If I make two bottles of wine today and I sell one in 10 years and the other in 20 years, the 20-year-old wine will fetch a higher price than the 10-year-old wine (all other things being equal). The same labor went into both bottles of wine, so the amount of the difference in price cannot be reduced to labor.

As regards to aged wine: it is false that "the same labor went into both bottles of wine," since the 20-year-old wine was stored 10 more years than the 10-year-old wine. Industrially storing wine entails a great deal of expense (means of production), which is reducible to labor. But furthermore, even if your assertion was correct, you would still have not proven that the difference in price was not reducible to labor. Surplus value is after all directly the result of the exploitation of labor. The worker is not paid as much as his labor is worth because he does not own the means of production and loses out on the power struggle which determined wages.

I appear to be barred from the main page of this debate. However, I want to make a general statement.

In his notes on my three arguments, David points out that each of these arguments can be disproven. But that is actually a point in my favor: if I was presenting unfalsifiable arguments, I would retract them immediately, since unfalsifiable statements are logically meaningless and thus improper for a debate.

> "[I]t is false that 'the same labor went into both bottles of wine,'
> since the 20-year-old wine was stored 10 more years than the
> 10-year-old wine."

Labor is required to place each bottle of wine into storage and labor is required to remove each bottle from storage, but no labor is required to keep a bottle in storage, thus the labor expended on each bottle of wine is the same. (Perhaps this is not how wine is stored industrially, but it is how I store wine in my example.)

> "Surplus value is after all directly the result of the exploitation
> of labor."

No exploitation occurred in my example: I made the wine, I put it in storage, I removed it from storage, and I sold it. If surplus value is the result of exploitation, and no exploitation occurred, then surplus value cannot account for the price difference.

> You would still have not proven that the difference in price was not
> reducible to labor.

The same exact labor was used to make both bottles of wine, so any difference in price cannot be reduced to labor.

P.S. My comments about the falsifiability of your arguments were not meant as an attack on you but rather as a criticism of Ill Logic's phrasing. I apologize for the confusion.

"No exploitation occurred in my example: I made the wine, I put it in storage, I removed it from storage, and I sold it. If surplus value is the result of exploitation, and no exploitation occurred, then surplus value cannot account for the price difference."

All right, I see what you mean here. I thought theories of values only applied to organized production. At least, LTV as formulated by Marx and Carson only apply to organized production, as I understand it.

Apart from that, I'd say you're wrong that "no exploitation occurred." Obviously the buyer was exploited. But maybe you meant something else.

"The same exact labor was used to make both bottles of wine, so any difference in price cannot be reduced to labor."

Well, the point I was making is that the source of the surplus was still your labor. It is the wine which you produced, as well as your labor in selling it, which engendered the profit.

"P.S. My comments about the falsifiability of your arguments were not meant as an attack on you but rather as a criticism of Ill Logic's phrasing. I apologize for the confusion."

I see. I am also confused. I am trying to clear this one up with Ill Logic.

> the buyer was exploited.

How? I do not force the difference in prices upon the buyers--the buyers each willing pay different prices at the different times. (For example, say both bottles of wine are sold at auctions with no minimal bid.)

> the source of the surplus was still your labor.

The labor used to make, store, and sell both bottles was the *same!* It can't be the source of the *difference!*

You seem to have a different definition of exploitation. I consider selling a commodity at a higher price than its exchange value to be exploitation and you don't. Either way, that part of the discussion is circular since it is predicated on our theories of value.

The surplus would be impossible without your labor, is what I am saying. Its origin is in the labor you spent to make the wine. The difference comes from your act of exploitation, or overpricing, or however you want to call it, towards the buyer. But you couldn't exploit/overprice if you hadn't labored to begin with, and likewise the buyer couldn't buy your wine without either his own labor or someone else's labor giving him the means to do so. This is what it means for surplus to be reducible to labor.

> The surplus would be impossible without your labor

I never said there was a surplus. Even if both bottles sold at auction for less than the total cost of raw materials plus capital (including tools) plus my socially-necessary labor, the older wine would still cost more than the younger wine.

Again, the exact same labor was used to make both bottles of wine, so any difference in price cannot be reduced to labor.

"I never said there was a surplus. Even if both bottles sold at auction for less than the total cost of raw materials plus capital (including tools) plus my socially-necessary labor, the older wine would still cost more than the younger wine."

Then the increase would be irrelevant. The only relevant fact, in this case, would be that you undersold. From my perspective, you must have undersold because you were on the losing side of a power struggle between buyers and sellers. No one willingly undersells himself, unless he intends thereby to gain the capacity to oversell in the long-term.

"Again, the exact same labor was used to make both bottles of wine, so any difference in price cannot be reduced to labor."

The difference in itself, no. But in both cases, every component of the price is reducible to labor. The fact that you undersold is not relevant to this principle.

I don't have any additional counter-arguments right now.