Why do commodities have value? I know it comes from socially necessary labour time, but why does that give them value?

Services are also commodities.

And most jobs are still in manufacturing or agriculture worldwide.

The article already makes two false assumptions regarding value, and again makes the mistake of conflating value with price.

Also before you say
Overal in society that doesn't matter.

If there are a thousand painting companies, nobody is going to evaluate all of them and do a cost-quality analysis on all thousand of them. They are going to pick the cheapest one that seems reputable. The quality of paint jobs don't vary by a whole lot, a coat of paint is a coat of pain, a repaired car is a repaired car.
Companies that don't perform up to a certain standard get a bad reputation and go under, companies that perform above a certain standard often make too much costs and go under. In the end, they all roughly converge to the same price range and quality range, within the same kind of competition bounds that traditional commodities have.

True but it works different because what determines the value you have the cost of manufacturing not a factor for any human service and the product is an abstraction not something you can hold. What could possibly even differentiated a job a person likes and something people just do for fun?

Yes you do.
A painter needs paint and brushes, fuel for his car. A mechanic needs oil and new parts. A cleaner needs to pay for cleaning agents, brooms and transportation. Then on top of that, all of them need a wage to live off of.

Thats not relevant at all. Most service jobs actually do produce something physical. A painter produces a painted house. A mechanic produces a repaired engine. And something abstract like, I dunno, a visit to the doctor, still produces a commodity with a use value, a labour time value and it has a finite supply. As such, it is still a commodity. It doesnt need to be a physical thing.

Being paid? I dont see how this is relevant at all. The theory of value is about how the capitalist system functions and how its relations of production and exchange function. If all of society worked for free and fun, we would have socialism.

This hack doesn't understand what Marx meant.

This is wrong. Exchange value is not use value, labour value and supply combined.

Leftcom posters are right again

Wow that guy really doesn't understand marx.

Exchange value is the interactions of these things.

Also if im wrong please explain the correct way so I can correct myself next time, instead of saying "iz wronk"

Exchange-value cannot contain use-value because use-value is qualitative while exchange-value is quantitative.

A physical therapist, psycho therapist, building safety inspector, escort, workout instructor, nutritionist and a others dont need anything to do their job but their selves all of which are fully capable of working on their own. Although I suppose you do have a ceiling for jobs that require a degree by law such as a psychologist but you can legally do the same thing by just calling it something else. Also the ones that do use tools a lot of them are obtainable and relatively affordable to the workers. It's not like trying to own a factory machine which is obviously too pricey for any individual. It just seems more difficult for anyone to exploit something an individual can do on their own easily.

IFor that last bit was talking about in the forms of socialism that you dont get everything free but through labour vouchers or bartering or whatever alternative form of currency.

Hmm… "it's hard so it's wrong"

Well a framework that describes capitalism obviously doesnt describe socialism, just like how it doesnt describe feudalism.

And? Theres work hours (labour value), a finite amount of people who do that work (supply), usefullness (use value) and its sold (exchange value). So its a commodity.

Why do you insist that there is a difference?

...

Exchange-value is the price a product is sold at. What we call price is therefore exchange-value.
Use-value is abstract and differs from person to person. It is how much you value something.
Exchange-value of products fluctuates around the Value. Supply and demand influence if the price is above or below the value.
Value is the total labor power spent on creating the product. Which is essentially how long it takes to create a product.
Converting this to money is done by comparing the labor power needed to create different products. Which then gives you the relative values of products.
Value is only created by social labor, which means labor which has a use-value (someone is willing to buy it). The maximum value is based on socially necessary labor time. If your labor power expended exceeds the average, you won't create more value.

Reading the conclusion made me suspicious that the person writing it didn't understand the prerequisites of the LTV. So instead of reading a bunch of drivel, I searched for the prerequisites. I wasn't surprised that they didn't show up.

web.cortland.edu/worrellm/Papers_files/A Faint Rattling.pdf.

Stop posting or at least put off that flag.

I concede

I suppose but while the structure is different both socialism and capitalism use exchange and a need to measure value for exchange.

I wasn't implying they arent commodities just that they seem to not be out of the reach of the people doing the work unlike what you have with factory production.

...

Alright, I will try to amend my mistakes. Did I get it right this time?
Price is the price of a product when it is sold.
Exchange-value is the value of a product. Products don't have intrinsic value. They only have value when they are put in relation to each other. This relation happens during the exchange process.
LTV describes the abstract labour that goes into a product. This abstract labour influences the price of the product. However, it does not describe what the real value of a product is. Because this value is only determined in the exchange process.

...

Marx clearly speaks of circumstances where commodities are sold above or below its value. In the early parts of Capital he makes the assumption that commodities are sold at value in order to study other aspects of the economic detail without confusion. He is very clear that he does not conflate exchange value and price though.

