The labour theory of value must be distinguished from Marx’s value-form analysis

Evidence

The discussion of the four stages of value in Capital should also be distinguished from the “construction” of the so-called labor theory of value, which, following Adam Smith, identifies the value of a produced commodity in the amount of labor time it contains. Whether this theory entails or amounts to an anthropology (in the sense in which Althusser or DeMan himself might denounce that) is a very interesting question; but the matter of production is the other face, or the other dimension, of the phenomenon of the “value form” that concerns us here; it grounds the market and exchange and culminates in the emergence of that peculiar thing called money. — Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic…, 514

Categorization

• DEFINE: Jameson distinguishes the labor theory of value (an anthropology of production) from the value-form analysis that concerns him — foundational distinction for the book’s economic-aesthetic argument.
• XREF: Connects to Milgrom’s and Shapiro’s work on exchange value and legal-economic institutions already in the knowledge base. — connects to: Distinguishing labour-capacity from labour resolves the wage contradiction Marx inherited — Dirk Braunstein, Adorno’s Critique of Political Economy, 1359; Marx’s critique of classical economics targets the form, not the content — Fredric Jameson, Marxism and Form, 374; The labor theory of value cannot be refuted as a price-deduction calculus. — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1102