#labor value

This came from a Reddit debate I participated in. The question asked us to come up with empirical evidence for the labor form of value. Below is my entry. 

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Marx can be thought of has a sociologist and historian who studied our relationships to material goods and the means of production especially under capitalism. His system analysis is more argumentative than empirical, though Marx does use empirical information in his arguments.

We first have to realize that value is a social human construction to begin with and not intrinsic to the items that we give value. Because value isn’t an intrinsic property it isn’t something we can hold a ruler up to and get a measurement like you would with physics. Instead we have to make arguments based on the dynamic we see in production.        

So Marx often talks about more than one type of value in Capital. We normally think of three types: labor value, use value, and exchange value. One of the falling points in Capital Volume 1 is that Marx assumes that demand and production are in equilibrium. This allows him to kind of ignore market demand in his analysis, but this is also a major sticking point when talking about his theory of value.

Marx is a very exhaustive writer, but a good portion of his argument boils down to that fact that labor power is not only used in converting raw materials into useful commodities, but also in finding and extracting the raw material in the first place. The big “therefore” that we get out of Marx is that exchange value is derived from use value which is created by labor so labor is the source of an items value.

I’ve seen some argue that the raw materials already have some value, but until they are worked upon by the human they have no real use value to us, and so there is no real value except that which we give.

After reintroducing variable demand in to the system we do see the cost of comedies rise and fall with supply and demand; however what we are really exchanging is still use value derived from labor. So no matter what the variable cost is its value still comes from the labor that produced it.

Even in the more abstract industry of customer service we can see that value is added to a company by providing a positive experience to consumers. When we think about it we can only expect that capitalists are only willing to higher us to labor because they expect to get something in return and that is the value of our labor without which they would not be able to make a profit.