I never thought about this aspect of labor from like the view of preserving value, I always thought in a way when strikes happen for example, or like a crises, it was more like, capitalists being mad at the loss of future profits. not so much like that preservation of value side of stuff as well as like the profit stuff

He is unable to add new labour, to create new value, without at the same time preserving old values, and this, because the labour he adds must be of a specific useful kind; and he cannot do work of a useful kind, without employing products as the means of production of a new product, and thereby transferring their value to the new product. The property therefore which labour-power in action, living labour, possesses of preserving value, at the same time that it adds it, is a gift of Nature which costs the labourer nothing, but which is very advantageous to the capitalist inasmuch as it preserves the existing value of his capital. [4] So long as trade is good, the capitalist is too much absorbed in money-grubbing to take notice of this gratuitous gift of labour. A violent interruption of the labour-process by a crisis, makes him sensitively aware of it

rather like the foolish virgin who admitted that she had had a child, but only a very little one'.

I thought Crowley was being funny when he wrote in the early 20th century that "Even the smallest baby is incompatible with the virginity of its mother", but I guess it was a stock phrase going around.

The same holds good for every kind of refuse resulting from a labour process, where that refuse cannot be further employed as a means in the production of new and independent use-values. Such an employment of refuse can be seen in the large machine-building factories at Manchester, where mountains of iron turnings are carted away to the foundry in the evening, only to re-appear the next morning in the workshops as solid masses of iron.

lol, yeah we have a word for that now Granpa, we call that "recycling"

"The activity of labour-power, therefore, not only reproduces its own value, but produces value over and above this. This surplus-value is the difference between the value of the product and the value of the elements consumed in the formation of the product, in other words the means of production and the labour-power."

Marxism in a nutshell

Our capitalist stares in astonishment

What's it gotta be this time eh?

Edit: oh no...