You are equivocating on 'value'; firstly, the law of value only applies to goods which are commodities (complexes of 'use value' and 'exchange value') - the 'us

You are equivocating on 'value'; firstly, the law of value only applies to goods which are commodities (complexes of 'use value' and 'exchange value') - the 'use value' would be there even if the good were not traded, and it is usually independent of the exchange value. In various pre-capitalist societies, there were many such goods produced (but, as you can expect, digging a hole might have use value to the person doing it, but not exchange value which is dependent on society in general). Secondly, the law of value only applies to goods which can be freely reprocuded, so it has difficulty with patents and copyrights in modern society, so I don't claim that the law of value 'works' for all categories of products in today's society. Either way, you shouldn't act as though you and your professor uncovered some kind of devastating flaw in Marxism, even at the time; it takes a lot of hubris to accuse modern political economists and Marxists of being brainwashed to such a basic 'logical fallacy'. The law of value works such that a person digging a hole in the ground obviously isn't producing exchange value, thus the person digging a hole won't continue to do so, in the long run in society, the value of commodities is quickly realized. Here's a good page on the 'mud pie' (hole digging) argument: https://libcom.org/library/law-value-3-das-mudpie https://libcom.org/library/law-value-3-das-mudpie