> I really don’t understand why you started talking about rent when we were
> first trying to figure out what value is and its relation to price.
>
rents, in this case, are a technical term tied not to the fee for using someone else's real property but to added costs or savings tied to market advantages tied to phenomena like location relative to markets, innovation relative to industrial sectors, etc... they have strong impacts on price but are not elements of value within the labor theory of value.
>
> I am not sure what Marx or you are saying. But from my surrealist social
> justice perspective I consider it rather astonishing that a natural
> substance mined in horrendous conditions by degraded and abused workers
> actually ascended to the heavens of the marketplace to become the God with
> which everything else had to request humbly an exchange. So I would
> juxtapose this image with this verse to show absurdity of bourgeois life,
> the voracious exploitation of those who brought to the market a thing of
> infinite power, the sacrifice of life and the enthroning of a thing.
>
> In addition to Joanna's excellent link, this, fairly short, passage from
Capital lays out Marx's understanding of fetishism and - and I didn't
anticipate this - also lays out one of the ways he links particular/specific
labor processes and exchanges which will partially address your connection
about the relation between particular exchanges and the structural dynamics
of capitalism.
Off to teach...