Thanks for the informative reply. I agree with you totally that having some
background on the economics of Marx's time is very helpful since the labor
theory of value hasn't been a part of mainstream economics since the 1880s.
My interest is the importance of dialectics in activity theory. Some
believe that word-meaning has the same theoretical status in Vygotsky's work
that the commodity does in Marx's and that both are 'concrete universals'
that can be analyzed using dialectical logic. Ilyenkov's name pops up
repeatedly in much of the activity theory literature I've seen and his major
work on dialectics presupposes some familiarity with the history of the
labor theory of value, especially in Ricardo. It sounds like the book might
be a good source for that background.
Take care,
Paul