to return to an unaligned state.

You don't have to be particularly based to be an Irish Catholic who pushes back against the theories that justified English oppression of your island.