There is no value without labor. This was recognized by everyone from Karl Marx to Abraham Lincoln to Adam Smith. Smith even conceded that profit was impossible if workers retain their surplus value, which is exactly the point. I bring this up because that's what capitalism is: draining the surplus labor value from workers to the capital-owning class. In feudalism, the artistocracy and th emonarchy extracted that val…
Plausible.
But there is very little value without tools. In fact, one could argue that all material progress has been in the form of better and better tools. One person with a combine beats 100 people with sickles.
Those tools are necessary for almost all of the value that labor produces.
So if we want those tools, in the real world we need to pay the producer of those tools. (Or make them ourselves, which is possible, but runs into division-of-labor issues.) The people who manufacture combines aren't a charity; they want to receive the value of their work too.
And unless the farmer (or custom cutter) has the money to buy the combine, then there's a third party in the situation - the capitalist, the person who provides the money to buy the tools that will give the increased productivity. That person usually isn't a charity, either. They need to get some return on their money.
But the place where I at least partly agree is this: The worker who knows how to use the tools is deserves at least part of the value provided by using the tool. The tool-maker deserves part of the value; the capitalist deserves part of the value; and the worker also deserves part of the value. (If you don't like the word "deserves", well, without all three parties, the value isn't produced, and none of the three are charities, so if we want the value, we need to give them part of the returns.)
And currently, you can make a very solid case that the worker is getting the short end of the stick. I can't buy "the worker deserves it all". No, the worker does not. But I can agree that workers deserve more than they're getting.
(In the cases where the workers either make their own tools or have the money to buy them, this argument breaks down. But in an industrialized society, that seems to be the exception, not the rule.)