> Isn't the Marxist conception of this based on exchange
> of labor time?
> In
> other words, if you were willing to exchange what you
> made during your
> time painting with whatever someone else was doing
> during their time
> working, then this is the basis of the economy now,
That was Ricardo if memory serves, Marx simply adopted the concept because it suited his claim that only labor (not capital) is the producer of value. Of course that statement may only be true in a labor-intensive economy where different jobs are relatively homogenous e.g. making a table takes about as much skill and effort (albeit of a different kind) as say making an iron plow.
Things get a bit more complicated where you have capital-intensive and labor-intensive industries operating side by side e.g. hospital care and computer mfg. A claim that an hour of a surgeon's and an assembler's work produces a more or less equal value is ludicrous on its face.
Wojtek