theory

Similar excerpt from Value, Price, and Profit (basically a cliff notes version of Capital):

Now, this concept of an ideal price was not innovated by Marx. Adam Smith (regarded by Marx as one of the two great political economists, along with David Ricardo, in Capital chapter 1 footnote 33) thought of this as well and called it natural price.

In fact, Marx was not even the first to come up with a labor theory of value. Adam Smith, a man held in esteem today by modern bourgeois economists, actually himself based his theory on a labor theory of value.

Capital is Marx’s original ideas posed as a critique of political economy (hence the subtitle). So he took these ideas that had already been put forward by Smith, Ricardo, and others, and carried them out systematically to their conclusion, in some aspects more consistently than the original authors.

A flaw in Adam Smith’s theory of labor is the mud pie argument so often thrown at Marx, when really Marx made the theoretical advancement that overcomes it. Smith did not determine what kind of labor creates value and hence counts as social labor. So, someone who makes something socially useless, like mud pies, all day could earn an income in Smith’s model.

What distinguishes Marx’s labor theory from earlier theories is in his recognition of the dual character of labor^1^, that a singular act of labor is regarded in two different ways in the real practice of capitalism. On one hand, concrete labor produces use values, but on the other hand, abstract labor produces value. Throughout capital, concrete ≈ natural/physical, and abstract ≈ social. All societies produce use values, but only in the capitalist epoch does society behave as though these use values have a distinct property called value, due to being commodities.

That's what tracks according to what was already laid out in these first two sections, and according to what I've heard from others, but it still confuses me to think that the actual quality of something does not affect its price.

I mean, surely if two of the exact same thing were made in the exact same timespan, but the one was made in a sweatshop while the other was made in a factory with good conditions and pay, then the latter would be more expensive, right?...

...

...Oh, the latter would just be overpriced, wouldn't it?

This year has an extra day, so you have less work to do each day.

It is, but to the folks who may have trouble comprehending everything on the first pass (I expect to be one!), it may help to at least read it all so you have the basics in your head, then count on the discussions to help the rest fall into place. That's been my experience with reading groups.