I read Capital, and the whole thing just went over my head. I really couldn't understand what he was getting at. Could any comrades help explain the LTV? Thanks! 
I read Capital, and the whole thing just went over my head. I really couldn't understand what he was getting at. Could any comrades help explain the LTV? Thanks!
It is not.
Again, labor value can be wasted. An idle laborer, for instance, has potential value that is not being actualized. A laborer given busy work (the Keynesian "digging holes to justify a salary" approach to full employment) has potential value that is not being actualized.
The laborer still has value to contribute to the economy, regardless of what actions that person is performing. But whether those actions generate the maximal use value depends on how that laborer is engaged. Anything under the maximal use value is effectively wasted labor.
No, a 100 HP and 200 HP engine have different components that each have different amounts of value embedded in them. They are different products. In the market, the 200 HP engine is priced higher than the 100 HP engine not because it produces more HP, but because it is larger, has more materials in it, and the components have to deal with larger heat and energy loads so they may even be higher quality.
The 200 HP engine might even have twice as much material and components in it. There is more labor going into mining and producing those components, and also more work going into the assembly.
True. But that doesn't mean the 100 HP engine is cheaper to make. It could just as easily be cruder and less efficient. An engine that is assembled incorrectly, for instance, can have less (or no) output relative to one assembled optimally. An engine made from improper components can have a lower safe operating tolerance. Or it may simply be thanks to advances in material sciences / engine geometry / assembly technique that we achieve more torque from an equivalent input of labor and raw inputs.
You can build a 65" flat screen TV today using less material and fewer expensive components than a 16" tube-screen TV from the 1980s. That's entirely thanks to our understanding of the physics and material science surrounding the assembly process.
In either case, the concept of labor value doesn't change. The laborer has access to a certain capital/material stock and attempts to create a useful output. The relative success of the endeavor can create more utilitarian value based on a host of factors. Recognizing inefficient labor application as waste means prioritizing a certain amount of labor education, capital improvement, and R&D in order to conserve labor value.
By contrast, in a market-based economy, all we care about is the exchange value of the components we produce. If a 100 HP motor sells for the same as a 200 HP motor, then there's no incentive to upscale and no conception of waste at the level of the manufacturer. In some cases, there may be incentives to discourage conversion to 200 HP motors, because this would require increased input costs for the producer that don't resolve as exchange-value revenues.
The labor value of the market-based economy may be equivalent to that of the planned-economy, assuming the number of man-hours is the same.
But the waste of labor value in the market-based economy is going to be higher, because the economy continues to produce lower-utility 100 HP engines in pursuit of maximum exchange value return. The real expected utility value of those labor hours is lower.
A Marxist sees this disparity in utility as an economic cost (labor value is being wasted), while a Capitalist only recognizes the marginal return on sales and therefore considers 100 HP motors and 200 HP motors as equivalent (labor value is ignored).
Would it be sufficient to say that labor that is employed to produce commodities at the social average of costs, quality, the utility of the final product, etc. is what gives commodities their value? That would account for ineffective utilization of labor as you state.
That commodities/services are a consequence of labor applied to capital over time.
And the labor value actualized/squandered is equal to the utility of the commodities/services they produced as a percentage of the maximal utility value they could have produced.
Labor value exists as a function of potential man hours * time * most-efficient-product/service rendered. And that labor value can be realized or lost, depending on whether the laborer is employed efficiently. Thus, the goal of a well-run economy is to maximize the utility output of individuals in order to achieve a long-term improvement in quality of life for the polity.
Hence "from each according to their skill, to each according to their need". Maximize utility of labor inputs. Equitably distribute outputs.
I do feel like you're glossing over the labor that goes into sourcing and processing all of the "advanced" components that goes into more modern (and perhaps lighter) products. This affects the cost of those components as they have massive ounts of labor going into them. The impression I'm getting is you're looking purely at the final stage of assembling the product, which is not the only place that labor imbues value into a thing.
I agree that it is only the exchange value that determines its price. But the labor value is reflected in the cost of production all the way up the line. However, the price is tethered near to the cost of production as a floor in order to make a profit.
I'm trying to keep it reasonably simple by confining the discussion to a single individual performing a single job with relatively uniform components. I'll happily concede that modern components can carry their own costs. But I might counter that those costs are potentially lower than their historical peers.
