Value-form

The value-form or form of value (German: Wertform)[1] is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy and in Marxist theory.[2] It refers to the social form of a commodity (any product traded in markets) as a symbol of value, which contrasts with its physical features, as a product which can satisfy some human need.[3] The physical appearance of a commodity is directly observable, but the meaning of its social form is not.[4] Marx seeks to provide a brief morphology of the category of economic value as such, with regard to its substance, the forms which this substance takes, and how its magnitude is determined or expressed. He analyzes the forms of value in the first instance by considering the meaning of the value-relationship that exists between two quantities of commodities. Marx calls the commodity form, as a basic form of value, "the economic cell-form of bourgeois society", meaning it is the simplest economic unit out of which the "body" of capitalist civilization was developed and built up, across six centuries.[5] The capitalist mode of production is viewed as "generalized" (or universalized) commodity production, i.e. the production of commodities by means of commodities.[6]

The "forms of value" of commodities are only the first of a series of social forms which Marx analyzes in Das Kapital, such as the forms of money, the forms of capital, the forms of wages, and the forms of profit.[7] In his dialectical story, each of these forms is shown to grow out of (or "transform" into)[8] other forms, and so all the forms are connected with each other, step by step, logically and historically.[9] At the end, all the forms appear seamlessly integrated with each other in a self-reproducing, constantly expanding capitalist system, of which the distant historical origin has become hidden and obscure; the fully developed system appears other than it really is, and does not transparently disclose its real nature.

Basic explanation

Marx initially defines a product of human labour that has become a commodity (in German: Kaufware, i.e., merchandise, ware for sale) as being simultaneously:

The "form of value" (also a reference to phenomenology in the classical philosophical sense used by Hegel) then refers to the specific ways of relating through which "what a commodity is worth" happens to be socially expressed in trading processes, when different products and assets are compared with each other. Practically speaking, Marx argues that the product values cannot be directly observed and can become observably manifest only as exchange-values, i.e., as relative expressions, by comparing their worth to other goods they can be traded for (usually via money prices). This causes people to think value and exchange-value are the same thing, but Marx argues they are not; the content, magnitude and form of value must be distinguished, and according to the law of value, the exchange value of products being traded is determined and regulated by their value.

Historical change

Marx argues that the form of value is not "static" or "fixed once and for all", but rather, that it develops logically and historically in trading processes from very simple, primitive expressions to very complicated or sophisticated expressions. Subsequently he also examines the various forms taken by capital, the forms of wages, and so forth. In each case, the form denotes how a specific social or economic relationship among people is expressed or symbolized.[10]

Initially, in primitive exchange, the form that economic value takes does not even involve any prices, since what something is "worth" is very simply expressed in (a quantity of) some other good (an occasional barter relationship).[11] Some scholars, such as Hans-Georg Backhaus, argue that for this reason value simply did not exist in societies where money was not used. Marx, though, argues that product-values did exist in primitive economies, but that establishing how much products were worth often followed customary practices, rather than purely a comparison with other products, or reckoning with money; thus, value was merely expressed in a different way. All the time, that is, people knew quite well that their products had value because it cost work-effort to replace them, and consequently they also valued their products.

In the most primitive (simplest) situation, people acquire objects for which they have a use by borrowing, trading or bartering, in exchange for other goods that they don't particularly have a need for themselves. They value things directly because of their useful qualities and because takes worktime to get them. In the process, customary norms develop for what counts as a normal, balanced exchange.

But at the most abstract, developed level, the value form is only a purely monetary relationship between objects, or an abstract earnings potential or credit provision based on some assumptions, which may not even refer to any tangible object of trade anymore at all. At that point, it appears that the value of an asset is simply determined by the amount of income that could be obtained if the asset were traded under certain conditions.

Social relations

By analyzing the value-form, Marx aims to show that when people bring their products into relation with each other in market trade, they are also socially related in specific ways (whether they like it or not, and whether they are aware of it or not), and that this fact very strongly influences the very way in which they think about how they are related.[12] It influences how they will view the whole human interactive process of giving and receiving, taking and procuring, sharing and relinquishing, accepting and rejecting—and how to balance all that.[13]

The value-form of products does not merely refer to a "trading valuation of objects"; it refers also to a certain way of relating or interacting, and a mentality, among human subjects who internalize the value-form, so that the manifestations of economic value become regarded as completely normal, natural and self-evident in human interactions (a "market culture," which is also reflected in language use). Marx's description of what goes on in commodity exchanges highlights not only that value relationships appear to exist between commodities quite independently of the valuers, but also that people accept that these relationships exist even although they do not understand exactly what they are, or why they exist at all.

Sources

Aristotle and Samuel Bailey

Marx borrowed the idea of the form of value from the Greek philosopher Aristotle (circa 360–370 BC), who pondered the nature of exchange value in chapter 5 of Book 5 in his Nicomachean Ethics.[14] However, Marx criticized and developed Aristotle's idea in an original way.

