@Whisper While its true to say that assets have no value without labour, its not true to say that labour has no value with assets. And also, if you drop me off naked in the woods, I'm not going to be focused on sending you an email. I'm going to use my labour to build a shelter and hunt and gather something edible.

The cacophony of criticism that I'm getting here on this thread just for mentioned a very small element of one of the theories that Karl Marx wrote about is EXACTLY what I was talking about in my very first post.

My original post was about this: in the west (especially in the US) we are gaslit into thinking that capitalism is the holy grail and that communism is the root of all evil. As soon as you discuss any small part of labour, capital, distribution the capitalism fan boys pipe up in a red mist of 'communism is the end of the world, it didn't work, etc etc etc' when nobody was actually talking about communism. We were discussing the mechanics of value exchange between labour and capital, using money as a medium.

It occurs to me that there is a generation of people in the USA that are realise that something is wrong. They see that GDP is rising, but they are aware that their salaries and purchasing power is declining. They wonder how on earth can we have a country with a rising national income but a declining life expectancy. What has happened to our industrial heartlands? Why is food getting more expensive but farmers can't seem to make enough money and having their land taken off them by banks? Why are cities filled with opioid zombies? Why can't the average guy buy an average house on an average salary and have a stay at home wife to raise three kids like we use to in the 60s? Why is the tax on ordinary people going up and up and the tax on billionaires going down, sometimes to the point where they the effective tax rate is negative?

These are all good questions. But you can't go very far in the discussions, because as soon as you even start to discuss things like the labour theory of value, working class people that have been raised on capitalist propaganda since they were 2 years old start shrieking THAT SOCIALISM AND SOCIALISM DOESN'T WORK AND MEANS BEING ENSLAVED TO A COMMUNIST GODLESS ETC ETC ETC ETC.

@Lone_Ranger

If you characterize money as a "store" of labour, simply because it can be used to buy labour, then money is a store of cheese, a store of foot massages, a store of ammunition, a store of facial tissues, etc, etc, etc.

Not really a very useful or enlightening metaphor.

It is also true that assets have no value without labour. So what? Labour has no value without assets. Labour is not in any way primary... it's just another thing, amid the myriad of things, that people want to buy and sell. Especially since "labour" is a broad category, encompassing many different services, none of which are equivalent.

"Labour" is just a marxist way of saying "services", while pretending all services are the same.

There's no getting around the need for assets, either. If I drop you off naked in the woods at night, how long will it be before you can send me an email?

I could sit here poking random holes in the labour theory of value all day. Or I could simply point out that when people tried to organize society around it, things went so badly that they ended up shooting people for trying to leave. Which you already know if you are over forty, unless you reached forty under a rock.

We also have places in the free world where people aren't allowed to leave. We call them prisons. We put thieves and murderers there.