MentisWave Doesn't Understand The Labor Theory of Value

Added: 2026-05-22

[00:00:00]No, dear viewer, you have not been transported into an alternate universe.

[00:00:06]This really is Lavader responding to Menus Wave using Marxism and the labor theory of value as my weapons of choice.

[00:00:14]The end of the world is apparently upon us and it came not with fire, but with me citing Karl Marx approvingly. A few months ago, I decided I wanted a better understanding of Marxism. I'd already read my fair share of Lenin and a few of the other usual suspects, so I figured it was time to tackle the big man himself and his infamous Capital Trilogy. I mean, how hard could it be? I once decrypted an entire Julius Eve book for a video. So, surely Markx would be a relaxing afternoon by comparison because I wouldn't be dealing with the author thinking he was channeling ancient Aryan sun gods. About 50 pages into the first volume, I began to deeply regret ever starting a YouTube channel and possibly being born. It took a while, but I think I eventually got the hang of it. And think is carrying a heavyweight championship belt in that sentence. I have to admit that a lot of what I assumed about MarkX turned out to be wrong, which opened my eyes to how thoroughly those garbage r/political compass memes had rotted my brain. Don't misunderstand me. I remain a staunch anti-communist. I just happened to have a strong ethical commitment to hating things for the correct reasons and not the wrong reasons. This sent me back to a few of Menus Wave's older videos. I binged a lot of his content last year, so I wanted to measure my current grasp of Marxism against the critiques he raises. And yeah, unfortunately, they could have been better. One of the rougher ones is his video on the labor theory of value where he argues that surplus value simply doesn't exist. So, I decided to make a response. Partly because it sounded fun and partly because I might teach my fellow Chuds a thing or two about Marxism. I don't only care about redpilling the normies. I'd also like the normies to get smarter while it happens. And honestly, looking at things through someone else's lens sharpens your own thinking. So, I'm treating this as a brain exercise, too.

[00:02:29]One thing before I head off, since I can already feel the full wrath of the Menus Liquid Zulu clique descending on me like a Ukrainian drone strike, I have nothing against Menus wave. I still like him as a content creator and we're in the same Chutube Discord server. I just felt the need to correct a few things about how he thinks the theory works. I'm not claiming the labor theory of value is good or that it beats the subjective theory of value. I'm mostly pointing at the straw men scattered around the place. But that's not all. Just like Millennial Burger joints, I will be doing something a little different here.

[00:03:08]I won't just explain the errors, but I will also bring up how Menus could have most effectively argued against Markx here and what the best angle of attack could have been. I just want to make sure my buddy is also up to date on his attack methods. So, I guess it is time for us to now get into it.

[00:03:29]Hello internets. You may have heard an argument from socialists before that goes something like this. You will certainly never get paid exactly the amount of value that you bring with your labor. That will never happen. Why?

[00:03:44]Because of what is known as profits. A company cannot have profits if they pay their workers the fair due. If they actually pay their workers exactly how much money their workers are generating, then there's no profits. Profits are surplus labor value extracted from the workers. That's just it. Simple as. This argument is tied to the labor theory of value and the claim that profit is theft. It's a big reason why so many regular people probably get tricked into socialist thought. Immediately here at the beginning of the video, we run into a big problem. not from Menus Wave's side, but everyone's favorite dog shocker, Hassan [ __ ] because he himself gets the labor theory of value completely wrong while trying to explain it. And what makes it worse is that it is a completely revisionist social democratic view of it, forged in the evil layer of Ferdinand Lazala himself.

[00:04:41]To be fair, Hassan isn't outright strawmanning marks here, but the explanation is muddled in ways that actually weaken the argument and make it easy for libertarian critics like Meniswave to knock down. Hassan grabbed onto Marx's conclusion that profit comes from unpaid work without the reasoning that gets you there and ended up sounding like exactly the kind of socialist Mark spent years arguing against. Here's the single most important thing to understand in capital. Markx made a very careful distinction between two ideas. Labor, which is the actual work you do, and labor power, which is your capacity to work for a given period of time. Hassan treats these two as the same exact thing. But for Markx, your labor isn't what you're selling in the first place.