In so doing, Marx was also influenced by, and responding to, the "classical" political economy discourse about the economic laws governing commodity values and money,[15] in Europe beginning (in Marx's view) with William Petty's Quantulumcunque Concerning Money (1682)[16], reaching a high point in Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) and culminating with David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817).

In particular, Marx's ideas about the forms of value were influenced by Samuel Bailey's criticism of Ricardo's theory of value.[17] In Capital, Volume I, Marx stated that Bailey was one of the few political economists who had concerned themselves with the analysis of the form of value. Yet none of the political economists had understood its meaning, because they confused "the form of value" with "value itself", and because they only paid attention to the quantitative side of the phenomenon, not to the qualitative side.[18]In Capital, Volume II, Marx criticizes Bailey again for "his general misunderstanding, according to which exchange-value equals value, the form of value is value itself", leading to the mistaken belief that "commodity values cease to be comparable once they no longer actively function as exchange-values, and cannot actually be exchanged for one another".[19]

According to Marx, Aristotle already described the basics of the value-form when he argued[20] that an expression such as "5 beds = 1 house" does not differ from "5 beds = such and such an amount of money", but according to Marx, Aristotle's analysis "suffered shipwreck" because he lacked a clear concept of value. By this Marx meant that Aristotle was unable to clarify the substance of value, i.e., what exactly was being equated in value-comparisons, or what was the common denominator commensurating a plethora of different goods.[21] Aristotle thought the common factor must simply be the demand for goods, since without demand for goods that could satisfy some need or want, they would not be exchanged. According to Marx, the substance of product-value is human labour-time in general, labour-in-the-abstract or "abstract labour". This value (an average current replacement cost in labour-time) exists as an attribute of the products of human labour quite independently of the particular forms that exchange may take, though obviously value is always expressed in some form or other.

Preparatory writings

Marx's idea can be traced back to his 1857 Grundrisse manuscript where he contrasted communal production with production for exchange.[22] The form of value is also mentioned in his 1859 book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. It is already clearly evident in his manuscript of Theories of Surplus Value (1861–63). In correspondence with Friedrich Engels in June 1867, Marx provided a first outline of his text on the form of value.[23] Marx first explicitly described the concept in an appendix to the first (1867) edition of Capital, Volume I,[24] but this appendix was dropped in a second edition, where the first chapter was rewritten (rather hurriedly) to include a special section on the value-form at the end.

When the concept of the form of value is introduced in the first chapter of Capital, Volume I[25] Marx clarifies that economic value becomes manifest in an objectified way only through the form of value established by the exchange of products. People know very well that any product represents a value, i.e. there is an economic cost of supply for the product. But how much value? What something is economically worth can be expressed only relatively, by relating, weighing, comparing and equating it to amounts of other tradeable objects (or to the labour effort or sum of money those objects represent).[26] The value of products is expressed by their "exchange-value": what they can trade for. Since exchange-value is most often expressed by a "money-price", it then seems that "exchange value", "value", "price" and "money" are really all the same thing. But Marx argues they are not the same things at all.[27] Precisely because the political economists kept conflating and confusing the most basic economic categories, Marx argued, they were unable to provide a fully consistent theory of the economy.

Capital, Volume I

In a preface to the first edition of Capital, Volume I, Marx stated:

"I have popularised the passages concerning the substance of value and the magnitude of value as much as possible. The value-form, whose fully developed shape is the money-form, is very simple and slight in content. Nevertheless, the human mind has sought in vain for more than 2,000 years to get to the bottom of it..."[28]

Marx gives various reasons for this, but the main obstacle seems to be that trading relations refer to societal relations that are not necessarily observably manifest, and therefore can only be inferred or analyzed with the aid of highly abstract ideas. The quote clarifies that Marx thought that the value-form of commodities is not simply a feature of capitalism, but is associated with the whole history of commodity trade.[29] He claimed that the origin of the money-form of value had never before been explained by bourgeois economics, and that "the mystery of money will immediately disappear" once the evolution of value-relations has been traced out from its simplest beginnings.[30]

Marx argues that only when market production is highly developed, that it becomes possible to understand what economic value actually means in a comprehensive and theoretically consistent way, separate from other sorts of value (like aesthetic value or moral value). He discussed the notion of the formal equality of market actors more in the Grundrisse.[31] Marx admitted that the value-form was a somewhat difficult notion but he assumed "a reader who is willing to learn something new and therefore to think for himself."[32] In a preface to the second edition of Capital, Volume I, Marx said that he had "completely revised" his treatment, because his friend Dr. Louis Kugelmann had convinced him that a "more didactic exposition of the form of value" was needed.[33]

Engels, the first "value-form Marxist"

The first "value-form theorist" who interpreted the significance of Marx's idea was his friend Friedrich Engels, who argued in his Anti-Dühring polemic of 1878 (when Marx was still alive) that "The value form of products... already contains in embryo the whole capitalist form of production, the antagonism between capitalists and wage-workers, the industrial reserve army, crises..."[34] Discussing the concept, origin and development of the form of value, Engels intended to demonstrate that real socialism involved the abolition of commodity production and the law of value, rather than their conscious integration in the economic system of a socialist commune, as Eugen Dühring proposed.

