LOV and LTV

["Charles Brown" <CharlesB@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Another point on this is that for Marx "value" mainly applies to capitalism. Marx refers to the fruits of exploitation in pre-capitalist societies as "surplus-labor" ( see below) not "surplus value" . So, for Marx "value" is meant to convey the specific form of exploitation that predominates in capitalism.   "Value" is unique to capitalism, or to the commodity production and exchange that was on the periphery of societies until capitalism. In Marxist terms, feudal serfs were exploited , but did not produce value.

So, showing exploitation in capitalism without using the concept of "value" misses the point or impoverishes rather than enriches Marx's theory.

Also, value relations do not have to be exploitative. There can be production for exchange or commodity production, and exchange based on the proportions of labor times for producing the  commodities that does not involve exploitation.

Charles
^^^^^^^

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1867-c1/ch10.htm#S2

SECTION 2
THE GREED FOR SURPLUS-LABOUR. MANUFACTURER AND BOYARD

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Capital has not invented surplus-labour. Wherever a part of society possesses the monopoly of the means of production, the labourer, free or not free, must add to the working-time necessary for his own maintenance an extra working-time in order to produce the means of subsistence for the owners of the means of production, [7] whether this proprietor be the Athenian calos cagaqos [well-to-do man], Etruscan theocrat, civis Romanus, Norman baron, American slave-owner, Wallachian Boyard, modern landlord or capitalist. [8] It is, however, clear that in any given economic formation of society, where not the exchange-value but the use-value of the product predominates, surplus-labour will be limited by a given set of wants which may be greater or less, and that here no boundless thirst for surplus-labour arises from the nature of the production itself. Hence in antiquity over-work becomes horrible only when the object is to obtain exchange-value in its specific independent money-fo!
rm; in the production of gold and silver. Compulsory working to death is here the recognised form of over-work. Only read Diodorus Siculus. [9] Still these are exceptions in antiquity. But as soon as people, whose production still moves within the lower forms of slave-labour, corvée-labour, &c., are drawn into the whirlpool of an international market dominated by the capitalistic mode of production, the sale of their products for export becoming their principal interest, the civilised horrors of over-work are grafted on the barbaric horrors of slavery, serfdom, &c. Hence the negro labour in the Southern States of the American Union preserved something of a patriarchal character, so long as production was chiefly directed to immediate local consumption. But in proportion, as the export of cotton became of vital interest to these states, the over-working of the negro and sometimes the using up of his life in 7 years of labour became a factor in a calculated and calculating sys!
tem. It was no longer a question of obtaining from him a certain quant
of surplus-labour itself: So was it also with the corvée, e.g., in the Danubian Principalities (now Roumania).