Labor Theory of Value

11/10/21  PJMedia:

Asao B. Inoue is a professor of Rhetoric & Composition at ASU and he is urging his fellow (xello?) teachers to fight “white language supremacy” by implementing “labor-based grading” which “redistributes power in ways that allow for more diverse habits of language to circulate.”

The problem is this: “White language supremacy in writing classrooms is due to the uneven and diverse linguistic legacies that everyone inherits, and the racialized white discourses that are used as standards, which give privilege to those students who embody those habits of white language already.”

As the article explains this is based on Marx's "labor theory of value."  All real value comes from the labor, not from capital invested, or competence of the work.  One example that should demolish this theory of a trust fund baby.

2. Two people are placed before a PC with a C++ compiler and three mugs of coffee*.  One produces a program that calculates loan payments; the other spends twice as long to produce nothing.  Clearly the value of the second worker's effort is worth twice as much as the guy who creates a useful program.

*: Because a software engineer is a device for converting coffee into code.