The total automation example is just meant as a logical exercise, a sort of ridiculous indication of why unpaid labor time may not be the cause of profit/rent/interest. I just included it because I had it at hand and it seemed impolite to talk about a theory on a public list without giving any indication of what it is. Wanted to do more than just throw around names.
As you must know, one can certainly build examples with direct labor still employed and still say that profits and prices can (or even must) be determined without reference to labor values (though there is a question whether a technical conditions approach should be allowed data on the abstract direct labor hours required for each industry--how are various kinds of concrete labor abstracted into qualitatively identical hours before and through the actual commensuration in exchange, ask the followers of II Rubin and Alfredo Saad Filho in the highly recommended Value of Marx http://www.socialistworker.co.uk/article.php?article_id=6598).
Just not yet clear on what your criticism is. All I am getting is the sense that you want to fly high above the theoretical debate, and I am interested in what you have to say about the strongest versions of Sraffa or Samuelson or Steedman or Hodgson beyond whose views you say Justin has not advanced.
I'm also not sure what all the mark up talk of others is supposed to prove.
If certain brands enjoy mark ups, this does not increase surplus value for capital as a whole; it is only redistributes it unevenly.
If there are brands that escape commodity pressure, this is surely not true of most commodities.
Whether Walmart or Bloomingdale's achieves a kind of hybrid monopsony/putting out system towards industrial capitals abroad and succeeds in redistributing to itself most of the surplus value does not seem to me to speak against the labor theory of value.
I couldn't follow what the break down of costs was supposed to prove. Why the wage differentials or differentials in value added along the chain? Please explain
Truly interested in your views.
Rakesh