I'm not trying to 'debunk', just trying to understand. When economic planners in a communist state are evaluating goods, I understand the logic of totting up the total amount of labour embedded in each microwave or onesie, and using that as a unit of value-measurement.

But goods unquestionably do involve materials as well as labour, and why leave out one really obvious factor of production?

Yes, I know that acquiring metal from the earth requires labour-hours, and so the metal can be said to be a fruit of labour. But if it's a resource that can be depleted (like metal, like a non-renewing aquifer) then it has to be economised. And if it has to be economised, surely it has to be reckoned in the accounts of the planners?

Say I invent a way to make a car-part with the same amount of labour but 10% less steel, how would that be evaluated under the labour theory of value?

Thanks

  • AssortedBiscuits [they/them]
    ·
    2 years ago

    Say I invent a way to make a car-part with the same amount of labour but 10% less steel, how would that be evaluated under the labour theory of value?

    Well, the car part would still have the same value of labor time, but the production of the car part is not isolated but within a giant network of productions of other commodities. In this case, the production of the car part is tied to the production of steel, which itself is tied to the extraction of iron ore and coal (or some other source of carbon). Using 10% less steel means the steel mill can either produce less steel since the number of labor time needed to produce a socially necessary amount of steel within a given timeframe is lessened or it can continue to produce the same amount of steel but have that extra steel go to other socially necessary commodities. The steel mill not needing to produce as much steel would have its own cascading effects on the rest of production.

    Yes, I know that acquiring metal from the earth requires labour-hours, and so the metal can be said to be a fruit of labour. But if it’s a resource that can be depleted (like metal, like a non-renewing aquifer) then it has to be economised. And if it has to be economised, surely it has to be reckoned in the accounts of the planners?

    Resource extraction gets more labor intensive the more scarce it is. Let's take mining as an example. If there's two locations of ore, one located not too deep and the other located within the bowels of the Earth, obviously people would rather mine the ore that's closer to the Earth's surface. It's just common sense. As the ore nearest to the surface gets depleted, the deeper ore would have to be mined.

    And the deeper ore would have a higher value because there's more labor time embedded within it. There's the greater amount of time needed to dig through that much more dirt, there's waste management and labor time needed to move the excavated dirt around because real life mining isn't like Minecraft where the dirt gets turned into a stackable cube, there's advanced machinery involved with the wear and tear of that machinery representing another form of labor time that the deeper ore captures, the machinery would consume more fuel representing more labor time, and there's greater risk of worker injury and the medical staff needing to perform labor as a form of reproductive labor.