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!
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.