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?
In a capitalist economy all surplus-value is labour.
The capitalist pays the worker for his labor-power (ie the capacity for labor) and not the total labour in a day. That “unpaid” labor makes up the surplus value which is monetised as profit.
A value of a commodity could be made up of constant capital (let’s say machinary for sake of simplicity) and variable capital (which is labour). But that constant capital itself is made up of labour as well; we could call constant capital dead labor and contrast that with the living labor of variable capital added to it make the total value.
Why is it called variable capital? Because that is part the capitalist can squeeze to increase the total value produced and therefore increase the capitalist’s surplus value ie profit. How do you “squeeze”? The worker has either have to work either harder or smarter (https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/10/why-machines-dont-create-value/)
Now the above could be considered as use value which is different from exchange value which is what it is traded at in the market.
All of the above presumes a competitive market where no-one is cheating (example wage theft) and the goods produced are socially determined to be useful.
The first chapter of Capital explains this but the following links may help as well:
4 min read: https://en.prolewiki.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value
20 min read: https://redsails.org/labour-and-labour-power/
80 min read: https://redsails.org/wage-labour-and-capital/
Look at the sources at the bottom within the above links for further reading.