More On Commodities

Having magically discarded unwanted use-value and done the cookery to homogenise, congeal and crystallise labour into a commodity, Marx sets up a nice straw man:

A use-value, or useful article, therefore, has value only because abstract human labour is objectified or materialised in it. How then is the magnitude of this value to be measured? By means of the 'value-forming substance', the labour, contained in the article. This quantity is measured by its duration [in] hours, days etc.

Cue an internet meme about, who wants to live under a system where the value of something is greater the slower and dumber the producer?

The straw man is duly knocked down, making Karl appear entirely reasonable:

It might seem that if the value of a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour expended to produce it, it would be the more valuable the more unskilful and lazy the worker who produced it

sounds like Britain in the 70s... but it

only needs, in order to produce a commodity, the labour time which is necessary on an average, or in other words is socially necessary. Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society [...] The individual commodity counts here only as an average sample of its kind.

Marx goes on to ponder, in the first real-world example cited in the book, that:

The same quantity of labour provides more metal in rich mines than in poor. Diamonds are of very rare occurence on the earth's surface, and hence their discovery costs, on an average, a great deal of labour time [... William] Jacob questions whether gold has ever been paid for at its full value [...] The total produce of the Brazilian diamond mines for the eighty years ending in 1823 still did not amount to the price of 1½ years' average produce of the sugar and coffee plantations of the same country, although the diamonds represented much more labour, therefore more value.

Karl Marx "Capital Volume I" (1990) pp129-30

Could the explanation be that the theory is a hopeless hack that has fallen at the first fence?

Or is this a Conspiracy Theory in the making? I will read on with my expectations raised as high as my hackles.

Revision

Pictured: Homo neanderthalensis confronts humans with shirts.

In my young days the Neanderthals were primitives without language or culture who radiated into Europe before being overrun and wiped out by our ancestors; unsurprisingly as they were nasty, brutish and short, and no good to be said for them.

No language because they had no hyoid bones. True, only a few chunky pieces of skull and long bone had been found at the time, but no hyoids and therefore no language or anything that goes with that.

Humans definitely did not interbreed with them, no siree, fastidiousness in matters of mating being a characteristic of the Homo sapiens of course.

Today, after the discovery of a hyoid at Kebara in Israel, some apparent settlements and a few smeary bits of "art", they are pictured as a cross between Noble Savage and Eco Warrior, who would undoubtedly have opposed Brexit and Capitalism, re-nationalised the railways and so forth, given the option.

The few percent of Neanderthal genes found in Europeans, Western Russians and their descendants is cited as proof of local interbreeding and proposed as the likely cause of smoking, alcoholism and other such defects: it doesn't seem to sit well with us. This explains why alcoholism and chain-smoking are unknown in Asia or Africa.

Inspirational Again