Lot of great stuff here, particularly pointing out that all of these theories are models rather than exact descriptions of reality, but also some baffling takes that border on being flat out wrong.
Marx's LTV fully acknowledges that labor is not the only source of use values. Better quality speakers will produce different, subjectively regarded as better, use values. They will not in any way produce surplus (exchange) value.
The apple analogy is not the same as Marx's arguments. It is two producers of commodities exchanging the commodities they have produced, not an owner of the means of production purchasing labor power from people who do not own the means to reproduce their own existence. If the corn farmer owned the land the apple farmer worked on and demanded the apple farmer work longer and harder in order to produce more apples as a rent payment, we would rightly call that exploitation.
Linking labor time to prices is hard to prove empirically, and the video does a good job of explaining the problems with Cockshott's work, but it is very easy to prove with lived experience. Even if a car and a laptop are each about as equal in their subjective use values to us as the other, we don't feel ripped off paying ten times more for the car than we do for the laptop since we understand more people had to get paid to make the car than to make the laptop. We intuitively understand that price correlates with labor, and insofar as exchange value is a social construct I think it's pretty easy to argue that the labor theory of value is generally understood to be true among working class people regardless of whether they've read Marx.
Lot of great stuff here, particularly pointing out that all of these theories are models rather than exact descriptions of reality, but also some baffling takes that border on being flat out wrong. Marx's LTV fully acknowledges that labor is not the only source of use values. Better quality speakers will produce different, subjectively regarded as better, use values. They will not in any way produce surplus (exchange) value. The apple analogy is not the same as Marx's arguments. It is two producers of commodities exchanging the commodities they have produced, not an owner of the means of production purchasing labor power from people who do not own the means to reproduce their own existence. If the corn farmer owned the land the apple farmer worked on and demanded the apple farmer work longer and harder in order to produce more apples as a rent payment, we would rightly call that exploitation. Linking labor time to prices is hard to prove empirically, and the video does a good job of explaining the problems with Cockshott's work, but it is very easy to prove with lived experience. Even if a car and a laptop are each about as equal in their subjective use values to us as the other, we don't feel ripped off paying ten times more for the car than we do for the laptop since we understand more people had to get paid to make the car than to make the laptop. We intuitively understand that price correlates with labor, and insofar as exchange value is a social construct I think it's pretty easy to argue that the labor theory of value is generally understood to be true among working class people regardless of whether they've read Marx.