Article discreditng the thesis that Mao "killed millions of people" in The Great Leap

[FireIceTalon]

Then, I'd say there is the problem of valuing "design" itself. If you look as a pair of sneakers of today, or down hill racing skis, they are leaps and bounds better than those made in the 1960's. Does design have value? If the 1960's sneakers take more time to produce, are they more valuable even though they perform poorly compared to modern sneakers?

In this context, I would say design has value, though it is relative to time and space. Even though sneakers from the 1960's took more labor time to produce (assuming this is true) than modern sneakers, it doesn't necessarily make the former more valuable since socially necessary labor time must also be congruent with the best-available productive forces that are currently available in society .

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socially_n...abour_time

However, it ought to be said that by "socially necessary labour" Marx refers specifically to the total labour-time which on average is currently required to produce an output. It is this current labour cost which determines the value of output. So in a developed market Marx's exchange value refers to the average quantity of living labour which must be performed under currently prevailing conditions to produce a commodity. It is obvious that these conditions are incessantly changing, both in relation to quality of labour, quality of machinery, quality of distribution, and volumes of labour, machinery, sales in the branch, so estimating 'current' requirements is very much an exercise in approximation and dependent on the scales involved.

I would interpret the word "currently" to be of vital importance there. Obviously, the productive forces of today are more advanced in producing nearly all commodities than they were 50 years ago, and therefore the socially necessary labor time to produce like commodities now almost certainly differs from back then. So comparing them from different times would be apples and oranges, really.

So, water in a desert has the same value as water in a city by a lake?

After all, you don't produce water, it's just a thing you pipe out to places and exchange it.

Marx clearly distinguished between 'value' and 'use value'.

"Labor is not the source of all wealth. Nature is just as much a source of use values (and it is surely of such that material wealth consists!) as labor, which is itself only the manifestation of a force of nature, human labor power." [Marx, Critique of the Gotha Programme, 1875]

Water, obviously, as a resource occurring spontaneously in nature, has 'use value'. But that is a different thing from its actual value. 'Extracting the water, piping into places', and all the other processes of labor involved would be what gives it its value.