As discussed in this article below, in the first few years of the Russian revolution, the Bolshevik theoreticians took that idea very literally. It was shelved during Lenin's New Economic Policy, but subsequently the CPSU set about eliminating almost all private enterprise and bringing almost all trade under state control. In a moral sense, commercial activity came to be seen as intrinsically bad, alienating, exploitative and oppressive, because it enabled some people to get rich from other people's work.

Issues of interpretation

"Problem" of a form-analysis of value

Marx's value-form analysis intends to answer the question of how the value-relationships of products are expressed in ways that acquire an objective existence in their own right (ultimately as relationships between quantities of money, or money-prices)[35], what the modalities of these relationships are, and how these product-values can change, independently of the valuers who trade in them.[36] Marx argued that neither the classical political economists nor the vulgar economists who succeeded them were able to explain satisfactorily how that worked, resulting in serious theoretical errors.[37] The political economists sought in vain for an invariable standard of value, and proposed theories of money which were hardly plausible. The reason behind the errors was — according to Marx — that, as market trade developed, the economic relationship between commodity-values and money increasingly appeared in an inverted, reified way. In reality, economic value symbolizes a social relationship between human subjects, as reflected by a thing or expressed by the relationship between things. Yet it often seems more like value is the thing which creates the social relationship.[38] To understand the real causal relationships, not just economic calculation, but also an historical and sociological understanding of the subject was needed.

In vulgar Marxist economics, the commodity is simply a combination of use-value and exchange-value. That is not Marx's own argument.[39] As he explains in Capital, Volume III, in an overall sense business competition among producers centres precisely on the discrepancies between the socially established values of commodities in production and their particular exchange-values manifested in the marketplace.[40] Marx believed that correctly distinguishing between the form and content of value was essential for the logical coherence of a labour theory of product-value,[41] and he criticized Adam Smith specifically because Smith:

confuses the measure of value as the immanent measure which at the same time forms the substance of value [i.e., labour-time], with the measure of value in the sense that money is called a measure of value.[42]

Smith had affirmed that labour is "the real measure of the exchangeable value of all commodities", but, as David Ricardo subsequently argued, Smith's definition confused the labour embodied in a commodity when it was produced, with the labour commanded by the commodity when it was exchanged.[43] Marx believed that Smith and Ricardo were certainly right to identify labour as the substance of commodity value, but Marx realized early on that the definitions of both these political economists could not be correct. The fundamental reason for that was, that both economists mixed up "value" with "exchange value" and with "price" (and also mixed up actual prices with theoretical prices). That is, they mixed up the forms and substance of value, because they failed to distinguish correctly between them as qualitatively different things. The labour theory of product-value could, Marx argued, be made coherent and consistent, only when it was understood that product-values, prices of production and the market prices of commodities could vary independently of each other.[44] Product-values did not necessarily have anything to do in a direct way with the relationship between cost-prices and sale-prices determining the actual profitability of enterprises, because both inputs and outputs could be profitably traded at prices above or below their value, depending on the amount of sales turnover in a given time interval.

Althusserian interpretation

The value-form is often regarded as a difficult, obscure or even esoteric idea by scholars, and there has been considerable debate about its real theoretical significance. Marx himself started off the controversy when he emphasized that Capital, Volume I was not difficult to understand, "with the exception of the section on the form of value."[45] In his "Preface to Capital Vol. 1," the French philosopher Louis Althusser famously asserted:

The greatest difficulties, theoretical or otherwise, which are obstacles to an easy reading of Capital Volume One are unfortunately (or fortunately) concentrated at the very beginning of Volume One, to be precise, in its first Part, which deals with 'Commodities and Money'. I therefore give the following advice: put the whole of Part One aside for the time being and begin your reading with Part Two...[46]

Althusser's suggestions were taken up by many New Left Marxists, which meant that Marx's theory of the value-form and its significance was rarely taught.[47] However, Marx very deliberately and explicitly made an effort to state his interpretation of commodity trade with absolute clarity in his first chapters. Marx aims to demonstrate that the "labour theory of value" that guided the classical political economists in interpreting the economy cannot be correct, because the concept of economic value itself is misconstrued. Marx never referred to his own theory of value as a "labour theory of value" even once, knowing very well (as indicated by his analysis of bank credit) that the value of many assets is not determined by labour-time. The ideas of the political economists had to be modified very considerably, before the theory of value could truly make sense. However, when the modifications were carried out, the previous understanding of capitalist economic life was also overturned. Hence Marx's own theory showed at the same time both continuities with the classical tradition, and radical discontinuities. This has been the cause of numerous controversies about the extent to which Marx broke with, or accepted, the previous theories of the political economists about economic value.[48]