[00:05:33]To give you a better idea, imagine that you are a farmer and you rent out your neighbor's ox to plow your fields for 50 bucks for the entire day, which covers feeding it, sheltering it, vet bills, everything needed to keep it alive and working because you can't plow your fields effectively with a sick and weak ox. So, it's a fair price. But during the day, the ox plows fields that produce 200 bucks worth of crops. Now, and this is important, you haven't ripped your neighbor off. You paid the going rate for what you rented. You just walked away with 150 bucks more than you paid because of what the ax did during the rental period. Now, swap the ox with a normal everyday worker. The boss pays you the cost of keeping you alive and able to come back tomorrow. food, rent, and the ability to provide for your family in order to raise the next generation of workers. That's the value of your labor power. And you actually do get paid that in a normal market. The catch is that during those work hours, you produce more value than the cost of keeping you alive. That extra goes to the boss. Again, workers do get a fair deal on what they actually sold. The exploitation going on here isn't that they are getting shortch changed at the cash register. It's about the fact that what they sold, which is their time and ability, produces more than it costs to keep them around. So why is this distinction between labor and labor power important? You may ask. They sound almost exactly the same. Remember what Hassan said back there? You will certainly never get paid exactly the amount of value that you bring with your labor. That will never happen. You never get paid the full value of your labor.

[00:07:30]This quietly and sneakily assumes that workers and bosses are arguing over the right price tag for labor with a boss lowballing the worker. And by assuming that you are indirectly arguing that capitalism is a cheating system you can fix with fair wages which again is the view propagated by the revisionist social democrats and democratic socialists because they believe capitalism can be reformed. This is not a position taken by orthodox Marxists.

[00:08:03]Markx wanted to show that capitalism is a system where exploitation happens even when every exchange is completely fair by the rules of the market itself. The structure of wage labor itself is the issue here, not about how much your boss is paying you for your wages. So when social democrats like Hassan here start saying that your boss isn't paying you what you really deserve, they immediately hand the entire argument away. So then libertarians like Menuswave can easily swoop in and say something like, well profit is the return for risk or for the boss's organizational work or for owning the equipment. Nothing about it is stolen worker value. So Menus Wave is now basing his video off of this muddled explanation of the labor theory of value, which is completely fine if you are using it to push back against those filthy reformist revisionists. But to an orthodox Marxist approach, this wouldn't put the slightest dent in the theory because it's working off of a false premise. But nevertheless, let's just continue and see what else he has to say. I'm sure most people have at some time felt like they aren't getting paid enough for the nonsense they put up with in whatever their job is. But is this feeling that you aren't being paid fairly the fault of profits and this thing known as surplus labor value that your company is supposedly extracting from you? Well, no. And the reason this socialist talking point doesn't make any sense is fairly straightforward. Surplus labor value doesn't exist. There is absolutely no such thing. And to demonstrate this, here's a simple tale using Fumos because why not?

[00:09:42]Let's say that Marisa gets an idea.

[00:09:45]She's tired of blasting magic all over the place, and decides to make some money selling lemonade. So, she builds a lemonade stand, buying the lemons and supplies, advertising the lemonade, finding just the right spot in Gensokyo for it, and of course, making and selling her lemonade to random passerbys. Let's say at this point that it costs her $1 to make a glass of lemonade, which she sells for $3, so a $2 profit. To keep things simple, we'll just say that 10 glasses of lemonade on average are sold every hour, effectively making $20 an hour. Then Martisa gets another idea. What if she builds a second lemonade stand and convinces Ramu to work there for $10 an hour with Martisa providing all the supplies she needs? Martisa then repeats this process until she has created a vast chain of lemonade stands. At some point, Martisa stops working at her own stand and dedicates her time to management. She has now effectively become a capitalist.

[00:10:31]This is where the socialists start to whine a bit. They argue that Ramu and the other girls are generating $20 an hour of value through their labor, but are only being paid $10 an hour.

