You’re right, but also not really factoring all the minutia. How many more hours went into all the parts of the home? It’s not a month when you have to make the screws and nails, cut the wood, polish the tile, mine the metal, etc. It’s far higher.
In Marx’s labor theory of value, which OP’s post is pulling from, the human made tools one uses to labor, to make a thing, is called Embodied Labor.
We tend to, through a process called Commodity fetishism, look at object purely in terms of its monetary value, rather than the labor processes that it took to make. That labor process, in the case of your house, is more than just the construction workers who put it together, they’re tied, by the labor process, to the people in the screw and nail factory, to people who grew the trees, chopped them down, processed the lumber. They’re tied to the people who drove the trucks and boats and trains which got the materials to the construction site.
So the workers who made the house might have done 8 hours worth of socially necessary labor to take the materials they had and turn them into a house. But those materials represent the embodied labor of all the people who labored before them to add successively more and more value to the base raw materials.
You’re right, but also not really factoring all the minutia. How many more hours went into all the parts of the home? It’s not a month when you have to make the screws and nails, cut the wood, polish the tile, mine the metal, etc. It’s far higher.
Other than that, I agree.
In Marx’s labor theory of value, which OP’s post is pulling from, the human made tools one uses to labor, to make a thing, is called Embodied Labor.
We tend to, through a process called Commodity fetishism, look at object purely in terms of its monetary value, rather than the labor processes that it took to make. That labor process, in the case of your house, is more than just the construction workers who put it together, they’re tied, by the labor process, to the people in the screw and nail factory, to people who grew the trees, chopped them down, processed the lumber. They’re tied to the people who drove the trucks and boats and trains which got the materials to the construction site.
So the workers who made the house might have done 8 hours worth of socially necessary labor to take the materials they had and turn them into a house. But those materials represent the embodied labor of all the people who labored before them to add successively more and more value to the base raw materials.
Beautifully put
That’s confusing division of labor with pricing