[β) Confusion with Regard to Profit and the Value of Labour]
Bailey is able to attack Ricardo's theory of value, because he fails to distinguish between labour and labour-power. So, Bailey, correctly, says,
““Hence Mr. Ricardo, ingeniously enough, avoids a difficulty, which, on a first view, threatens to encumber his doctrine, that value depends on the quantity of labour employed in production. If this principle is rigidly adhered to, it follows, that the value of labour depends on the quantity of labour employed in producing it—which is evidently absurd. By a dexterous turn, therefore, Mr. Ricardo makes the value of labour depend on the quantity of labour required to produce wages, or, to give him the benefit of his own language, he maintains, that the value of labour is to be estimated by the quantity of labour required to produce wages, by which he means, the quantity of labour required to produce the money or commodities given to the labourer. This is similar to saying, that the value of cloth is to be estimated, not by the quantity of labour bestowed on its production, but by the quantity of labour bestowed on the production of the silver for which the cloth is exchanged” (op. cit., pp. 50-51).” (p 148)
But, Bailey's criticism of Ricardo, here, is no different to every other critique of the theory of value of Ricardo and Smith, which fails to make this distinction between the commodity labour-power, which is bought by the capitalist, in exchange for wages, in the same way they buy other commodities used as productive-capital, and labour, which is what is performed by the worker, and which is the essence and measure of value. Where Ricardo errs is to place the worker and the capitalist in the position of commodity owners and producers. He assumes that what the capitalist buys from the worker is labour itself, whereas what the capitalist buys from the worker is not labour, or the product of labour, but labour-power, the capacity of the worker to perform labour, in just the same way as if they buy a machine, they do not buy the work the machine does, but only the use value of the machine, i.e. its capacity to do work. Where the labourer differs from the machine is that the use value of the machine is only to do work, whereas the use value of the labourer, their-labour-power, is the ability to undertake labour itself, the capacity to create new value.
If I employ a chef to cook my meals, what I buy is not the chef's labour-power, but their labour-service, or the product of their labour, manifest in the lamb chops I get for my dinner. Setting aside the value of the meat etc., if the chef works for 4 hours, what I pay for is 4 hours of their labour-time, and I hand over money that has an equal value to four hours of labour. Here, the commodity that the chef sells is the product of their labour, just as if it was the labour of a tailor who produced a pair of trousers that I bought from his shop. I act here as merely a consumer, who buys a commodity (4 hours labour-service in cooking lamb chops) and gives in exchange for it an equal amount of value, represented by an amount of money. But, what a capitalist buys, when they exchange wages for wage-labour, is not labour, or the product of labour, but labour-power. The capitalist does not buy 8 hours of labour from the worker, or the product of that 8 hours, but buys the capacity of the worker to work for 8 hours, and these are clearly two different things, as in fact, Smith had already demonstrated, but failed to pursue.
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