Mechanism of value

I guess that you could say that value is quantified in the production sphere, but it has to be sanctioned in the circulation sphere. Hence, you can't determine the value of a thing neither exclusively in the production sphere nor in the circulation one. You need both stages. Because until the moment that the commodity is sold, you don't know if the labor invested in it is the socially necessary. You don't know if you wasted more labor than the needed, or what. Competition in the market (in simple words, the fact that you can sell the product or not) will tell you that.

OP, you are not retarded, it is a good question. That said, the validity of the LTV does not depend on an explanation of why it's that way.

It's because there's a limited amount of labor you can use at any given time in the economy. It is the ultimate limit on production. Even nearly endless resources like crops are limited by the amount of labor you can put into them. The result is that the value of things becomes the total amount of labor put into them by the division of labor.
Imagine in early forms of trade (even barter), how people appraised each other's goods. Barring exotic goods, the standard people would have used was "did my goods take the same amount of effort to make/get as theirs? Could I make what they made with the same effort?"

I think Ricardo's examples with corn are good for this, IDK what book/chapter they're actually from though.

Reality is independent of the mind, but the law of value as a scientific model does depend on whether or not it can be rationally explained. It's not enough to empirically observe phenomena; we must be able to satisfactorily explain how they work and where they come from. I could notice that a hammer falls at 9.8 m/s^2, and it really would fall at that rate whether I noticed or not, but it is up to us (i.e. humanity) to come up with rational models that explain phenomena, and to confirm or reject them empirically; that is science.

All inputs to production are finite. What makes labor different is that it comes from people, and so it will necessarily be privileged by those who perform it. (If, for example, I find a pearl by the side of the road, I'll part with it more easily than if I had to dive for it myself.)

Can you provide any sort of source or reference? I've never read any Ricardo.

So what's gravity from, then? Why does it work that way?

The Higgs field.

value is a VERB and value requires someone to value it

ie, the value of something is what another person is willing to exchange for that item

if you value something "work" or maybe how much suffering it took to make that item it has no practical value

if you knew one item caused X amount of human suffering and the other item caused Y amount then how does that knowledge help you invest and analyze how much money or usefulness that item could do for you?

it some cases it might make sense like if you are the person paying for the time it takes to make something, but still you are not going to get more for the item than someone else values you it based on their opinion of how useful it is

and we see this sometimes in markets where you have "ethically grown" stamped on certain produce or certain brands advertise "made in america" and they might get a certain boost in sales for assuring their customers these claims are true

Usefulness of an item is purely opinion based whether it's just to sell something later when demand is high or whether it's a tool that can be used to make other things. And hording does have value because it encourages people to store things so when there is as shortage (demand increases) there now are items available to those who want or need it. For example if people keep water for emergencies then if there's an emergency they have water that they can use or sell.

Sometimes drug dealers will do this when there's lots of competition and they feel like they cant make as much money, so one drug dealer will get smart and he will hold onto his product until the other drug dealers in the neighborhood sell out and he can fill the demand between when everyone else sells out and when the next load comes in from the bulk dealers that all the other dealers are buying from, like once a week or every two weeks or whatever it is.

Attached: What is value Value is the worth of an item..jpg (960x720, 134.33K)

subjective value theory is refuted, what people are willing to pay depends on how much time and effort they have spend to get money

labour theory of value is empirically verified

And?

So after reading a little more of Shaikh and Sraffa, I think I've hit upon a decent starting point for my analysis. Below are my notes.

Producers Product Unit Labor-hours/unit Total labor-hours Total supply Demand per consumer Total demand30 Wheat bushel 5 60,000 12,000 bushels 150 bushels 12,000 bushels10 Mutton pound 2 20,000 10,000 pounds 125 pounds 10,000 pounds10 Pine cord 50 20,000 400 cords 5 cords 400 cords30 Iron ingot 30 60,000 2,000 ingots 25 ingots 2,000 ingots
1 bushel of wheat = 2.5 pounds of mutton = 1/10 cord of pine = 1/6 ingot of iron1 pound of mutton = 2/5 bushel of wheat = 1/25 cord of pine = 1/15 ingot of iron1 cord of pine = 10 bushels of wheat = 25 pounds of mutton = 5/3 ingots of iron1 ingot of iron = 6 bushels of wheat 15 pounds of mutton 3/5 cord of pine
6 bushels of wheat = 1 ingot of iron 15 pounds of mutton3/5 cord of pine

Sorry for the wall of text. I hope the tables came out OK. Anyway, my next step is to test the three assumptions listed in the first paragraph, and see which, when suspended, will cause value to systemically differ from labor-time. In other words, I continue the thought experiment with expanded and recessed production, inequality between supply and demand, and variations between occupations in labor-time per producer.
After that, my next step will be to examine this system under capitalist production proper, with all that entails–class, capital, profits, wages, etc. I'm going to initially assume homogeneity in the length of the working day and the wage rate (and therefore the rate of exploitation), and the organic composition of capital (and therefore the rate of profit). Then I will test those assumptions, too, and even re-test the earlier assumptions I adopted under simple commodity production.

I think I'm becoming kind of obsessive about this stuff, but I want to truly understand and critique these ideas, rather than simply memorize them and accept them.

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Seems decent enough so far, to me at least.

Yes.
"Human suffering" is not a universal component of commodities; human labour-time is.
saging because I reposted to fix formatting