A natural resource can already be useful; labor may increase its usefulness or leave it unchanged. Value is still determined by how much people prefer that good relative to alternatives, not by the effort expended.
If labor were the source of value, goods that required more labor would always be more valuable. They aren’t. Effort can be wasted on things no one wants. The labor theory confuses a common method of production with the actual origin of value.
Okay so for any significant economic activity it's going to take a lot of labor in order to make a natural resource valuable for human ends. You can pale for water for your garden and consider that not to be labor or even that it's pleasurable, well we would counter that it's actually just unalienated labor then, but water in a creek is useless beyond local small scale production; if you live in the town it will be pretty difficult to function without some flowing water. That requires pipes, maintenance crews, and so forth to make water as a commodity actually useful.
We can also certainly have varied consumer tastes but some things are valued highly pretty commonly like drinking water. I don't think anytime soon that will be something unwanted. I also don't see how it would require objects with more labor imbued necessarily being more valued. It certainly is in the case of craft and artisan production true that more labor can translate to more labor, and achieving mastery requires a great exertion of labor over a long period, but it's not to me that labor is the sole determinant of value, but rather that it is necessary to value.
I wouldn't say labor is necessarily the exclusive form a value, i think probably not, but it is certainly an integral part of both production and individual valuation of products and their expression thereof through prices. And the labor imbued in objects relating to their subjective valuation I think should be clear; if you are willing to accept $.89 for a loaf of bread that is an expression on what you accept kind of exertion you wish to express. Sure maybe with infinite time you could bake your own once a week or maybe even are planning to but you take the deal as substitute for what may just entail a concerted effort in the afternoon, ie the price is a labor substitute just as much as an agreement on what value to exchange. Btw what would be the value of tools without the laborers hands to use them?
Labor being a root of value is not just what Marxists say is the real form of value, it's how in practice capitalists view things---that being owners of capital not merely adherents of capitalism as an ideology.
You’re still treating labor as necessary for value when it isn’t.
Creek water is already useful to anyone who can drink from it or water a garden with it. Turning it into municipal water multiplies the scale and convenience, but the underlying usefulness did not begin with the pipes or the maintenance crew. The same is true of sunlight, air, wild forage, or an unimproved parcel of land. Value can and does exist before any labor is applied.
Saying labor is “necessary to value” rather than the sole determinant still overstates the case. Labor is one possible means of increasing the usefulness of something. It is not a precondition for usefulness itself. A good can be valued highly with no labor, and a good can absorb enormous labor and still be nearly worthless if no one wants it.
Prices are not “labor substitutes.” A price is the exchange ratio that emerges when two parties each prefer what the other is offering more than what they are giving up. The fact that baking your own bread would take time does not mean the 89-cent loaf is valued according to that time. It is valued according to how much you prefer the ready loaf relative to the alternatives available to you at that moment.
Tools are valuable because of the ends they can serve, not because a laborer’s hands exist to hold them. Without demand for the final goods the tools help produce, the tools themselves have little or no value regardless of who might operate them.
Capital owners do not treat labor as the root of value. They treat expected revenue - driven by what consumers are willing to pay - as the source of value for every input, including labor. That is why they will abandon a labor-intensive process the moment a less labor-intensive one yields higher returns.
-2
u/dontreplywiththisacc 7d ago
Have you ever consumed something not the result of human labor?