I promise I’m not a wrecker, I just have trouble finding Marxist sources for these things that aren’t big books on top of what I’m already reading. I think I understand that it says the exchange value of a product is proportionate to the labor time used to create it. Am I getting that correct? More labor-intensive commodities, or products requiring more specialized tools to make would cost more. And I know I’ve heard the criticism before. Heard it pretty much all my life. “Is a cookie still worth its labor if it’s burnt? Is a pie worth the labor if it’s a shit pie?” I have heard people say that Marx addresses such criticisms in Capital, but I haven’t gotten around to those tomes yet. Could someone explain to me how they are addressed and maybe straighten out other things I may have gotten wrong?
This is my understanding of things, so I think you are correct. Although I think “time” is not the correct dimension. I think more broadly the value of a product is linked to the labor that was put into it, across many different factors, instead of just time alone.
Critiques like this are irrelevant because they are focusing on small situations where a single item of labor did not turn out as desired. Mistakes get made during the process of creating something, and most normal people don’t focus on the results that didn’t turn out correctly. The example of labor to produce a “shit pie” is not even worth considering.
If anything, you could make a case that if you have some piece of labor that is very difficult and prone to failure you could argue that the value of the product also includes all the failed attempts to create the product correctly, or the difficulty involved.
I am not an economist, I do not read theory, but this is my uninformed take.