Proudhon confuses labour with labour-power, and so confuses the determination of the value of commodities by the labour-time required for their production, with the determination of their value by wages, i.e. by the value of labour-power. Labour-power is a commodity, like corn or hats, and so it makes no more sense to try to determine the value of some other commodity by the value of labour-power, than it would to determine it by the value of corn or hats, though Adam Smith did, also, attempt to use corn in that manner.
Labour, as opposed to labour-power, is not a commodity, but is, itself, the value creating process, the essence and measure of value. That is why, as Marx's later analysis showed, it is meaningless to talk of the value of labour, as against the value of labour-power, because labour, itself, has no value. It would be like asking what is the value of value?!
“Thus it is going against economic facts to determine the relative value of commodities by the value of labour. It is moving in a vicious circle, it is to determine relative value by a relative value which itself needs to be determined.
It is beyond doubt that M. Proudhon confuses the two measures, measure by the labour time needed for the production of a commodity and measure by the value of the labour. “Any man's labour,” he says, “can buy the value it represents.” Thus, according to him, a certain quantity of labour embodied in a product is equivalent to the worker's payment, that is, to the value of labour. It is the same reasoning that makes him confuse cost of production with wages.” (p 53)
Adam Smith also makes the error of sometimes measuring the value of commodities by labour-time and sometimes by wages.
“Ricardo exposes this error by showing clearly the disparity of these two ways of measuring. M. Proudhon goes one better than Adam Smith in error by identifying the two things which the latter had merely put in juxtaposition.” (p 54)
Proudhon's aim is to arrive at a proper proportion in which workers should share out the total product of their labour. He needs to do this, as will be seen later, as the basis of his petty-bourgeois schema for “labour-notes”.
“To find out the measure for the relative value of commodities he can think of nothing better than to give as the equivalent of a certain quantity of labour the sum total of the products it has created, which is as good as supposing that the whole of society consists merely of workers who receive their own produce as wages. In the second place, he takes for granted the equivalence of the working days of different workers. In short, he seeks the measure of the relative value of commodities in order to arrive at equal payment for the workers, and he takes the equality of wages as an already established fact, in order to go off on the search for the relative value of commodities.” (p 54)
What is wrong with this has already been elaborated in Engels' Preface, and is also set out by Marx in The Critique of the Gotha Programme. Not all labour is productive of value; labour is not equal, but comprises simple and complex; not all labour is socially necessary; not all products are consumption goods/revenue; not all production can be consumed by workers, because a) some must cover insurance funds for accidents, where capital is destroyed, b) some must be set aside as social funds for young, old and sick members of society, c) some must be set aside for capital accumulation.
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