Theory Makes Perfect

Labour Theory of Value When you produce something, it costs you the time that you put into it. When, for example, you cook a meal, it might take you an hour to prepare the food. But imagine all the hours that have also gone into that meal indirectly: the time spent growing and preparing the ingredients, the time spent transporting and collecting them, the time spent honing your cooking skills, the time spent making the utensils. Commodities, i.e. products that are bought and sold, have value (economic or exchange value) because of the average labour time put into them. So for example wool, in the abstract, has a value based on the amount of time it takes society (or the average worker) to make wool. It's average labour time which determines the overall value of wool in the abstract because some people can produce more or less in a given amount of time, but if the whole of society set about producing wool then the time it took to produce that wool per worker would by definition be t...

There is a lot in the news about supposed labour shortages, with driving positions being unfilled and meat processing companies asking the government to allow them to use more prison labour, no doubt because they have fewer rights and can be made to work for less. This is having a knock on effect on the economy, with empty supermarket shelves and restaurants closing. Some are attributing this at least in part to Brexit and Covid, with workers either leaving the country or staying at home. While that's undoubtedly part of the picture, deeper causes should also be investigated. In a country of 70 million there should be no problem for the population to grow, prepare, distribute and where necessary import food for everyone. But in the UK a lot of food is wasted; every year 2 million tonnes of food, the equivalent of 1.3 billion meals, goes unsold but is still edible . Meanwhile 8.4 million people in the UK are struggling to afford to eat. Even before Brexit and the pandemic, food b...

Imagine capitalist society as a grand hotel. The floors correspond to your place in society. Most of the people who read this won't be on the ground floor; they will be privileged to live in the "developed" world, and so will be a few floors up. But most of the people who read this will be far away from the top of the hotel. They will be working for the people upstairs, and will have a worse standard of living than the people upstairs as well. Imagine that the people on the lower floors, the "working class", are given jobs which involve using the equipment and materials owned by the people on the top floors, the "ruling class". The equipment is given to the workers through the service elevator, and the goods and services they produce are transported upstairs. The bosses on the upper floors give the workers money in return, with which they can buy back some of what they produce. As I said, the people reading this probably aren't on the ground floor....