[00:10:40]Therefore, the $10 profit is considered surplus labor value that is being stolen from them, and that Marisa is thus exploiting their labor. Oh no, that sucks. But if we think about this logically, we can find some major flaws in their reasoning. If Marisa paid them the full $20 an hour, then she wouldn't be making any more than she did when she was running a single lemonade stand all by herself. So, she would have no reason or incentive to do this. In fact, she could risk losing money or seriously wasting her time. Think of all the work that goes into building the stands, finding the perfect spot for the stands, getting the supplies for the stands, repairing and maintaining the stands, dealing with potential lemon shortages, and so on and so forth. Depending on how well she does all these things, the profits can be completely different. If something goes wrong, resulting in less than four lemonade sales per hour, she could end up paying Ramu and the other girls more wages than she gets back in profits. Lemonade sales could also rise on a sunny day or fall on a rainy day, depending entirely on how customers subjectively feel about partying with their money for a glass. Menus did something very sneaky here, and I only caught it on my second rewind. He goes from saying that surplus value doesn't exist when his own example literally shows that it does exist. In his story, each glass costs $1 in supplies and sells for $3. Rayu makes and sells 10 glasses per hour for a wage of $10. So in one hour, Rayu's stand brings in $30 in revenue. $10 of that just covers the supplies that were already worth $10 before she touched them. That leaves $20 of new value created at her stand. Rayu gets 10 of that new value as her wage, while the other 10 goes to Marissa. What he just showed using his own numbers is the structure of surplus value. The labor produces $20 in new value. The worker keeps half and the owner keeps half. Like that's not a reputation of the labor theory of value. If anything, he just illustrates it. What Mantis is actually doing here is arguing that Marissa deserves her $10. That's a totally different argument from this thing doesn't exist. He opens by saying it doesn't exist. Then his analogy demonstrates it happening and then spends the rest of the analogy explaining why the capitalist deserves to keep it. Those are two distinct positions. Like there is nothing wrong with saying that there is such a thing as surplus value and then arguing why taking it isn't theft and that the owner is entitled to it. They are not mutually exclusive from this point of view. Now here comes I think the biggest problem with the analogy Mantis is making.

[00:13:24]Marissa is doing two different things at once. She does management labor like building stands, finding locations, dealing with supplies, yada yada. And at the same time she owns the stands and the supplies. Markx is very careful to keep these two positions separate.

[00:13:42]Mentis smushes them together. so that justifying one looks like justifying the other. Nobody, including Markx, denies that managing a business is real work that deserves compensation. He even has a term for it in capital, calling it wage of superintendence and treats it as productive labor like any other skilled work. But that's not where capitalist profit comes from. In Marx' view, profit goes to whoever owns the means of production. The work of running the business and the ownership of the business are different roles even when one person does both. To demonstrate, think about a publicly traded company.

[00:14:25]The CEO is technically an employee since he has a salary. The actual profits go to the shareholders who may have nothing to do with running the company. Hell, they might never have visited the office or read an internal email. They get paid because they own shares. So my question to Menis is what labor are those shareholders performing to earn their dividends? If management work is what justifies profit, passive shareholders shouldn't be getting any, but they are.

[00:14:56]That's the whole point of being a shareholder. Now imagine Marissa hires a general manager and stops working entirely. She sits on a beach drinking margaritas while collecting checks from her 10 lemonade stands. Is she still entitled to all the profits by Men's logic? If labor and risk-taking justify profit, the answer should be an obvious no. She's not contributing labor anymore, and her manager is the one making risk decisions on the ground, and he is the one who has to be terrified of Marissa's wrath if he makes a mistake.

[00:15:32]Also FYI, while social democrats like Hassan may say that profit is theft, Markx on the other hand never made this argument. Nowhere in capital does he say that profit is theft. Again, Markx was careful to argue that capitalist exchange is by its own rules completely fair. The worker gets paid the full value of their labor power and no theft occurs in any individual transaction.

[00:16:00]Again, and this is arguing more against the reformist revisionists. By reducing it to profit is theft, you are giving the libertarians a much easier target.

