What does the labour theory of value say?
The vast majority of things that we make and use are known as commodities. They must have both a use value and an exchange value. To have a use value means they satisfy the needs of at least a section of society i.e. have a use! To have an exchange value that can be compared to the values of all other products i.e. what it can be exchanged for! Of course, different commodities have different exchange values, e.g. I’d need to exchange a lot of bread in order to buy a computer. How do we determine how ‘expensive’ a commodity is then? Marx determined that the price of a commodity is proportional to the amount of labour used to make it by someone with skills average to the rest of the workforce. That is the amount of time taken to transform raw materials in to the product on the shelf. When you see all commodities, everything that we buy and use from food and clothing to iPods and barbies, it becomes obvious that it is the working class who run society produce all the things we consume. Wh
