Roberts reverts back to that even Pre-Ricardian, let alone pre-Marxist position, of claiming that it is labour-power, that creates value, and so that the value of the commodity is determined by the value of the labour-power, of the wages of the labourer that determines the value of their product. He recoils from that conclusion, but can only do so, by leaving himself in a contradiction.
“In so far as it has the specifically social character of wage-labour, it is not value-creating. It has already been shown in general that wages of labour, or price of labour, is but an irrational expression for the value, or price of labour-power; and the specific social conditions, under which this labour-power is sold, have nothing to do with labour as a general agent in production.” (p 823)
This is true of labour under every mode of production, as Marx and Engels set out above. This value, created by labour, may take the form of an individual value inseparable from the use-value, in the case of a product, or may take the form of an exchange-value, in the case of a commodity, or it may take the form of a price of production, under capitalist production. The most obvious example of that, as described by Engels, in his Supplement to Capital III, is that, during the 10,000 years, prior to capitalist production, where commodities were produced and exchanged by independent commodity producers, the labour that produced those commodities was not wage-labour, and did not exchange with capital. But, it did clearly produce new value, and that was the basis of the exchange-value of the commodity, and of the exchange of commodities based upon their equal value!
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