According to Marx, or perhaps not according to Marx, but according to the scholarship that has followed in the train of Marx’s theorizing, ‘labour’ determines the ‘exchange-value’ of commodities in a non-arbitrary manner. I admit at the outset that I have not finished reading Capital, Volume 1, something that I am in the middle of doing. I have therefore not yet come across anything in Capital, Vol.I – or anywhere else, for that matter – that I could point to and say that ‘this’ is an adequate demonstration of how ‘labour’ informs or determines the magnitude of all ‘exchange-values.’ Nevertheless, I feel that I have already read enough of Capital to be able to anticipate how Marx might demonstrate that influence and determination, despite a slew of other factors actually contributing to temporary price fluctuations away from a theoretically deduced ‘labour-determined’ mean to which ‘exchange-values’ will tend to revert or…
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