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Mass_Driver comments on The Instrumental Value of Your Own Time - Less Wrong
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Your first point is a very old and well-analyzed one amongst Marxists, in the sense of time-as-labor, "time" being the usual approximate metric for the measure of labor. Indeed, depending on how one interprets your question, it may be that you independently stumbled upon one of the key points of Marxian analysis and the concept of surplus-value.
Perhaps with that qualification some Googling may serve as a productive use of your time.
No, no, I can't take credit. I've read The Marx-Engels Reader cover to cover, as well as some interesting neo-Marxist thoughts on time-as-labor by a guy named something-or-other Cohen.
In general, I think Marx was wrong -- his hypothesis about Life, the Universe, and Everything was just far too complex to have any serious chance of being wholly or even mostly correct, and history has been justly unkind to his predictions. As to the single point of time being a useful way to analyze labor, though, well, that's a much simpler idea, and has not been disproven, and has not received much attention lately.
That said, if you have specific suggestions for what I should Google, I'm all ears.
AFAIK, when economists want to truly measure how the price of a good has changed over time, they measure that price in terms of how much time one would have to work in order to purchase it. Matt Ridley does this through (the first 7 chapters that I've read of) The Rational Optimist
I'm not super familiar with Marxism, but I thought the key thesis about labor was the labor theory of value - picked up from Adam Smith and John Locke, among others. There are two versions of this theory - one is that the sole determinate of the price of a good (or at least the supply side for more sophisticated Marxists) is the amount of labor that went into it. The other is normative in nature, which says that people should be paid according to the amount of labor they put into their work.
Is my understanding of Marxism just wrong?
No, that sounds like a good summary to me. I think you probably have an excellent understanding of Marxism. :-)
Measuring how much time it takes to produce a commodity is a fascinating way of exploring history, but note that I'm not trying to measure the value of a product -- I'm trying to measure the value of my time. If you commoditize my labor, you might be able to calculate how much it has cost to reproduce my ability to toil in various ages of history, but I'm not trying to measure the value of my time to a capitalist facing a decentralized, bloated labor market -- I'm trying to measure the value of my time to me.
I see now. I took
To mean the labor theory of value point, not the more general point that time is a useful way to think about labor, at least for some things.