1. The means of production, as I understand it, are in most cases privately owned under a capitalism. Farm equipment like a tractor is a means of production that can be owned by the owner of the farm, or it can even be owned by a leasing company that the employer pays. Labor is what give value to production and products. If you had a bunch of canvases, paint, and stencils, and just let them sit around, they would be only as worth as they labor to produce them. But, if you used those factors to make a nice piece of art, the labor you put in to make the art would be the value of it. Its price would be how much you, as the artist, would set it at.
  2. Karl Marx views value as not just a price, but the cost of how much labor was expended to produce a product. Something becomes valuable when labor is used to produce it. As stated in the video, a piece of wood is only wood unless you use labor to alter it into, say, a lamp stand. It now has the value of how much labor you put into producing the lamp stand.
  3. The relationship between labor and value is that labor produces value. The products that firms sell are only valuable because labor was used to create them. If there is no labor, firms would have no products to sell, and therefore, would have no valuable products to exchange for money to then make a profit.
  4. A person’s labor power is the value of labor they put into their job equal to what that person gets out from contributing their labor. The labor one puts into a job may exceed their labor power; this is especially so under capitalism. One’s labor power may be about 3 hours’ worth of one’s full workday. Whereas the labor they actually put into a full workday is 8 hours. They then create 5 more hours of their own excess value for the company.
  5. Surplus value is then the excess value of labor that one provides which is kept by the company. Taking into consideration the example I offered in answer #4, when a person provides an additional 5 hours of labor, that is surplus value being created. This surplus is then used by the company to help generate a profit.

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