>
> > 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.
They are exchanging their labor time, but not necessarily equal amounts of labor time. Marx (or perhaps one of the people Marx cribbed from) said that within a trade, if two people have the same type of capital, and one is twice as productive as another, or produces twice the amount of commodities, their labor time is twice as valuable as the others.
As far as inter-trade exchange, one of the point's is the markets tendency to equilibrium. If I am trying to exchange my labor time time for someone who grows vegetables, and the exchange for 1 hour of their time would either be 1000 hours of me writing articles for In These Times, or 1 hour of me manufacturing furniture, the tendency will be for people to work in manufacturing furniture as opposed to writing for In These Times. If people can spend less time to exchange for things they want, they usually will. Of course, some of the time embedded in being a doctor is the training that is unneeded in an unskilled job. There is no shortage of doctors in the USA, there may even be a slight oversupply, which tends to support this idea.
-- Lance