Ok. I agree with the general sentiments of your post. Still, if human labour creates value, then there must be a minimum value to human labour, as it is impossible to fathom a human creating something of value without the creator himself (a basic input) being minimally valuable. Commoditization aims to seperate products from where they come from because it's more marketable that way. Thus, when one buys a meat product at the grocery store, the context from which that meat came is erased. One sees the product independent of the history of that product. It sells well. Yet, good apple trees produce good apples. Good theorizers produce good theories. One cannot say, "that is a valuable bushel of apples but the apple tree itself is valueless!" Even if one grants that the value of a bushel of apples stems from the cultivation of this fruit from human labour, there is going to be someone else who values the tree itself if it is absolutely scarce (say there are simply no trees quite as good). Further, in another scenario there could be a lumberjack who wants to cut down a tree and a treehugger who wants to conserve the tree. The treehugger sees intrinsic value in the tree and not from its cultivation but for its own sake. By saying that all value stems from scarcity, you see, one doesn't limit one's self to mere value created by labour--though I am in agreement that most value is created from labour. What makes labour valuable, it has been argued, is that there are competing uses of energy allocation in a time-constrained context. As such, there is an opportunity cost, and an opportunity cost expresses a basic relation between scarcity and choice. Thus, if one produces X and wishes to sell it it is not made valuable purely because of the labour that went into it, (though this is partially true), but deeper, the labour that went into it is valuable because of the competing uses of that labour (it could have been allocated into Y or Z, for example). Therefore, I still see scarcity as beneath the labour theory of value.
I see what you mean,and maybe a lot of our disagreement is semantic.
I realise we are getting off topic but it's an interesting discussion so why not:
For example if you read Marx, he would say a society can produce a lot of
wealth, but very little
value: a highly mechanised society, can require very little human labour to create a lot of wealth. Hence the recurrent crises of capitalism - a car company for example is forced to mechanise production ever more efficiently in order to comepte with his competitors and because of the fact that each unit produced represents a profit, so in order ot maximise profit, you maximise productivity. But the more mechanised production becomes, the less valuable the product, i.e. see how car prices have fallen over time.
A marxist analysis doesn't see htis fundamentally as down to supply and demand (though this can explain short-term fluctuations) but that he long term trend is down to the fact that fixed capital (i.e. machinery, which doesn't add any value but rather is only the expression of past value i.e. past-profit which was extracted from labour) is constantly increasing in relation to variable capital (i.e. human labour, that which valorises fixed capital via the process of production).
What Marxism argues ofr therefore is a society not based on the need to create value but rather which maximises mechanization of production allowing ever shorter working hours, more human
wealth, which can then be shared out by a society with ever more free time which can be devoted to intellectual or physical pursuits which both develop us as human beings and are socially useful, and higher living standards.
Now regarding the question "how could human labour create value when it has no value", I would say that human labour is human beings' ability to create value, that it is the source of all value...for example ina marxist analysis a society which lives largely from abundant natural wealth (as a lot of tribal societies in tropical areas did) creates very little value...for example eating coconuts that fall off a tree or drinking water from a river. But these society's may enjoy a lot more wealth than, say, a highland society which has to put in a great many labour hours just to reap some potatoes (my sweeping vulgarisation of human society notwithstanding).
The deeper issue there being, for example, that Marx argued with economists who argued that the source of profit came from the exchange process, i.e. mercantilism, whereby one country would exploit another by exporting expensive and importing cheap goods. While he didn't disagree that this happened, Marx rejected the idea that this could ever be the basis of the economic system, as it owuld make capitalism a zero sum game, because for all the profit generated in the imperialist countries, there would be equal loss in the colonies. Whereas in fact the global economy was growing hugely. So in this sense, the capitalist economy wouldn't have been able to grow internationally (i.e. the capitalists in competing imperialist countries and in the empires and their colonies all growing simultaneously) if wealth had come from just monopolizing pre-existing resources and then selling them.
Hence why this analysis of profit specifically derived from
exploitation, ultimately leads to seperating "wealth" and "value" as concepts.
Hope that made some sense.