Labor is the commodity whose surplus value is expropriated and realized through market exchange

Evidence

Capitalism is a system of commodity production, centred upon the relation between private ownership of capital and propertyless wage labour, this relation forming the main axis of a class system. Capitalist enterprise depends upon production for competitive markets, prices being signals for investors, producers, and consumers alike. — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 150 (#expands, via linked claim)

Through exchange, economic process and economic values emerge simultaneously, because exchange is what sustains or produces the distance between subject and object which transmutes the subjective state of feeling into objective valuation. — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 250 (#complicates, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: The exchange sphere’s apparent equality masks the extraction of surplus in production.; Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production; Market relations are real yet structurally unable to express the underlying social labor (+22 more)

Related

• Exchange itself, not utility or scarcity, creates economic value. (similarity 0.86)
• Labor power only becomes a value through the possibility of exchange. (similarity 0.86)
• Competition drives price toward exchange value determined by embedded labour (similarity 0.85)
• Exchange value is measured by what a commodity trades for, not by its price (similarity 0.85)
• Capitalist profit arises even when all goods exchange at fair value (similarity 0.83)
• Capitalism’s defining move is abstracting exchange value from ordinary life processes (similarity 0.83)
• Labour-power is the sole commodity whose use-value is the creation of value itself (similarity 0.83)
• Profit arises from labour’s dual commodity-and-experiential nature. (similarity 0.82)
• The wage only imperfectly reflects the exchange value of labour power (similarity 0.82)
• Exchange creates value as genuinely as production does. (similarity 0.82)
• Exchange value triumphed because it alone can compound into more capital (similarity 0.82)
• Capitalist-worker exchange is formally equal but substantively unequal (similarity 0.82)
• Commodity fetishism presents social labour relations as properties of things (similarity 0.82)
• Formal market equality between buyer and seller masks exploitation inside the enterprise. (similarity 0.82)
• Surplus-value emerges where equivalent exchange opens a gap over reproduction costs (similarity 0.82)

Broader Connections

• Capitalism is defined by private capital, propertyless wage labour, and competitive markets #expands (0.80) — Anthony Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity, 150
• Economic value emerges through the distance exchange creates between self and object #complicates (0.72) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 250
• Market relations are real yet structurally unable to express the underlying social labor #expands (0.70)
• Market ideology conceals exploitation by making exchange stand in for production #corroborates (0.60)
• Production and exchange form a unity of the diverse, not an identical unity #qualifies (0.55)
• The sphere of exchange generates capitalism’s spontaneous commonsense and bourgeois theory #expands (0.55)
• Ideological forms like wages serve to maintain capitalist domination #expands (0.50) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 903