Common academic difficulties

Probably the difficulty Marxist academics have had with Marx's own texts about the concept of value is because, abstractly, "economic value" refers at the same time to many different things:

From the use of the expression "value" it may therefore not be immediately obvious what kind of valuation or expression is being referred to, it depends on the theoretical context.[50] Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, the originator of the famous "transformation problem" controversy, claimed confidently that in Marx's text, "the context always reveals clearly which value is meant".[51] Nevertheless, there have been very lengthy academic debates about what Marx really did mean in particular passages. Rigorously investigated, the concept of "value" turns out not to be a "neat-and-tidy accounting concept" that can be manipulated with mathematical precision; it can be manipulated with mathematical precision only if a series of definitions are already fixed and assumed (it is a fuzzy concept).

At the end of his life, David Ricardo had to "conclude, rather sadly, that 'there is no such thing in nature as a perfect measure of value'... there is no such thing as an invariable standard of value".[52] In Marx's Capital, it is understood from the start that there cannot be an invariable standard of value even in principle (this logically follows from the analysis of the form of value). If a standard of value such as gold is adopted (which Marx does), this is done only for the sake of argument, and for the sake of simplicity of exposition or reckoning.

In addition, orthodox economics typically takes it for granted, that the exchange processes on which markets are based already exist and will occur, and that prices already exist, or can be imputed. This is often called the "gross substitution axiom" by economists: all products are, in principle, supposed to be mutually interchangeable with all other products, and therefore the "price mechanism" can allocate resources in such a way, that market equilibria are assured by the laws of supply and demand.[53] This assumption is overturned only in special cases, where markets still must be brought into being and a process of "price discovery" takes place. In modern economics, the "value" of something is defined either as a money-price, or as a personal (subjective) valuation, and the exchangeability of products as such presents no special problem; it normally does not merit any special inquiry since exchangeability as such is taken for granted.

In conventional economics, money serves as a medium of exchange to minimize the transaction costs of barter among utility-maximizing individuals. Such an approach is very different from Marx's historical interpretation of the formation of value. In Marx's theory, the "value" of a product is something separate and distinct from the "price" it happens to fetch (goods can sell for more or less than they are worth, i.e., they are not necessarily worth what they happen to sell for).[54]

Value-form and commercial fetishism

The theory of the forms of value is the basis for Marx's concept of commercial fetishism, which concerns how the independent power acquired by the value of tradeable objects and market relationships is reflected back into human thought, and more specifically into the theories of the political economists about the market economy. In Althusserian theory, however, this meaning is unknown, because Althusserian theory detaches the concept of "commodity fetishism" from the concept of the "value-form".[55] Almost none of the New Left discussions of commodity fetishism refer to Marx's value-form analysis in any depth.[56]

In the reified perception of the political economists and the vulgar Marxists, products have value because they are expressible in money-prices, but Marx argues that in reality it is just the other way round: because commodities have value, i.e. because they are all products of social labour,[57] their values can be expressed by generally accepted money-prices, accurately or not. The true relationship can, however, be traced out only when the historical evolution of economic exchange is considered from its most simple beginnings to its most developed forms. The end-result of market development is a fully monetized economy (a "cash economy"), but how its workings appear to the individual at the micro-level, is often different or the inverse of its causal dynamic at the macro-level. According to Marx, this creates a lot of confusions in economic theorizing.[58]

Development of the commodity form of value in the history of trading relations

Marx distinguishes between four successive steps in the process of trading products, i.e., in the circulation of commodities, through which fairly stable and objective value proportionalities (Wertverhältnisse in German) are formed that express "what products are worth". These steps are:

These forms are different ways of symbolizing and representing what goods are worth, to facilitate trade and cost/benefit calculations. The simple form of value does not (or not necessarily) involve a money-referent at all, and the expanded and general forms are intermediary expressions between a non-monetary and a monetary expression of economic value. The four steps are an abstract summary of what essentially happens to the trading relationship when the trade in products grows and develops.

