WS: I think the problem with the concept of value is that, to paraphrase Marx, repeat history but this time as a farce - specifically, the philosophical debate about the existence of the so-called universals. The crux of the debate is whether the so-called "universals" or "essences" that individual things share (and thus what defines them) exist in things themselves, or in the human mind that perceives them. The realist position, shared by Platonists and Aristotelians is that they exist in things themselves, the conceptualist position is that they exist as abstract concepts in human mind, whereas the nominalist position is that they exist merely in the language, as words without empirical meaning. The problem with this debate is that it is pure metaphysics - it depends solely on philosophical assumptions one makes and cannot be decided one way or another by empirical facts.
The concept of value unwittingly reintroduces that debate which had been passé since Kant. Equating value with price is tantamount to nominalism - i.e. it is a claim that value or "economic essence" of things is merely a function of the intercourse system in which they are used, but there is nothing intrinsicly valuable in things themselves. To illustrate it with an example, if people were paying money for bags of air sold on ebay - there would be a value changing hands but there would be no material "vector" of that value at all, and the value of the product would be created literally out of the thin air, but the exchange system alone - just like words and their meaning are created by verbal intercourse.
Marx, being a closet Aristotelian, assumed that economic essence i.e. value resides in things themselves - because only then it requires an explanation of its origins. The nominalist position does not require any explanations other than referring to pure convention - in fact seeking an "explanation" whether there is a causal relation between a name and what it denotes is an interesting philosophical speculation which nonetheless does not get very far (cf. Wittgenstein).
More importantly, taking the realist position on the notion of economic
value had certain political usefulness - it provided ontological grounds for
the notion of exploitation i.e. as something being taken unjustly away.
>From the nominalistic perspective, when workers get pennies for what they
produce, nothing is being taken away from them, they are merely not getting
in the system of exchange as much as they would hope to. The concept of
exploitation can still have currency, but it would require additional
ethical assumptions that would differentiate between just and unjust systems
of exchange.
By contrast, the concept of exploitation as taking something tangible away had a much stronger propagandistic value as well as the appeal to the feelings of the masses who were unable to comprehend more sophisticated aspects of ethical discourse. For them, if they felt wronged, and if that feeling was to be justified, it would need to be demonstrated in some ostensible and tangible way, e.g. as something of their being taken away from them. The same reasoning, btw, underlies many third-worldist ideologies which claim that the North is rich because it stole something tangible form the South.
So Marx faced an uneasy task of reconciling a primitive populist notion of exploitation which had political currency among its constituents, with a more sophisticated and more defensible notion that lacked that currency. LTV was a conceptual device (a problemshift as Lakatos would call it) that allowed marrying both. It retained the more concept of "exchange value" being a product of the system of exchange, and introduced the concept of "use value" which was embedded in the properties of the things themselves, and from there it maintained that the use value was that "something tangible that was stolen" even though the "exchange value' was ser by a more or less consensual process.
I think it was a very clever rhetorical trick that served the cause of labor well - but its usefulness expired when the labor was able to obtain better terms of employment, and the power struggle between labor and capital shifted to new dimensions. The realist notion of value i.e. is something embedded in things being exchanged rather than a mere product of the system of exchange is not tenable -as it can be easily demonstrated that that things whose material properties are indistinguishable from those of others things have nonetheless a greater value than those other things (which is what makes the fashion industry possible). The proposition that the rich are rich because they stole something tangible from the poor is silly and can be easily debunked. There are more effective and defensible ways of criticizing systems of exchange that produce gross inequalities or wasteful use of resources. So LTV should be but to the museum of human thought.
Wojtek