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?
You get paid 100 dollars a day.
You produce work that your boss sells for 700 dollars a day
Materials, electricity, transport, etc, for the work you produce, cost your boss 200 dollars a day.
So your boss pays 300 dollars to get 700 dollars. Your work is worth more, but you get paid less for it. You get paid 100 to produce work worth 500 (your wage + profit).
In many cases you are not even paid enough to afford buying what you produce.
This is a simplistic example but it demonstrates the basic idea. Things cost money to produce. Then capitalists “add” something extra to that cost, and sell the product. The capitalist profit wasn’t really something added extra. It was removed from the wage the worker pays. Which is why the first thing bosses look to do when cutting costs/looking for more profits (which is always) is not to renegotiate the price of electricity, fuel, or material costs. No, instead they ask you to work extra hours for less money, they offer you a low wage when they hire you (if you’ve been interviewed and hired before, you know that feeling that you’ve been somehow cheated), they lower your wage while crying about the economy, they fire you to hire some other poor bastard who is desperate to take a lower wage.
Burnt pies and shitty cookies are not realistic examples to refute the labour theory of value. Consider what happens in reality? If you worked at a bakery and you constantly burnt pies, there’s several possibilities, but they all lead to one outcome: your boss is unhappy because your accidents are cutting into his profits. Therefore, the value of the pie for your boss is still the same as it always was, whether it’s perfect or burnt. This value is the materials cost + labour + expected profit. They’ll still try to sell it at the same price, probably by hiding it among good pies, and some customers will still buy it because they don’t know any better.
That’s not to say that the price of things can’t be changed. But it’s still intrinsically tied to the cost of labour that went to produce it. When the capitalist makes a decision to change the price, they will almost never lower it below their material cost and their labour cost.
In the grand scheme of things, it’s all about mass production. In many cases the capitalist expects that their workers will make mistakes. They factor that in their profit calculations, and set the price accordingly. When you buy pies, a portion of the price makes up for the lost labour and materials put into creating failed pies.