Simple form of value

The value relationship in Marx's economic sense begins to emerge, when we are able to state that one bundle of use-values is worth the same as another bundle of (different) use-values. That happens when the bundles of products are regularly traded for each other, and thus are regarded as instruments of trade. It is a quantitative relationship between quantities, implicitly expressed in the same unit of measurement. The simplest value-form expression can be stated as the following equation:

X quantity of commodity A is worth Y quantity of commodity B

where the value of X(A) is expressed relatively, as being equal to a certain quantity of B, meaning that A is the relative form of value and B the equivalent form of value, so that B is effectively the value-form of (expresses the value of) A. If we ask "how much is X quantity of commodity A worth?" the answer is "Y quantity of commodity B". This simple equation, expressing a simple value proportion between products, however permits several possibilities of differences in valuation emerging within the circulation of products:

These possible changes in valuation enable us to understand already that what any particular product will trade for is delimited by what other products will trade for, quite independently of how much the buyer would like to pay, or how much the seller would like to get in return. Value should not be confused with price here, however, because products can be traded at prices above or below what they are worth (implying value-price deviations; this complicates the picture and is elaborated only in the third volume of Das Kapital). For simplicity's sake, Marx assumes initially that the money-price of a commodity will be equal to its value (ordinarily, price-value deviations would not be very great); but in Capital, Volume III it becomes clear that the sale of goods above or below their value has a crucial effect on profits.

The main implications of the simple relative form of value are that:

Marx also argues that, at the same time, such an economic equation accomplishes two other things:

Effectively, a social nexus (a societal connection or bond) is established and affirmed via the value-comparisons in the marketplace, which makes relative labour costs (the expenditures of human work energy) the real substance of value. Obviously, some assets are not produced by human labour at all, but how they are valued commercially will nevertheless refer, explicitly or implicitly, directly or indirectly, to the comparative cost structure of related assets that are labour-products. A tree in the middle of the Amazon Rain Forest has no commercial value where it stands. We can estimate its value only by estimating what it would cost to cut it down, what it would sell for in markets, or what income we could currently get from it—or how much we could charge people to look at it. Imputing an "acceptable price" to the tree assumes that there already exists a market in timber or in forests that tells us what the tree would normally be worth.[61] The simple form of value, according to Marx, "is an embryonic form which must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can ripen into the price-form".[62]

Expanded form of value

In the expanded value-form, the equation process between quantities of different commodities is simply continued serially, so that their values relative to each other are established, and they can all be expressed in some or other commodity-equivalent. The expanded value-form expression really represents only an extension of the simple value form, where products alternate as relative and equivalent forms in order to be equated to each other.

Marx argues that, as such, the expanded value-form is practically inadequate, because to express what any commodity is worth might now require the calculation of a whole "chain" of comparisons, i.e.

X amount of commodity A is worth Y commodity B, is worth Z commodity C ... etc.

What this means is, that if A is normally traded for B, and B is normally traded for C, then to find out how much A is worth in terms of C, we first have to convert the amounts into B (and maybe many more intermediate steps). This is obviously inefficient if many goods are traded at the same time.

General form of value

The practical solution in trade is therefore the emergence of a general value-form, in which the values of all kinds of bundles of commodities can be expressed in amounts of one standard commodity (or just a few standards) which function as a general equivalent. The general equivalent has itself no relative form of value in common with other commodities; instead its value is expressed only in a myriad of other commodities.

=

In ancient civilizations where considerable market trade occurred, there were usually a few types of goods that could function as a general standard of value. This standard served for value comparisons; it did not necessarily mean that goods were actually traded for the standard commodity.[63] This rather cumbersome approach is solved with the introduction of money—the owner of a product can sell it for money, and buy another product he wants with money, without worrying anymore about whether the thing offered in exchange for his own product is indeed the product that he wants himself. Now, the only limit to trade is the development and growth rate of the market.

Money-form of value

Just because quantities of goods can be expressed in amounts of a general equivalent, which acts as a referent, this does not mean that they can necessarily all be traded for that equivalent. The general equivalent may only be a sort of yardstick used to compare what goods are worth. Hence, the general equivalent form in practice gives way to the money-commodity, which is a universal equivalent, meaning that (provided people are willing to trade) it possesses the characteristic of direct and universal exchangeability in precisely measured quantities.

=

But for most of the history of human civilization, money was not actually universally used, partly because the prevailing systems of property rights and cultural custom did not allow many goods to be sold for money, and partly because many products were distributed and traded without using money. Also, several different "currencies" were often used side by side. Marx himself believed that nomadic peoples were the first to develop the money-form of value (in the sense of a universal equivalent in trade) because all their possessions were mobile, and because they were regularly in contact with different communities, which encouraged the exchange of products.[64] When money is generally used in trade, money becomes the general expression of the value-form of goods being traded; usually this is associated with the emergence of a state authority issuing legal currency. At that point the value-form appears to have acquired a fully independent, separate existence from any particular traded object (behind this autonomy, however, is the power of state authorities or private agencies to enforce financial claims).

