Is the value of a commodity equal to its socially necessary labor time because production takes place under wage labor...

OK, this post made me realize that I have not yet called you a faggot.

No one here cares who the OP is, faggot.

Well, I assumed that it would help since this thread is about my specific question, and identifying the person asking the question in order to have a direct discussion would probably be helpful.
And apparently you don't have an answer to my question, so I'm going to call you a faggot, too.
Faggot.

that's the spirit

Yes because the money the wages are paid in is itself a universal commodity.

No, the "law of value" is the labour theory of value. Marx never spoke of anything else besides a law of value, he never said "muh labour theory of value" because that's not what he's saying. His economic theory is closely intertwined with the metaphysics he picked up from Feurbach. So I guess it's correct to speak of the LTV as something distinct from Marx's law of value. The LTV is not related to mature Marx however.

The value relation presupposes a lot of different things. The most basic one is the polarity of capital and labour (labour is working towards a constant process of producing more value) and the labourers "freedom in a double sense". The labour is free to sell whatever he wants but is possession of nothing else but labour power.

The essence of Marx's law of value is more complicated than SNLT. Marx conceived of man in the same way Feurbach did. He saw man as being grounded in the material essence of nature, and it's through labour that man reproduces himself. The "substance" of value as abstract labour is not measurable in time. You can't quantify abstract labour in of itself, but it is expended temporally. A better way of rephrasing SNLT is that the average amount of abstract labour is expended concretely in the average amount of time it takes to produce a commodity. For abstract labour there is only the whole. You can divide it up fractionally, but beyond those fractions there is no "subunit". There is only the whole of abstract labour which represents societies capacity to reproduce itself or create time. It's why in countries with a lower level of productive forces, 1 hour of labour is less intensive than in countries with a higher level of development. An hour of labour in Germany may produce more commodities in an hour than in India. The intensity is measured in time, but the reason we can speak of intensity to begin with is because we are speaking of a real expenditure of societies capacity to reproduce itself. There is a finite limit to what this capacity is at any given time, but there is only one unit which is the whole capacity. It's important to grasp abstract labour as such before you move on to something like SNLT (which is related to how production and circulation reinforce each other in a commodity producing society). But at the same time, I have my doubts about the causal link between labour and exchange so maybe just don't waste your time ;).

create wealth, not time*

Fug.
OK, I'm going to try to digest all this later when I'm not so tired, but I'll definitely work through it and tell you what I understand and what I don't.

You mean between labor and exchange value?
Law of Value is not about exchange value at all.
Or do I misunderstand you?

Marx's economics are just as much about his philosophy as it is about the free marget :DD. Why nature and labour as the source of value asserts itself over social relations is just as much a statement about being itself as it is about scarcity, or whatever.

Law of value is not about the labour theory of value.

OH! I meant that a critique of Marx I've seen is that since value is evaluated(heh) subjectively it's difficult to logically argue that labour and the expenditure of labour as an objective process have any causal link to exchange. There's also some Hegellian critiques of Marx I'm going to read soon. Approaching Marx from an empiricist or analytical standpoint is beyond retarded. I recommend this essay. marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/en/jordan2.htm

That was my point. Marx was talking about social use value, not market or exchange value. So it's not as subjective as you make it out to be.

Social relationships can be subjective while still being a product of the subjectivity of society. Of course, how someone subjectively decides how to price something is related to cost-price. There's a plethora of antagonisms between the producers, consumers, merchants etc. These can all be social and subjective but still a part of a larger universal. For example, the price you put on land or honour as Marx says.

And actually, that's not what I'm talking about either. I'm talking about the causal link between abstract labour and exchange value. This is deeply intertwined with Marx's metaphysics my dude. It's why "analytical Marxist" usually abandon the law of value.

okay I gotcha.
On a related note, would you?

I would prefer not to.

If you're using "value" here to mean "utility," then that makes sense. But if, as I understand the law of value to state, value depends on SNLT, then any given quantity of labor time can't, by definition, produce "more" of it. Right? I think I might be getting ahead of myself, though.

Yes, I understand that.

I understand that, too.

I think I get what you're saying. Labor is heterogeneous and qualitative; there's no quantitative way to compare the act of, say, picking fruit and hammering nails. But both activities necessarily take certain amounts of time, which you can measure (and thus find an average for). That's what you're getting at, right?

Got it.

Let me see if I have this down. You're talking about abstract labor in itself here, rather than labor time. I get that there can't be any "unit" of measurement since abstract labor is heterogeneous and therefore qualitative rather than quantitative. It's the same with utility–economists sometimes speak of "utils," but that's almost a running joke. Anyway, given that abstract labor can't be quantified, I'm not sure you could even express it as a fraction.

Is "less intensive" the right term here? I think "less productive" is more appropriate. Unless I'm missing out on the context. Usually I see "labor intensity" in the sense of comparison to "capital intensity"–though that may just be an Austrian school thing.

OK, so really what you're doing, by describing "intensity" is comparing (though not definitely, because it can't be quantitative) the human effort contained in 1 hour of labor time between these two countries. I think.

Fug.
Well, this has all been pretty illuminating. I think I understand now why the law of value isn't a price theory, and instead just the "axis around which prices revolve"–although honestly that may not even be true. I think the first time I heard that phrase, it was from something Ernest Mandel wrote.

Thanks for helping me out with babby's first Marx.

pls respond

No, there's still the value of dead labor that is embedded in the commodity. It's also important to note that the thing with living labor (human labor) is that it adds a variable value onto a commodity as the costs, productivity, and other things can be adjusted to squeeze more labor out of the subject. The laborer adds a "quantized" amount of labor into the commodity based on how much labor went into it in proportion to the SNLT. Regardless of whether or not the laborer produced more or less in relation to the SNLT, labor is conditioned to meeting the SNLT in order for a business to stay afloat. Money takes on the material form of value(labor) that is supposed to represent an abstract amount of labor paid in a priori agreed wage. The "value" of money is based on measuring the value of labor as labor itself (the value of labor for any commodity) so that money itself can be used to relate one commodity to another in terms of price.