This is not clear at all. Elaborate, please.

All you need for commodity exchange is for people to accept something is yours and be willing to exchange something they own which you desire in return for it. That thing being a product of labor is not necessary. You can own land based on agreement without taking any trouble to cultivate or defend it, and exchange it for other things based on agreement. You can exchange naturally occurring things without rendering them ~crystallizations of social labor.

Marx’s argument is invalid in another way because there are so many qualities commodities share besides being products of labor.

Now, I know that the law of value is supposed to come specifically with highly developed industrial society with large scale social production which makes the abstract real etc etc however the issue is that this then messes with Marx’s argument I went over in the prev comment where he tries to prove the LTV by going over the concept of commodities/commodity exchange as such without regard for this.

Arguments like the “mud pie” don’t apply, because mud pies are neither useful nor difficult to make.

The argument only doesn’t apply for the first reason. There’s no necessity even for Marx that commodities be arbitrarily “difficult” to produce.

Incorrect, the exchange-value that price fluctuates around is representative of the value in a commodity.

How is this a response to what I said?

Another way to look at it is that the value of a commodity is the sum of its inputs, which can be reduced to labor and natural resources.

This is both incorrect (for Marx, value is entirely determined by socially necessary labor time) and doesn’t mean anything (this is like multiplying 3 apples by 7 pears, what does it mean that the value of a commodity can be reduced to labor and natural resources?; with value being determined by labor time you can reduce things to a certain quantity, but then you just add on a qualitatively different thing and you return to the original problem of needing a third equivalent, or a value to unite the components of value).

Marx is correct, though this is no mystery.

You forgot to explain how this actually occurs. You just say that capitalism does it.

What’s universal to goods bought and sold is that they require natural resources and human labor to create them.

You should tell Marx this since he expressly says that he thinks the only universal is labor. You both happen to be wrong, though.

What would an intelligent person, by your estimation, take fault with in Marx[‘s Capital]?

Capital rests on the argument ~that the fact qualitatively different (in terms of use values) commodities are exchanged for each other in different quantities requires a quality they share in common which only differs in quantity from one commodity to the next, and Marx posits that the only quality this could be is being products of labor. Yet this is very clearly not something that all commodities have in common, and that a thing’s status as a commodity and its ability to be exchanged for other commodities has nothing to do with its being a product of labor. The only way Marx’s argument can be accepted is if you start with the presupposition that commodities are valued by the labor required to produce them.

How this happens that commodities are exchanged at their “value” is a complete mystery by the way, since Marx says it has nothing to do with the conscious considerations of either the buyer or the seller.