Once the money-commodity (e.g., gold, silver, bronze) is securely established as a stable medium of exchange, symbolic money-tokens (e.g., bank notes and debt claims) issued by the state, trading houses or corporations can in principle substitute paper money or debt obligations for the "real thing" on a regular basis. At first, these "paper claims" (legal tender) are by law convertible on demand into quantities of gold, silver etc., and they circulate alongside precious metals. But gradually currencies come into use that are not so convertible, i.e., "fiduciary money" or fiat money which relies on social trust that people will honor their transactional obligations. These kinds of fiduciary money rely not on the value of money-tokens themselves (as in commodity money), but on the ability to enforce financial claims and contracts, principally by means of the power and laws of the state, but also by other institutional methods. Eventually, as Marx anticipated in 1844, precious metals play very little role anymore in the monetary system.[65]

Alongside fiat money, credit money also develops. Credit money, although expressed in currency units, does not consist of money tokens. It consists rather of financial claims, including of all kinds of debt certificates (promissory notes) which entitle the holder to future income under contractually specified conditions. These claims can themselves be traded for profit. Credit arrangements existed already in the ancient world,[66] but there was no very large-scale trade in debt obligations. In the modern world, the majority of money no longer consists of money tokens, but of credit money. Marx was quite aware of the role of credit money, but did not analyze it in depth. His concern was only with how the credit system directly impacted on the capitalist production process.

The ultimate universal equivalent according to Marx is "world money", i.e., financial instruments that are accepted and usable for trading purposes everywhere, such as bullion.[67] In the world market, the value of commodities is expressed by a universal standard, so that their "independent value-form" appears to traders as "universal money".[68] Nowadays the US dollar,[69] the Euro, and the Japanese Yen are widely used as "world currencies" providing a near-universal standard and measure of value. They are used as a means of exchange worldwide, and consequently most governments have significant reserves or claims to these currencies.

In summary

Marx's four steps in the development of the value-form are mainly an analytical or logical progression, which may not always conform to the actual historical processes by which objects begin to acquire a relatively stable value and are traded as commodities.[70] Three reasons are:

It is just that, typically, what the socially accepted value of a wholly new kind of object will be, requires the practical "test" of a regular trading process, assuming a regular supply by producers and a regular demand for it, which establishes a trading "norm" consistent with production costs. A new object that wasn't traded previously may be traded far above or below its real value, until the supply and demand for it stabilizes, and its exchange-value fluctuates only within relatively narrow margins (in orthodox economics, this process is acknowledged as a form of price discovery).[71]

Implications

To summarize, the development of the value-form through the growth of trading processes involves a continuous dual equalization & relativization process:

Six main effects of this are:

Generalized commodity production

Capital existed in the form of trading capital already thousands of years before capitalist factories emerged in the towns; its owners (whether rentiers, merchants or state functionaries) often functioned as intermediaries between commodity producers. They facilitated exchange, for a price - they made money from trade. Marx defines the capitalist mode of production as "generalized commodity production", meaning that most goods and services are produced primarily for commercial purposes, for profitable market sale.[72] This has the consequence, that both the inputs and the outputs of production become tradeable objects with prices, and that the whole of production is reorganized according to commercial principles. Whereas originally commercial trade occurred episodically at the boundaries of different communities, Marx argues,[73] eventually commerce engulfs and reshapes the whole production process of those communities. This involves the transformation of a large part of the labour force into wage-labour (the sale of labour power as a commodity), and the capitalization of labour employed.

In turn, this means what whether or not a product will be produced, and how it will be produced, depends not simply on whether it is physically possible to produce it or on whether people need it, but on its financial cost of production, whether a sufficient amount can be sold, and whether its production yields sufficient profit income. That is also why Marx regarded the individual commodity, which simultaneously represents value and use-value as the "cell" (or the "cell-form") in the "body" of capitalism. The seller primarily wants money for his product and is not really concerned with its consumption or use (other than from the point of view of making sales); the buyer wants to use or consume the product, and money is the means to acquire it from any convenient source. Thus the seller does not aim directly to satisfy the need of the buyer, nor does the buyer aim to enrich the seller. Rather, the buyer and the seller are the means for each other to acquire money or goods. As a corollary, production may become less and less a creative activity to satisfy human needs, but simply a means to make money or acquire access to goods and services.[74] As against that, products obviously could not be sold unless people need them, and unless that need is practically acknowledged. The social effect is that the motives for trading may be hidden to some or other extent, or appear somewhat differently from what they really are (in this sense, Marx uses the concept of "character masks").

Reification

The concept of the value-form as an aspect of the commodity form is intended to show how, with the development of commodity trade, anything with a utility for people (a use-value) can be transformed into a quantity of abstract value, objectively expressible as a sum of money; but, also, how this transformation changes the organization of labour to maximize its value-creating capacity, how it changes social interactions and the very way people are aware of their interactions.

However, the quantification of objects and the manipulation of quantities ineluctably leads to distortions (reifications) of their qualitative properties. For the sake of obtaining a measure of magnitude, it is frequently assumed that objects are quantifiable, but in the process of quantification, various qualitative aspects are conveniently ignored or abstracted away from. Obviously the expression of everything in money prices is not the only valuation that can, or should, be made.[75]

Essentially, Marx argues that if the values of things are to express social relations, then, in trading activity, people necessarily have to "act" symbolically in a way that inverts the relations among objects and subjects, whether they are aware of that or not. They have to treat a relationship as if it is a thing in its own right. In an advertisement, a financial institution might for example say "with us, your money works for you", but money does not "work", people do. A relationship gets treated as a thing, and a relationship between people is expressed as a relationship between things.

