looking at something from the perspective of what people are willing to pay or even it's "use value" is to exclude the item's design and how and why it came to be. items today are designed for exchange value rather than use value, so value cannot be discerned based on behavior among commodities we have now (the uniformity required for such a thing simply doesn't occur in really existing capitalism so the notion is a joke). the conundrum is not what is market value, because markets are a human invention and an example of behavior not economic process. rather the conundrum is: do commodities today actually contain the value they are attributed in a market environment? modern economics, still in rudimentary form has been entombed within plutocratic social engineering. because of this there are only a few things we know about value 1. value is tangible. 2. value can be measured. (eg-1 gallon of fuel, 1 pair of shoes etc.) 3. value is based on a usable resource or building material (oil, plastics, brick, metals, food, water, etc) 4. value can be analogical of fuel as economics is metabolic. (ie-nothing happens without the required resources and effort required). 5. value has a consistent production cost that coincides with physical resources and effort required to realize the final usable material or item. 6. surplus value/net income/profit only occurs when something is sold above production cost (or when production cost is artificially reduced as with devaluing labor). 7. surplus value/net income/profit is not new or "additional" value. i believe the answer is that commodities today aren't designed to contain value, rather instead they are designed to contain as little value as possible. to allow as much "value" attributed to them within a market environment to be translated into profit for owners of capital.
