[whatshisface]

You're right in that the further you get from "the labor theory of value" the better you do, like mixing a bowl of Doritos with a bowl of celery. Smith admitted a little bit of market valuation, and in doing so was a little bit better than completely wrong.

Quoting from your link,

>For the modern reader an alternative version of Smith’s calculation may seem more natural: the ‘labour commanded’ by a commodity represents the time you would have to work (say, at the average wage) in order to buy the commodity. In both cases – Smith’s version and the modern one – the calculation of labour commanded is the price of the item divided by some measure of the wage, usually an average.

Clearly, N hours of work at an average wage W is just a roundabout way of expressing a quantity of money NW, and from there Smith believed in market pricing.

[claudiawerner]

Smith's error (which turned him to "market pricing") was not recognising the dual character of labour, which is solved in the Marxian schema; capitalists purchase labour-power, which is a commodity with an exchange value (i.e the labour commanded by it is the amount required to reproduce it) of W and a use value (value in use) of concrete labour itself, which is the capacity to create value. Unlike Smith's idea, this is compatible with both varying value of money, varying wages (assuming there is something to vary the wages) and useful in explaining the role of profit.

On the whole, though, I dispute the notion that the LTV must be abandoned; you are already starting from the position that a bowl full of celery is a good thing, but I'd say that we'd do just fine with the Doritos, and the case for a bowl of celery lacks the explanatory power of the bowl of Doritos.