Marketisation

The total implications of the development of the forms of value are much more farreaching than can be described in this article, since (1) the processes by which the things people use are transformed into objects of trade (often called commodification, commercialization or marketization) and (2) the social effects of these processes, are both extremely diverse. A very large literature exists about the growth of business relationships in all sorts of areas. For capitalism to exist, markets must grow, but market growth requires changes in the way people relate socially, and changes in property rights. This is often a problem-fraught and conflict-ridden process, as Marx describes in his story about primitive accumulation.

Value-form and price-form

In his story, Marx defines the magnitude of "value" simply as the ratio of a physical quantity of product to a quantity of average labour-time, which is equal to a quantity of gold-money (in other words, a scalar):

X quantity of product = Y quantity of average labour hours = Z quantity of gold-money

He admits early on, that the assumption of gold-money is a theoretical simplification,[76] since the buying power of money units can vary due to causes that have nothing to do with the production system (within certain limits, X, Y and Z can vary independently of each other); but he thought it was useful to reveal the structure of economic relationships involved in the capitalist mode of production, as a prologue to analyzing the motion of the system as a whole; and, he believed that variations in the buying power of money did not alter that structure at all, insofar as the working population was forced to produce in order to survive, and in so doing entered into societal relations of production independent of their will; the basic system of property rights remained the same, irrespective of whether products and labour were traded for a higher or a lower price.

As any banker or speculator knows, however, the expression of the value of something as a quantity of money-units is by no means the "final and ultimate expression of value".[77]

Eventually financial trade becomes so complex, that what a financial asset is worth is often no longer expressible in any exact quantity of money (a "cash value") without all sorts of qualifications, and that its worth becomes entirely conditional on its expected earnings potential.[78]

In Capital Volume 3, which he drafted before Volume I, Marx shows he was well aware of this. He distinguished not only between "real capital" (physical, tangible capital assets) and "money capital", but also noted the existence of "fictitious capital" and "pseudo-commodities" that strictly speaking have only symbolic value (which, however, can be converted into real product value through trade). Marx believed that a failure to theorize the value-form correctly led to "the strangest and most contradictory ideas about money," which "emerges sharply... in [the theory of] banking, where the commonplace definitions of money no longer hold water".[79]

Price-form

Consistent with this, Marx explicitly introduced a distinction between the value-form and the price-form early on in Capital, Volume I. Simply put, the price-form is a mediator of trade that is separate and distinct from the forms of value.[80] Prices express exchange-value in units of money.[81] A price is a "sign" that conveys information about either a possible or a realized transaction (or both at the same time). The information may be true or false; it may refer to observables or unobservables; it may be estimated, assumed or probable. However, because prices are also numbers, it is easy to treat them as manipulable "things" in their own right, in abstraction from their appropriate context. The price resulting from a calculation may be regarded as symbolizing (representing) one transaction, or many transactions at once, but the validity of this "price abstraction" all depends on whether the computational procedure is accepted.

According to Marx, the price-form as such is not a "further development" of the value-form,[82] for three reasons:

In Marx's theory of the capitalist mode of production, not just anything has a value in the economic sense, even if things can be priced. Only the products of human labour have the property of value, and their "value" is the total current labour cost implicated in making them, on average. Value relationships among physical products or labour-services and physical assets — as proportions of current labour effort involved in making them — exist according to Marx quite independently from price information, and prices can oscillate in all sorts of ways around economic values, or indeed quite independently of them. However, the expression of product-value by prices in money-units in most cases does not diverge very greatly from the actual value; if there was a very big difference, people would not be able to sell them, or they would not buy them.

If prices for products rise, hours worked may rise, and if prices fall, hours worked may fall (sometimes the reverse may also occur, to the extent that extra hours are worked, to compensate for lower income resulting from lower prices, or if more sales occur because prices are lowered). In that sense, it is certainly true that product-prices and product-values mutually influence each other. It is just that, according to Marx, product-values are not determined by the labor-efforts of any particular enterprise, but by the combined result of all of them.

Real prices and ideal prices

In discussing the form of prices in various draft manuscripts and in Das Kapital, Marx drew an essential distinction between actual prices charged and paid, i.e., prices that express how much money really changed hands, and various "ideal prices" (imaginary or notional prices).[84] Because prices are symbols or indicators in more or less the same way as traffic lights are, they can symbolize something that really exists (e.g., hard cash) but they can also symbolize something that doesn't exist, or symbolize other symbols. That can make the forms of prices highly variegated, flexible and complex to understand, but also potentially very deceptive, disguising the real relationships involved. Modern economics is largely a "price science" (a science of "price behaviour"), in which economists attempt to analyze, explain and predict the relationships between different kinds of prices—using the laws of supply and demand as a guiding principle. This however was not Marx's primary concern; he focused rather on the structure and dynamics of the capitalist system as a whole. His concern was with the overall results that market activity would lead to in human society.

