There is one natural law that for Marx drives everything, and that is The Law of Value. It manifests itself differently in each mode of production. The subjectivists, however, take just one of these manifestations – that which occurs under capitalism – and turn it into a natural law. If we take Marx's examples of The Law of Value, in Capital I, of Robinson Crusoe, the primitive commune, and individual peasant household, we see one manifestation of The Law of Value. In each of these cases, value is expressed and measured directly by labour-time. In each case the value is individual value, as opposed to market value. That is it is the value as determined by the actual labour embodied in the production of these different social units, as opposed to a social or market value, which is an average value determined by aggregating the individual values of all producers for products sent to market as commodities. Neither Robinson, nor any of the others have to express the value of their products as a price. A price would be meaningless, because it is only the exchange-value of a product/commodity expressed in money. But no such exchanges occur. The only such relation for Robinson is that expressed in The Law of Value itself, that, with a given amount of labour-time, whatever labour he expends in one activity means that he gives up the production of some other use value. He exchanges the possibility of a certain amount of use value in one form for that in another. But, he does not require price or exchange-value to determine this. He can calculate values directly in terms of labour-time, and allocate his time accordingly. And, as Marx and Engels say, it is this form of The Law of Value, whereby values are measured directly in labour-time, that will apply under communism.
Nor does Robinson consider his labour as some kind of specific labour, such as slave labour, corvee labour, peasant labour or wage labour, all of which are merely historically determined forms of labour, and, thereby, ephemeral and specific to different socioeconomic formations. He simply considers his labour as generic labour, labour in the abstract, and that again is how a communist society will measure labour in determining the value of its output. Similarly, Robinson, the peasant household etc. do not consider the portion of their labour required to reproduce their labour-power, as wages, because wages are an historically determined phenomenon that only arises when labour-power itself is sold as a commodity. For Adam Smith, wage labour is labour, and the value of the product of labour should then equals wages, but he sees that is not the case, and so wrongly concludes that The Law of Value no longer applies, and that the price of labour and capital is determined by competition, the price of labour (wages) being low because its plentiful, the price of capital (profits) being high because its scarce. Ricardo disagrees about The Law of Value not applying, but can't explain this difference between wages and the value of the product of labour, because, like Smith, he fails to distinguish between labour and labour-power, and so fails to distinguish that what is specific about the form of labour under capitalism is that labour-power itself is sold as a commodity.
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