Is value in a Marxist sense just a magical property an item acquires because it was made using human labor?

I should probally read more that the first chapter of capital before I try to talk about value again.

based on my own reading here is what I understand about value. Am I wrong?

Use value is how useful something is. Exchange vlaue is what people will give you for it or how much it is valued in an exchange its different basically unrelated to use value. Value is congealed labor in a commodity that correletates with equilibrium price.

Value is the quantified amount of labor that it took to produce an item. Working requires you to exert energy and as a result it imbues a thing with "value". The expenditure of energy is what gives things value relative to other things. Contrast this with use value which is the item's benefit to the owner of that item. Something like a church has a low use value in terms of production but has a high value in terms of labor time, which is why society values intricate churches so much. Hope this helped!

No, in Marxist theory value can be thought of as a representation of how much labor is necessary to produce an item. They are one and the same.

Value, as Marx uses the term, is an abstraction which takes the average time that workers in a given society need to create an average example of a given commodity. If you are interested, page 29 of the attached book explains it in detail.

Hey, this stuff is not exactly easy to explain to someone who does not know anything about the subject. I just wanted to give him an idea of how I was using the term "abstraction," since that seemed to be what he did not understand. Value is kind of like numbers in arithmetic. It is an abstraction that describes a real quality.

If an item required a ton of work for you to create you're more likely to value that item more highly than if it was extremely easy to make. Similarly, if a society understand an item is difficult to make it'll value that item highly. A way to quantify "difficulty to create" is to define it in terms of the average labor time it takes for an item to be produced. For a commodity (i.e. an item sold in quantity in the market) you need to factor in the need society has for that commodity item because people generally won't buy a commodity that has no social use.

To a given individual, yes. Twenty yards of linen is more useful to a tailor than it is to a bricklayer.

Kind of. It is how much of another commodity that a given commodity can be exchanged for. Say that a tailor is willing to exchange a coat with a miner for ten ounces of gold. The exchange value of the coat can be said to be ten ounces of gold. Likewise, the exchange value of ten ounces of gold can be said to be one coat.

Ultimately, yes, but considering price is not necessary to understand value.

Thanks. I think I get it.

Value in the Marxist sense is a supposedly scientific proof that workers are underpaid. It literally is intended for no other socially-relevant purpose.

Not always. The value of a commodity changes depending on supply and demand after the worker was compensated for producing it.

isn't value just the equilibrium price? when supply directly equals demand of a product?

Is that you AA?

youtu.be/dGT-hygPqUM?list=PL3F695D99C91FC6F7
Please watch at least a few of these videos user, you look silly talking about Marx because you don't know much about his ideas. I want you to learn user.

read the first chapter of capital or something before trying to argue about this

Please give me an objective explanation of cost, prices, and value that isn't rooted in labor, labor power, or labor time.

He is using the neoclassical Subjective Value Theory which is extraordinary in that it frames economics in terms of absolutely nothing that is a physical reality. Economics is all in your MIND, and, no, the fact that it describes nothing real does not make it entirely useless! Because value = price, don'cha know. It doesn't have anything to do with production or how useful a given commodity might be to an individual. Those things are beyond the scope of basic economics.

In the commonly-understood sense these things mean what you think they mean. Marx tries to create objective measures of these things that unfortunately don't adequately describe real distribution of resources.

Fair.

But there must be some objective explanation. Economics is much too systematic and quantifiable for it to all just be a silly illusion.

Not all values are the same, first of all.
Comparing "value" with monetary price or labor time is like comparing apples and oranges.
Yes we can receive a commodity that took a certain amount of work to produce in exchange for equivalent work, but let's not pretend that no commodity exists that was never appreciated beyond its initial cost. In addition let's not pretend that commodities can never be durable.
Some abstractions, like rights to arable land or personal relationships, have an acquisition cost but also have a maintenance cost. Things like cars have an objectively-determined "lifetime cost of ownership" that is much greater than the retail price.

This sentence alone betrays you understand literally nothing about Marx. Do you seriously believe he did not take supply and demand into account and that this is some sick critique? Also, value and price are not the same thing as Marx uses them.

It acquires it because it's in exchange. It's not magical, it's social.