I have said previously that I did not read your article through. But that's because I find its premise to be false and its language, I believe consequentially, impenetrable. Thus, I reject the idea that there exists "a common property in all of these commodities which makes them actually able to be exchanged for one another." The only relevant feature that commodities share is their marginal utility.

The market does quantify marginal utility via the auction process. Market participants don't ask how much labor, or abstract labor, or whatever, when into the commodity. They ask only what they will have to forego to get it. How anything else can be thought to be a usefully common characteristic of commodities is beyond me, because it is beyond reality. Thus, you can easily dismiss "natural properties" for the same reason you can dismiss any other inherent feature of a thing for sale.

You quote someone (Marx?) to the effect that no chemist has ever discovered exchange value in precious stones. But who put the chemist in charge? Ostentation is a use of the things one shows off. Some people will forego the security of cash in the bank for the ostentation of owning a diamond. The utility of some scarce things as evidence of affluence is a use value (I think) from which its value in exchange arises.

Are you not struck by Marx's reference to the "mystical" nature of commodities and the "enigmatic" character of the product of labor? These are metaphysical fudge factors, economic phlogiston, wholly unnecessary to a proper marginalist understanding that auction value is the only value of any interest to economists.

Marginalists do indeed "dominate" economics today, long after Marx has come and gone and his writings have been plucked for whatever use they have. Marginalists dominate economics because they are right, and Marx was wrong. But then, Marx had a political agenda, betterment of the lot of screwed-over workers. I don't blame him for trying to create a theology in support of his worthwhile agenda. But I don't have to take that theology seriously. either.