1. The amount of time it takes me to type in, review and edit the response to the first question is labor, the laptop which I use is the means of production along with the charged battery and Internet connection. In short, labor is the amount of work that it takes to produce a commodity, it is measured in time. Means of production would be tools and ways to produce a commodity.
  2. Based on the video, a product’s value is the amount of labor that it takes to produce under normal circumstances. Therefore, the more labor (time) it takes to make a product, the more valuable it is. 
  3. There is a direct relation between labor and value – the more labor it takes to produce a commodity, the more valuable it is.
  4. The difference between labor and labor power is this: while labor power is a potential or a commodity that creates surplus value, the labor is the act of work itself. Let’s pretend that we are hiring a professional for an entry office position in advertising: their labor power consists of using multiple applications or software, but what they will do on a day-to-day basis, regardless of the software they used, is what we would call labor.
  5. Surplus value is defined as a product of capitalist exploitation – “it could be measured by ascertaining the ratio between the amount of time given to surplus labor and that to necessary labor”. What that means is that most workers spend at least a third of their day creating commodities that are “free” to a capitalist, since the expenses for labor have been covered by the worker’s necessary output in the first 3-4 hours of a workday. Surplus value, therefore, is an important measure in our studies of social class – if the means of production are owned by the capitalist class, if workers spend a big chunk of their workday working, technically, for free, then we can see how the toxic dependency on capitalism presents itself in the workplace.

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