Smith And Ricardo's Labor Theory Of Value

What is the effect of the worker's alienated labor on its products, both on what they can do and what can be done with them? Smith and Ricardo used the labor theory of value to explain the Cost of commodities. For them, the value of any commodity is the result of the amount of labor time that went into its production. Marx took this explanation more or less for granted. His labor theory of value, however, is primarily concerned with the more basic problem of why goods have prices of any kind. Only in capitalism does the distribution of what is produced take place through the medium of markets and prices. In slave society, the slave owner takes by force what his slaves produce, returning to them only what he wishes. While in feudalism, the lord

Rather than a particular price, value stands for the whole set of conditions which are necessary for a commodity to have any price at all. It is in this sense that Marx calls value a product of capitalism. The ideal price ("exchange value") of a commodity and the ways in which it is meant to he used ("use value") likewise exhibit in their different ways the distinctive relationships Marx uncovered between workers and their activities, products and other people in capitalist

Through alienation, the relations between workers has been reduced to the quantity of labor that goes into their respective products. Only then can these products exchange for each other at a ratio which reflects these quantities. It is this which explains Smith's and Ricardo's finding that the value of a commodity is equal to the amount of labor time which has gone into its production. While in use value, the physical characteristics of commodities—planned obsolescence, the attention given to style over durability, the manufacture of individual and family as opposed to larger group units, etc.—give unmistakable evidence of the isolating and degraded quality of human relations found throughout capitalist