Decline And Fall Of The American Empire

And if it is a bad year with little or no harvest what will he do to prepare for the next year?

What if the cashier can't come to an agreement with Safeway? Economies worked long before there were standard units of exchange. If the farmer needs capital - e.g. seed - to get started, he gets it from another farmer. What he uses to pay for it isn't particularly relevant.

How are you defining labor?What about valuable natural resources?

How do we obtain those natural resources? Do they just leap out of the ground into the capitalist's pocket?

True, although different types of labor receive different rewards. The miners are hired to operate the machines and extract the natural resource. They receive a paycheck. The trucks are driven and haul the raw material to be crushed and sifted. The labor at the plant extracts the raw material from the rock. They get paid.
Then, the precious metal (as an example of the natural resource) gets made into jewelry and sold. The seller receives a commission and the buyer pays up.We are discussing several hundred paychecks. Which labor among them should receive the ultimate value of the sold product? Realistically, which labor does receive the most?we in the grocery store who do most of the work hauling the product to the shelves, engaging in pleasant dialogue with the customers, and serving them meat, deli, bakery and Starbucks are the direct point of sale between the consumer and the business...so we believe we earn a chunk of the profit. The corporate types who stroll through occasionally to see if every display is straight and not crooked receive far larger paychecks. The truck drivers who deliver the product also get a share. As do the manufacturers who actually refine and box the product. the obvious conclusion is that labor is involved in the sale of the product. The question is what percentage of the sale value should each aspect of the labor receive?

It would be hard to work out a scale of "should" that had any meaning. "Should" the guy who risks his life down in the mine get more or less than the guy who pushes the buttons that print the cheques? Realistically, much of the cost to the end-user goes to parasites who are not essential to the process. For a start, everybody "should" be paid a living wage. But according to the capitalists, paying a living wage to a waitress or a fruit picker would ruin the economy. Somehow, we mange to survive paying a Safeway cashier twice as much as a 7-Eleven cashier but they still claim that a higher minimum wage would kill jobs.The sad part is that too many 7-Eleven cashiers and Safeway cahiers believe them.

I don't understand how that answers my questions.

It doesn't. The first wells in America supplied a grade of petroleum that was directly usable as fuel. While exposing the oil required some labor, the natural resource itself was capable of providing value to its owner with very little labor. Once pumped, the value of the fuel can be changed by various market forces, not all of which involve labor in any way.Similarly, at least some minerals that we mine are usable in their natural state, while others have a value that is completely artificial and that completely dwarfs any valuation of the labor used to produce them. Diamonds are one example. The value of diamonds on the market is almost completely artificial. Physically equivalent diamonds can be made by machine also involving very little labor. Yet the diamonds on the market do not have the same value.To pretend that the entire value of such things comes from labor is ridiculous.Edited by NoNukes, : No reason given.

If labor is the only source of value, then who's labor causes the value that naturally occurs in the resources? Say I buy a plot of land for 100 bucks, and somebody offers me 200 bucks for the rights to harvest the timber. I just gained 100 bucks through no labor. So you can manage the value of things without using labor, like through market forces n'stuff, but value, itself, is a human creation. It requires people, and at the very bottom somebody has to make the value.Except for natural resources - those things are the shit.So, you could define labor so broadly as to be like "human activity" or something, to spin it so all value technically comes from labor - but I don't know if that's what they're trying to do or not - and I'd agree that it would be ridiculous.Too, natural resources would still be an exception.

Do you understand that digging resources out of the ground requires labour?

And yet your examples involve "very little labour", not no labour.

Show me a capitalist who says he doesn't "work hard' for his money.

Within the context of the culture and lifestyle I was brought up in, I work hard. not as hard as some, and harder than others. Were you to throw me in a third world nation where I was pulling old computer parts apart for copper wire, I would probably work harder, and gripe louder at the pennies a day i earned.

In my experience, the ones who gripe the loudest aren't working while they're doing it.

Yes...if the money comes out of social security trust funds simply to pay mass labor.For the vanishing middle class, our future is tied up in "future obligations" while current obligations rob us of what we collectively saved.The whole problem with the rising tide argument is that it demolishes all of the houses built above water level. Marx saw it as class struggle. You know more about him than I do, but this whole idea of lumping the middle class in with the rich people is why I dont like communism.