[00:16:10]Arguing against your boss is stealing from you is far simpler than arguing against a point like that capitalism produces exploitation through fair exchanges grounded in historical conditions of unequal property ownership. Now again, Mens's point works well against the revisionist, but if I were him and I was targeting orthodox Marxism, I would drop the lemonade stand analogy entirely and first concede to Marx's structural description and then challenge his conclusions, grant him the fact that ownership of capital lets owners capture a share of output without performing labor in the production process. The counterargument could be that this arrangement still produces better outcomes than the alternatives because capital allocation, risk absorption, and the price signals generated by profit seeking solve coordination problems that well no other system has solved yet. Planned economies historically ran into serious calculation and incentive failures. This is the Hayek and Mises angle and it's far more dangerous to Marxism than but the boss works hard too because it does not deny exploitation in Marxist technical sense. It argues that what Marx calls exploitation is the price of a coordination mechanism we haven't found a better alternative for. There's also consent. Did Marisa force Ramu to work for $10 an hour? No. If Ramu feels there is a better use of her time, she and everyone else could just quit.

[00:17:45]Again, this ties into subjective value.

[00:17:47]How much does a person value their time?

[00:17:49]How much do you value your time? You can ask 10 different people this question and get 10 different answers. Again, this is based on subjective feelings.

[00:17:56]So, Martisa must offer the other girls an opportunity that meets or exceeds this subjective value. At the very least, Martisa needs to offer them payment that they consider worth more their time than building their own lemonade stand and becoming a potential competitor. So when we look at the big picture, we can now see a huge error in the labor theory of value. They are assuming that costs and value must be intrinsically connected. But this is not always the case. The cost of something is the loss or penalty incurred especially in gaining something. While value can be understood as relative worth, utility or importance. This error in their reasoning can be further demonstrated by a simple question. What if Marisa found a way to cut cost by 50% while still providing the exact same product? Does the utility of her product also somehow change? Of course not. It's still the same gosh darn lemonade. This is one of the many reasons why the labor theory of value is rejected by most modern economists in favor of a subjective theory of value. The part about subjective time preference is doing a slippery thing. Mantis uses subjective value theory to explain wage formation. You know, workers value their time differently. Employers must meet that value. So wages reflect what people subjectively consider worth their time.

[00:19:06]This sounds like it's offering an alternative to Markx, but it's mostly restating what wages are in marginalist language without engaging with what Markx actually argued. Markx isn't saying wages are determined by some objective measurement separate from human decisions. He's saying that across the labor market as a whole, the wage tends toward the cost of reproducing labor power because of competition between workers, you know, who need jobs to survive, and between capitalists who can't pay above what's competitively necessary for long without losing to rivals. Things like individual variation, subjective preferences, and negotiation all happen on top of that systemic floor. Menus' account works fine for explaining why a let's say software engineer makes more than a barista. Yes, subjective valuation, skill scarcity, and market conditions all impact this. It doesn't explain why both of them on average and over time get paid roughly what it takes to live in their respective lifestyles in their respective locations. with rising productivity over centuries not translating into proportionally rising wages, but rather rising profits for owners. But now, let's get to the big fish of this section. What if Marissa found a way to cut costs by 50% while still providing the exact same product?

[00:20:33]This is genuinely a good question, but it doesn't hit MarkX where Mantis may think it hits him. Markx distinguishes between two different things from the very first chapter of volume one of capital. The use value, which is the usefulness of a thing and what it does for you. In the case of the lemonade, it quenches your thirst and tastes nice.

[00:20:54]And then exchange value, which is what it trades for in the market. In our case, $3. The labor theory of value is about exchange value, not use value.

[00:21:05]Markx never claimed that putting more labor into something makes it more useful. I know this is by far one of the most common straw men of him, but he explicitly says the opposite. For example, a pearl diver who spends a whole week finding a pearl hasn't made it more useful than a lucky diver who finds an identical pearl in just 5 minutes. The use value of the pearl is the same regardless of labor time. What labor time governs at least in theory is the long run exchange ratio between commodities in a competitive market. So when Menus asks does the utility change the Marxist answer is relatively straightforward? No, of course not. That was never the claim. Use value and exchange value are different things and the labor theory of value has only ever been about the second one. The question might be a slam dunk against a cartoon version of marks that an undergrad or social democrat may hold where labor theory of value just means that something is more valuable if more work is put into it. But against the actual marks within the pages of capital, it doesn't land as hard. Literally every response of mine in this video can be summarized as just no, Markx never said that. And I just find it hilarious.

