4 ms·

What's messed up is the oversimplification. An hour of labor can produce wildly different amounts of value with different tasks, skill, materials, and especial

What's messed up is the oversimplification. An hour of labor can produce wildly different amounts of value with different tasks, skill, materials, and especially capital equipment. What's the value of a brain surgeon working with a shovel on a farm for 10 hours? Removing a brain tumor in a 10 hour surgery? Doing brain surgery for 10 hours, but with only primitive tools? Should they be paid the same? Why or why not?

hcarvalhoalves 3y ago
I believe you’re mudding the argument with unrelated statements I didn’t make: brain surgeons working on a farm. It’s simply: a worker who participates in the productive chain with labor can’t benefit from the value added by said labor. If thousands of iPhone are assembled by the worker, but said worker can’t afford even ONE iPhone, implicitly this means we value the worker 1/100000 of an iPhone. If you think this is fair and proportional compensation, ok, but that’s an opinion. It’s not a natural law. I don’t think wage stagnation and pornographic profit margins are fair.
- kbutler 3y ago
  This clearly demonstrates that the worker's labor is not the primary source of value of the product.
deciplex 3y ago
> An hour of labor can produce wildly different amounts of value with different tasks, skill, materials, and especially capital equipment. This is what I mean when I say "you should understand the labor theory of value before critiquing it." Capital goods are labor. They represent the accumulated labor required to produce them. If producing something requires a large amount of capital goods, then the labor that went into producing those capital goods is incorporated into the value of the product. You can apply a similar argument to acquired skills, etc.
- kbutler 3y ago
  Yes, "dead labor" if I recall Marx's term, embodied in the capital good - the useful part is the recognition that capital is simply the saved surplus value from previous work, applied to magnify current work. But trying to apply the labor-value this way just further illustrates the mistake in asserting you can attribute value to the hours of labor in a finished good. If no shovel is available, the value of a hole is the labor required to dig it with bare hands. But if shovels are available, the value of the hole is the value of the labor of digging the hole plus the fraction of the labor embodied in the shovel that was consumed in digging the hole. But if you introduce power tools, the value of the hole is the fraction of the labor of the construction and maintenance of the power tool that was consumed, plus the labor of the operator. There is no rational way to form an equivalence of these things, except if you consider them costs of the hole, rather than the value of the hole. Those different "hours of labor" whether current or past have different values based on how they are applied (utility value) rather than just "labor hours". And then as a bonus, the hole has the same utility value regardless of how it was dug.
  - deciplex 3y ago
    There is the notion of "socially-necessary labor" and the amount of that required to produce a thing does depend on the capital goods available to the people doing the work (that is, the technological sophistication and level of economic development). The expectation is that it will go down the higher the economic development. This can even make things that previously weren't worth doing before, worth doing now, because their value in labor is finally less than their use value. In principle market forces are supposed to drive down prices, are they not? Absent collusion and corruption, etc., we would expect the price of a good to be very close to the cost to produce it. This is what pro-capitalist, pro-market economists keep telling us, anyway - and that is at least the theory. But that cost to produce it is exactly the capital used in the production plus the labor applied to that capital. But if capital is just the product of labor, then in fact the cost to produce the item - and thus the price I will expect to pay in a competitive market, does in fact correlate quite well with the labor that goes into production.
  - kbutler 3y ago

hcarvalhoalves 3y ago

I believe you’re mudding the argument with unrelated statements I didn’t make: brain surgeons working on a farm. It’s simply: a worker who participates in the productive chain with labor can’t benefit from the value added by said labor. If thousands of iPhone are assembled by the worker, but said worker can’t afford even ONE iPhone, implicitly this means we value the worker 1/100000 of an iPhone. If you think this is fair and proportional compensation, ok, but that’s an opinion. It’s not a natural law. I don’t think wage stagnation and pornographic profit margins are fair.

kbutler 3y ago
This clearly demonstrates that the worker's labor is not the primary source of value of the product.

deciplex 3y ago

> An hour of labor can produce wildly different amounts of value with different tasks, skill, materials, and especially capital equipment. This is what I mean when I say "you should understand the labor theory of value before critiquing it." Capital goods are labor. They represent the accumulated labor required to produce them. If producing something requires a large amount of capital goods, then the labor that went into producing those capital goods is incorporated into the value of the product. You can apply a similar argument to acquired skills, etc.

kbutler 3y ago
Yes, "dead labor" if I recall Marx's term, embodied in the capital good - the useful part is the recognition that capital is simply the saved surplus value from previous work, applied to magnify current work. But trying to apply the labor-value this way just further illustrates the mistake in asserting you can attribute value to the hours of labor in a finished good. If no shovel is available, the value of a hole is the labor required to dig it with bare hands. But if shovels are available, the value of the hole is the value of the labor of digging the hole plus the fraction of the labor embodied in the shovel that was consumed in digging the hole. But if you introduce power tools, the value of the hole is the fraction of the labor of the construction and maintenance of the power tool that was consumed, plus the labor of the operator. There is no rational way to form an equivalence of these things, except if you consider them costs of the hole, rather than the value of the hole. Those different "hours of labor" whether current or past have different values based on how they are applied (utility value) rather than just "labor hours". And then as a bonus, the hole has the same utility value regardless of how it was dug.
- deciplex 3y ago
  There is the notion of "socially-necessary labor" and the amount of that required to produce a thing does depend on the capital goods available to the people doing the work (that is, the technological sophistication and level of economic development). The expectation is that it will go down the higher the economic development. This can even make things that previously weren't worth doing before, worth doing now, because their value in labor is finally less than their use value. In principle market forces are supposed to drive down prices, are they not? Absent collusion and corruption, etc., we would expect the price of a good to be very close to the cost to produce it. This is what pro-capitalist, pro-market economists keep telling us, anyway - and that is at least the theory. But that cost to produce it is exactly the capital used in the production plus the labor applied to that capital. But if capital is just the product of labor, then in fact the cost to produce the item - and thus the price I will expect to pay in a competitive market, does in fact correlate quite well with the labor that goes into production.
- kbutler 3y ago