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.
The cool thing about socially necessary labor is that is also includes the value added by our ancestors, like the infrastructure built or the technology researched over generations. We literally can’t build a modern house without the contributions of the entirety of humanity throughout history.
Of course, the logical conclusion to this is that any commodity cannot be claimed by any one person, and ownership must be claimed by humanity as a whole. An individual may use the product, but for example, the owner of the construction company has no moral claim on the house that his workers built.
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.
The cool thing about socially necessary labor is that is also includes the value added by our ancestors, like the infrastructure built or the technology researched over generations. We literally can’t build a modern house without the contributions of the entirety of humanity throughout history.
Of course, the logical conclusion to this is that any commodity cannot be claimed by any one person, and ownership must be claimed by humanity as a whole. An individual may use the product, but for example, the owner of the construction company has no moral claim on the house that his workers built.
Beautifully put