[00:22:28]Value is complicated and relative to thousands of different variables.

[00:22:32]Socialists oversimplify this concept of value by fitting it all into work done by a laborer. And then they accuse the profit of companies generated from sub variables of being theft of some surplus in the value of said labor. Menus once more brings up the subjective theory of value and then shows a meme where an Among Us chicken nugget sold for 100k and that this apparently destroys the labor theory of value. First off, if I see anyone unironically using political compass memes, I will immediately think less of them as a human being. But Mantis made this in 2022, so I am willing to let it slide. And second of all, the chicken nugget being sold for that much money does not debunk the labor theory of value in any way. I already explained the use value/exchange value difference, but I'm going to quote Big M himself on this because he does bring up this exact scenario in the third chapter of volume 1 of Capital.

[00:23:31]Quote, things which in and for themselves are not commodities. Things such as conscience, honor, etc. can be offered for sale by their holders and thus acquire the form of commodities through their price. Hence a thing can formally speaking have a price without having a value. The expression of price is in this case imaginary like certain quantities in mathematics. On the other hand, the imaginary price form may also conceal a real value relation or one derived from it as for instance the price of uncultivated land which is without value because no human labor is objectified in it. To put this in normie terms, basically for marks, value and price are not the same thing. Value is the amount of average labor time it takes to produce something using normal tools, normal skills, and normal conditions for that society. Two identical codes made under the same average conditions have the same value, no matter what they happen to sell for on a given day. Value is about the long run pattern across a whole economy. Why do coats roughly cost what they do over time or why bread is cheaper than cars?

[00:24:51]Again, this is what the labor theory of value is designed to analyze. Stuff that can be made over and over by anyone with the right tools and skills, essentially commodities. While price is just the actual money something sells for in a particular sale. And just like Mantis Wave says, they are completely subjective. And Markx himself would mostly agree with that, except that the price is still anchored to some degree by value. Kind of like a dog on a leash.

[00:25:23]You will never see an ordinary loaf of bread costing $100 outside an economic crisis. And just because something has a price, it doesn't mean it has value. So, regarding the chicken nugget shaped like an amogas, it is by definition not reproducible. There is exactly one of it and its price is whatever some collector is willing to pay. And this goes for all kinds of unique objects and antiques where they have prices but don't fall under his theory. So, they are not commodities in the proper sense. Using this example to refute the labor theory of value is roughly like trying to refute the law of supply and demand by pointing to a single weird transaction someone made out of nostalgia. It's a special case the theory doesn't claim to cover, but is presented as if it disproves the theory's actual claims.

[00:26:16]Now, I am going to give you a better example that is a far more honest counter to the labor theory of value than a chicken nugget. namely a fine bottle of wine. So, the wine sells for $20 when it is first released. 10 years later, the exact same bottle sitting untouched in a seller sells for $200. A hundred years later, $2,000.

[00:26:43]Nobody has worked on it during that time. No additional grapes were added, nor any kind of additional labor. The bottle just sat on a shelf and chemical reactions happened inside it on their own. This is better than the chicken nugget example because the chicken nugget is a one-off oddity, an antique, so to say, while wine aging is systematic. There's a whole industry built on it. So, it then fits Marx's definition of a commodity. Now, here's the puzzle for Big Bushy Beard Man. The bottle's price has increased 10fold, then 100fold. But what about its value in Marx's technical sense? Value, again, according to him, is determined by socially necessary labor time. The labor time embodied in that bottle didn't increase because, you know, nobody worked on it, according to the theory.