Well yes I suppose that is true.
But as I said before, most jobs in the world is still manufacturing or agriculture. And most service jobs have means of production. The percentage of the economy that exists out of purely human labour is tiny and every example you can give probably does use some form of means of production.

Value is not determined by the moment of exchange, rather it is in the moment of exchange we can observe value. The only way the value can be observed is through price. I guess price can be described as a sort of shadow of the value. The greater context of an exchange system must however be present for us to describe a commodity as a value.

You are still sort of conflating price and and value.

Am I then right to assume? If I am willing to exchange a certain commodity, or amount of money commodity, for a different commodity. One exchange for this other commodity is a particular of the exchange-value. We, therefore, can't see the "universal" exchange-value of a commodity.

Do you have any source that actually divides up jobs for the whole world in percentages and for each individual country? I suppose it logically would be true if you're talking about a global scale but country by country is what would determine if anything happens where any of us actually live and that differs by country.

I got some world bank numbers, which indicate ~40% service, ~30% agriculture and ~30% manufacturing worldwide.

But as I said before, there is no difference between the primary, secondary and tertiary sector. They all produce commodities. They all follow the law of value and can be compared and traded. A service is just a commodity that isn't something physical you can touch. But all a commodity is is labour turned into use value.

forgot sources
data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.SRV.EMPL.ZS
data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.AGR.EMPL.ZS
data.worldbank.org/indicator/SL.IND.EMPL.ZS

I was suggesting the type of primary commodities would influence likelihood of revolution in any particular country.

What you call the "a particular of the exchange value" is what Marx calls price. What you call "universal" exchange value is what Marx just calls exchange value.

That makes sense, thank you.

No a commodity is something that is produced for its value, not produced for its use value. A commodity is something that has a use value AND an exchange value. If production was solely for the production of use values then it would not be commodity production.

Wait
I heard that overcharging for commodities does not create new value or surplus value
But if value is created in the moment of exchange then doesn't that mean it does ?

It doesn't create additional value. Because the person buying it lost the same amount the seller gained. It is different from extracting surplus value. Because surplus value is additional value, which isn't gained in exchange, however, created in production.

Based leftcom poster at it again with the knowledge

Value is not created in the moment of exchange. Value is created through labour. Value is dependant on there being a market however. So for example subsistence agricultural work does not create (exchange) value, only use value. Industrial work for the purpose of producing goods for sale on the market produces commodities, which have a dual nature of a use value and an exchange value. The moment of exchange is the only way we can observe value. We can however only observe it indirectly through the price form. The price form is an imperfect reflection of value.

I didnt say the motivation behind production is use value you illiterate retard. I said that what a commodity is is labour turned into use value to be sold. A car is labour turning ore into ingots into cars, a massage is labour turned into a service.

Different user from who you replied to, I'm probably really misunderstanding this but how come they must be mutually exclusive? If I was offering 4 tomatoes for someone's leg of lamb, can't quality also factory into it? Like if I had a bad harvest one year and got a bunch of scrappy, tiny tomatoes, does the exchange value stay the same?

Why do commodities have value? What is the purpose of the Labor Theory of Value? Hell, what is the Labor Theory of Value? Ask three Marxists, and you will get three different answers, for each question. Or four.

>versobooks.com/blogs/3128-the-labour-theory-of-value-and-the-concept-of-exploitation
I'm tired right now, but from skimming it looks like a decent essay. I'm not sure how much I agree with all of that, but I agree very much with something he says at the end. Contrary to a common claim by Marxists, you don't need the LTV in order to understand that there is exploitation. This understanding is not necessarily based on feelings then, but rather similar to what biologists mean when they talk about parasites (and they don't use a labor theory of value for that either). Sheep that have some maggots living in their arse can live without these, but the sheepassmaggots can't make a believable claim vice versa (if sheepassmaggots owned the media, you would hear the Serious Experts claiming that all the time, of course).

Consider a factory existing on rented land. Neither the absentee landlord nor other people who have never been inside that factory even as a planner, but are just legally related to it by owning stock, play any active role in producing whatever stuff the factory produces. Putting aside the legal formalities and just thinking about the physical processes there, they are entirely redundant. A clear and simple argument.

On the other hand, I've seen various Marxists "explain" exploitation with the labor theory of value. They talk about prices a lot while at the same time denying that they are talking about prices, since we are dealing with abstract model prices, and there are at least two different models (direct and indirect work inputs or prices of production with equalized profit rates across the economy), and blahblahblah wild gesticulations blahblah the SCIENCEFACT of exploitation. And they all disagree with each other, yet they have a rare consensus to call you a dingus when you say you don't understand them.

Because it means that you yourself don't have to spend your time to make it anymore. In LTV, value is basically crystallized human time.