is in some way connected with the measure of the exchangeable
value of the commodities.

Stated in the simple, crude form, that the quantity of human labor
crystallized in them is the basis and measure of the value of
commodities when exchanged against one another, the labor theory of
value is beautifully simple. At least, the formula is simplicity itself.
At the same time, it is open to certain very obvious criticisms. It
would be absurd to contend that the day's labor of a coolie laborer is
equal in productivity to the day's labor of a highly skilled mechanic,
or that the day's labor of an incompetent workman is of equal value to
that of the most proficient. To refute such a theory is as beautifully
simple as the theory itself. In all seriousness, arguments such as these
are constantly used against the Marxian theory of value, notwithstanding
that they do not possess the slightest relation to it. Marxism is very
frequently "refuted" by those who do not trouble themselves to
understand it.

The idea that the quantity of labor embodied in them is the determinant
of the value of commodities was held by practically all the great
economists. Sir William Petty, for example, in a celebrated passage,
says of the exchange-value of corn: "If a man can bring to London an
ounce of silver out of the earth in Peru in the same time that he can
produce a bushel of corn, then one is the natural price of the other;
now, if by reason of new and more easy mines a man can get two ounces of
silver as easily as formerly he did one, then the corn will be as cheap
at ten shillings a bushel as it was before at five shillings a bushel,
_caeteris paribus_."[166]

Adam Smith, following Petty's lead, says: "The real price of everything,
what everything really costs to the man who wants to acquire it, is the
toil and trouble of acquiring it. What everything is really worth to the
man who has acquired it, and who wants to dispose of it or exchange it
for something else, is the toil and labor which it can save to himself,
and which it can impose on other people.... Labor was the first price,
the original purchase money, that was paid for all things.... If among a
nation of hunters, for example, it usually costs twice the labor to kill
a beaver which it does to kill a deer, one beaver would naturally be
worth or exchange for two deer. It is natural that what is usually the
produce of two days' or two hours' labor, should be worth double of what
is