[00:27:36]Therefore, the value should be the same as the day it was bottled. So, we have an enormous gap between value and price that doesn't close over time. It actually widens and it widens in a systematic predictable way. Older fine wine tends to be more expensive. Full stop. And everyone knows this. This case is different from ordinary supply and demand wobbling that the labor theory of value could give leeway for. Again, price can still be dynamic to some degree while leashed to the value. If the wine originally sold for $20, it would be plausible if it sold later for 50 or even 100. But $2,000 without the original value of the wine being tampered with in any way under ordinary conditions, yeah, that's a different story. So, while Marxists have to scramble to explain wine, subjective value theory handles it with no sweat at all. Consumers value aged wine more than young wine. That's it. Nothing really more to say there. So, if I was meant this wave, I would have used the wine example. Marxists could still potentially shoot back by saying that fine wine isn't a normal commodity, but it is still much more effective than the amogous chicken nugget. Therefore, the very concept of surplus labor value can actually be seen as an example of a personal increduly fallacy. Marxists fail to comprehend the complex nature of value and how it works in a subjective fashion. So they incorrectly conclude that it must somehow not be subjective and the profits generated from it are somehow a bad thing. The concept is thus nothing more than a phantom born from their confusion and lack of understanding. It doesn't exist. By breaking things down into lemonade stands, the concept of subjective value is easier to understand and see how the value in what Marisa is doing is fairly represented in the profits she is earning. I'm sorry, but this is just a wrong use of the term. Personal incredul is the fallacy of saying I can't imagine how X could be true so X must be false.

[00:29:40]Marx's argument for surplus value isn't anything like this. It's not I can't imagine how profit works without exploitation. Rather, it's an attempt at positive construction. Mark starts with a puzzle like how does money grow into more money through fair exchange. then proposes a mechanism like the unique property of labor power as a commodity and works out the implications across thousands of pages. You can think the argument fails, but it's not personal incredul because Marx is making a constructive theoretical claim here.

[00:30:15]Ironically, I would say meant this wave throughout this video is much closer to making the personal incredul fallacy than Marxist. Like he says here, Marxists fail to comprehend the complex nature of value and how it works in a subjective fashion. So they incorrectly conclude that it must somehow not be subjective, which in translation basically means I can't see or comprehend how anyone could think value isn't subjective, so they must be confused. And not just here, throughout the entire video, he keeps treating this agreement as confusion or stupidity. Oh, socialists are being tricked. Oh, they failed to comprehend. Look, I get it.

[00:30:56]It's an obvious rhetorical move in order to get people riled up. But I personally just really don't like it. Even when I really do not agree with and dislike someone like Markx, I still try to genuinely engage with his points and don't just see him as a bumbling idiot just because he begs Angles for rent money, which is still funny all things considered. Actually, I am going to go on a little side rant here because this is an issue I have absolutely been seeing in the field of philosophy and politics. Because people don't want to or are unable to engage with the actual writings and theories of prominent thinkers, they pick out one or more personal lifestyle habits of theirs that they disagree with or something else that happened to them and then attack them and dismiss their thoughts based off of that. because it's much simpler than engaging with their actual points.

[00:31:53]This is such a plebbeian low IQ tactic and it's a good filter in regards to deciding whether this person is worth genuinely conversing with or not. And boy, Markx is probably one of the worst victims of this. Again, as much as it is funny and enjoyable to see how he constantly begs angles for money in his letters, my own conscience doesn't allow me to use that as a weapon when analyzing and judging his actual ideas.

[00:32:23]And I think anyone with an IQ over 90 should feel the same. Let me know what you guys think in the comments. Anyway, side rant over. In general, I would say this has been a fun little exercise for me. Menus is not wrong for thinking the labor theory of value is inferior to the subjective theory of value on this point. I am totally with him again. I just think the critiques and points could have been better and that's what my video has been about. So it's not my conventional response video. I guess you could say it's not a commodity. This actually gives me an idea. So, I haven't managed to completely finish volume 1 of Capital. I am around 3/4 of the way through and I am planning on picking up volume two and three eventually as well.

[00:33:14]I am going to make it my task to finish all three by the end of the year. So, wish me luck on that. But when I do, I would be interested in making a very serious indepth video refuting the labor theory of value. I can already see it being over an hour long. So, if that is something you are genuinely interested in, leave me a comment down below and I will seriously consider fitting that into my schedule sometime next year.

[00:33:44]Who am I kidding? I don't even have a schedule.