[Discussion originally from http://eh.net/pipermail/hes/2006-June/006494.html HB] James Ahiakpor and Rod Hay are asking about Marx's theory of exploitation. For "all value derives from labor" you need to go the first sixty to eighty pages of Capital, where Marx talks about how all exchange value derives from labor time. (Use value, as Marx says, derives from the natural qualities of the object and the particular qualities of the labor involved in making it; exchange value derives from the quantity of abstract labor [time].) For "not given labor all of production amounts to exploitation," one place to go is Marx's Critique of the Gotha Program (published alone & in many readers, like The Marx-Engels Reader). There Marx criticizes the Gotha Program, written by Lasalle and his allies, for making that argument. Marx points out that, in order to have an on-going society that can reproduce and improve itself, some of production must go to replacing depreciation, some to education, etc., before the remaining production can be returned to the laborer directly. Peter G. Stillman