ABSTRACT
Marx argues that classical political economists such as Samuel Bailey (1791–1870), Edward Gibbon Wakefield (1796–1862), Jean Charles Léonard de Sismondi (1773–1842), and Jean-Baptiste Say (1767–1832) spoke of the “value of labour” and the “price of labour”. This terminology is “imaginary” (677), “uncritical” (679), and “irrational” (679):
It is not labour which directly confronts the possessor of money on the commodity-market, but rather the worker. What the worker is selling is his labour-power. As soon as his labour actually begins, it has already ceased to belong to him; it can therefore no longer be sold by him. Labour is the substance, and the immanent measure of value, but it has no value itself. (677)
