Marx quotes Proudhon's comment in which he criticises Say for noting that “labour”, as a commodity, has a value, and so it creates a “vicious circle” to treat it as the determining cause of value. But, it is quite right that using “labour(power)” the commodity, i.e. not labour, but labour-power, as that basis, does lead to to an inevitable contradiction and vicious circle, which is why Smith ended up in a dead end, and dropped the Labour Theory of Value. Ricardo pointed out Smith's error, but, because he never resolved the difference between labour and labour-power, he, also, never resolved the underlying contradiction.
Proudhon, also, does not resolve that contradiction, and says,
“Labour is said to have value not as a commodity itself, but in view of the values which it is supposed potentially to contain. The value of labour is a figurative expression, an anticipation of the cause for the effect.” (p 54)
As Marx notes,
“We have seen that M. Proudhon makes the value of labour the “determining cause” of the value of products to such an extent that for him wages, the official name for the “value of labour,” form the integral price of all things: that is why Say's objection troubles him.” (p 55)
Contrary to Proudhon, it is not “labour”(power) that produces new value, but labour as function/process, and is its measure. It is, likewise, not the value of labour-power, as a commodity, that produces use values. It is the use value of concrete labour that produces new use values, i.e. it is spinning labour that produces yarn, weaving labour that produces cloth.
“Labour, inasmuch as it is bought and sold, is a commodity like any other commodity, and has, in consequence, an exchange value. But the value of labour, or labour as a commodity, produces as little as the value of wheat, or wheat as a commodity, serves as food.” (p 55)
As stated earlier, Marx, himself, here, still had not made the terminological distinction between labour and labour-power, although all of his argument, here, is based upon that distinction between “labour” as commodity, i.e. labour-power, and labour as value creating process. He makes this terminological distinction, as a result of his further studies, as set out in Capital, and in an annotated version of the current work, presented to N. Utina, in 1876, Marx, indeed, added the words “labour-power” (la force du travail) after the use of “labour” in the above quote, and the same addition is made to the 1896 French edition.
Labour-power “has more or less value, according to whether food commodities are more or less dear, whether the supply and demand of hands exist to such or such a degree, etc., etc.” (p 56)
It is not a “vague thing”, as Proudhon claimed, but is always concrete labour, i.e. the labour-power of a weaver as against the labour-power of a carpenter, and so on, and this reflects the different, specific use values of these different types of labour-power.
Labour-power is bought as a commodity, and all commodities are bought because they have utility for the buyer. There is no utility in a wine producing capitalist buying the labour-power of a weaver. The logic of Proudhon's argument leads him to the conclusion that it is, then, the subsistence wage that is the natural price of “labour”, i.e. current labour-power, “that it is turning the wage minimum into the natural and normal price of immediate labour, that it is accepting the existing state of society. So, to get away from this fatal consequence, he faces about and asserts that labour is not a commodity, that it cannot have value. He forgets that he himself has taken the value of labour as a measure, he forgets that his whole system rests on labour as a commodity, on labour which is bartered, bought, sold, exchanged for produce, etc., on labour, in fact, which is an immediate source of income for the worker. He forgets everything.” (p 56)
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