Consider the Chinese molten salt nuclear engine, which uses thorium fuel rather than uranium or plutonium. Or consider an engineer dedicated to building a wind turbine instead of a coal stack. Consider how much paper we've conserved by taking our bureaucracy digital. Or the wattage requirements we've reduced by going from candles, to bulbs, to LEDs. Advancing technology doesn't automatically mean creating more physical waste. In many cases, advances can substantially conserve energy.
But that's getting away from LTV and into ecological economy.
A laborer who produces less utility than their peer is not less valuable as a laborer. Said laborer is simply wasting the difference in utility output. In a planned economy, administrators can recognize this waste and transition the laborer into the more efficient role, because they are fixated on utility.
Price can radically deviate from cost. We've seen that for years, in mark-ups between foreign wholesalers and domestic post-industrial retailers. H&M, famously, generates full multiples of the exchange value on an article of clothing it buys overseas and sells in the US. This creates a strong incentive to produce and market large volumes of textiles in an economy that is already oversaturated with them.
The labor required to make these surplus garments is functionally wasted. The disparity in pay is largely a consequence of coercion. And the labor of these workers is therefore squandered to generate items of near-zero use value but enormous exchange value.
This is not an instance in which textile worker labor is valueless, but one in which their value is deliberately extracted, exported, and destroyed in pursuit of maximized exchange value.
The distinction is that potential labor value exists in every laborer, while utility value produced by that labor can vary based on how much of the labor is successfully applied versus how much is squandered.
Again, I can point you to a laborer who is entirely unemployed. This individual still has the same potential labor value they had when they were working. This labor value is simply being wasted in unemployment.
This point does make sense - of course modern components carry costs. My issue is that you don't seem to include the value imbued on these commodities by their labor during their production. The cost of an assembling an engine is not just the assemblers time. It's all of the materials that go into it as well. You are also suggesting in your example that the labor time of assembling a smaller engine is the same as assembling a larger engine. I doubt that's true too.
I assume you wanted an example that shows "wasted labor" but I'm not sure why, either.
What are you talking about? Nothing about modern technology is less costly than older technology. Have you felt the weight of an LED bulb? Those things have so many components, metals, semiconductors, plastics, heavy metals, etc in them. They create so much more physical water and require labor inputs from so many individual people to make. Also, I doubt that "conserving paper" by going digital is a net savings. Paper is a renewable resource, and digital storage consumes more energy than a lot of countries do. I know that's not your point, really, but I think it's worth pointing out. What does conserving energy have to do with labor value anyway
You can play this game at any stage of the production cycle. Rather than describing the transformation of individual components into a finished motor, you could describe uncast steel transformed into individual components or iron and tin blasted into steel or undeveloped real estate transformed into iron and tin mines.
To distinguish between the idea of labor mispriced and misapplied.
The number of lumen you receive per watt of power applied to an LED is significantly more than the lumen you receive per watt of power applied to a wax candle. LEDs are far cheaper to produce than candles, they last longer than candles, and they produce far less waste. Everything about an LED is less costly than a candle.
I've got an LED bulb on the end of my phone that produces light equivalent to an old car headlight. It weighs less than an ounce, contains no heavy metals, and will last the full life of the phone. To produce the same amount of light over the same time period with a candle, I would need buckets of wax and miles of wick. And the sourcing of those materials would create mountains of trash. Nevermind the ecological impact of all that burning and melting of materials.
In a country with 50M additional people, the consumption of paper products between 2000 and 2020 has fallen by over 30%. We are expecting to see another 10-15% reduction in the next decade, which amounts to 10M tonnes of paper per year. This, in a country that consumes 17% of global paper.
The process of paper production has an enormous ecological footprint, both in terms of the raw destruction of tree life and the chemicals and energy waste that goes into the manufacturing process.
Activities with a lower energy footprint produce less physical waste and reduce future demands on labor to perform cleanup and mitigation of the damage that this waste causes.
Sorry my guy ignoring the ridiculous environmental destruction of LED light production, which includes semiconductors, metals, plastics, and control electronics, doesn't mean they're less costly. In fact, they take a huge number of additional people, pieces of equipment, energy, etc than an Edison bulb. Same with paper. Saying that reducing paper use saves paper is a tautology, and doesn't compare with the massive environmental cost of data centres and cloud computing.
Look, we've gotten off topic from LTV. My issue is around the background costs of production and how that relates to the profitability of products. I think your examples don't encompass some of the important parts of LTV, because they are focused for some reason on energy savings, and don't take resource extraction into account.