That Labour Theory of Value....

To cast the Labour Theory of Value into colloquial terms - including the conclusion often reached from it.

It’s only human labour that really adds value to things. Therefore, all the value added to something should flow to labour. If capital, or the capitalists - who have not laboured to add value - gain some of that value than that’s expropriation. We should therefore stop that and make sure that labour gains all the value added.

Yes, pretty crude but at the general level of understanding that is what is meant by it.

A veteran metal detectorist hit the jackpot when he turned up late to a group dig only to stumble across the largest gold nugget ever found in England after just 20 minutes of searching.

Richard Brock, 67, travelled three-and-a-half hours from his home in Somerset in May 2023 to join an organised expedition on farmland in the Shropshire Hills.

Despite his metal detector not in full working order, Mr Brock, who has been metal detecting for 35 years, discovered the biggest find of his life after unearthing a 64.8-gram (about 2.28 ounces) golden nugget.

To a useful level of accuracy that’s some £4,000 worth of gold.

The nugget is estimated to sell for £30,000.

Well, maybe it will and maybe it won’t. But this does pose a terrible problem for that Labour Theory of Value.

Yes, of course, we can go through any number of rathole iterations and insist that the labour of detectoring is what added the £26k in value and all that. Or say that natural finds are different or summat.

But what we’ve actually got there is that the prices humans allocate to things are not objective. They are subjective. £4k of gold becomes £30k of nugget because there’s a nice story attached.

We can also continue down the rathole iterations and insist that the absence of a metal detector would lead to no value at all, therefore capital is being expropriated by not gaining all, let alone any, of that value.

But the correct answer here is that the Labour Theory is simply wrong. Sure, we can construct ethical or moral systems in which it should be true. We can even insist that humans be reformed so as to make it true - tho’ we’d observe that New Soviet Man sure took a long time comin’.

Reality is simply that humans do not price things by the labour value in their production. Prices are subjective opinions, not objective realities. Sure, when 8 billion subjectives are aggregated we get to the “real price” of something but we’ve not an objective analysis underlying all of that. Given this it’s not possible to have an objective split of the value added - for that value just isn’t commensurable in that manner.

That is, the Labour Theory of Value is just great except for the one thing - it doesn’t apply to us, us humans, and the prices and values we apply to things.