In what Marx called "vulgar economics", the complexity of the concept of prices is ignored however, because, Marx claimed, the vulgar economists assumed that:

  • all prices belong to the same object class (they are qualitatively the same, and differ only quantitatively, irrespective of the type of transaction with which they are associated, or the valuation principles used).
  • for theoretical purposes, there is no substantive difference between price idealizations and prices which are actually charged.
  • "price" is just another word for "value", i.e., value and price are identical expressions, since the value relationship simply expresses a relationship between a quantity of money and a quantity of some other economic good.
  • prices are always exact, in the same way that numbers are exact (disregarding price estimation, valuation changes and accounting error).
  • price information is always objective (i.e., it is never influenced by how people regard that information).
  • people always have equal access to information about prices (in which case swindles are merely an aberration from the normal functioning of markets, rather than an integral feature of them, which requires continual policing).
  • the price for any particular type of good is always determined everywhere in exactly the same way, according to the same economic laws, regardless of the given social set-up.

In his critique of political economy, Marx denied that any of these assumptions were scientifically true (see further real prices and ideal prices). He distinguished carefully between the values, exchange values, market values, market prices and prices of production of commodities. However he did not analyze all the different forms that prices can take (for example, market-driven prices, administered prices, accounting prices, negotiated and fixed prices, estimated prices, nominal prices, or inflation-adjusted prices) focusing mainly on the value proportions he thought to be central to the functioning of the capitalist mode of production as a social system. The effect of this omission was that debates about the relevance of Marx's value theory became confused, and that Marxists repeated the same ideas Marx himself had rejected as "vulgar economics". In other words, they accepted a vulgar concept of price.[85]

Fluctuating price signals serve to adjust product-values and labour efforts to each other, in an approximate way; prices are mediators in this sense. But that which mediates should not be confused with what is mediated. Thus, if the observable price-relationships are simply taken at face value, they might at best create a distorted picture, and at worst a totally false picture of the economic activity to which they refer. At the surface, price aggregations might quantitatively express an economic relationship in the simplest way, but in the process they might abstract away from other features of the economic relationship that are also very essential to know. Indeed, that is another important reason why Marx's analysis of economic value largely disregards the intricacies of price fluctuations; it seeks to discover the real economic movement behind the price fluctuations.

Scientific criticism

There are five main lines of scholarly criticism of Marx's idea of the value-form.

Obscurantism?

The criticism most often heard from the critics of Marx, such as Karl Popper, Friedrich von Hayek, Ian Steedman and Francis Wheen is that, even if Marx himself meant well, Marx's value-form idea is simply an esoteric obscurantism, "dialectical hocus pocus", "sophistry", or "mumbo jumbo". Francis Wheen refers to "a shaggy-dog story, a picaresque journey through the realms of higher nonsense."[86] This type of criticism was already being made while Marx was still alive, as Marx himself reports in a postface to the second German edition of Capital, Volume I in 1873.[87]

Often, Marxists have replied to this type of criticism by restating Marx's arguments in clearer language, or by showing that Marx's theory of economic value at the very least fares no worse than the subjective theory of value (the theory of the util as the measuring unit of utility). Even so, when he published his very clear restatement Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence,[88] the Marxist philosopher Gerald Cohen explicitly dissociated himself from Marx's value theory. Cohen argued that it is possible to have an historical materialism without a labour theory of value, because the one does not logically entail the other as well.[89] Marcel van der Linden accepted Cohen’s approach, noting that “whether Marx’s theory is exactly right or not, it remains a fact that the working class produces a surplus product about which it has no say.” [90] This interpretation contrasts with Lenin's opinion — repeated by Johann Witt-Hansen[91]—that with the appearance of Das Kapital, "the materialist conception of history is no longer a hypothesis, but a scientifically proven proposition".[92] Earlier on, in 1880, Engels had written (at the end of Part 2 of his pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific) that “two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science.”[93]

Interpretations of the substance of value

Marx's argument is that the exchangeability of commodities with recognition of their value is based on the common factor that all of them are products of social labour (co-operative human labour producing things for others).[94] Critics however have argued ever since Capital, Volume I was published, that Marx's argument is simply not logically compelling. The critics suggest that Marx's observations fail to provide any logically decisive proof that human labour-time (work effort) is the substance of the economic value of products.

Marx's own response

In a famous letter from Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann dated 11 July 1868, Marx became extremely indignant and derisive about this objection, stating among other things that:

"All that palaver about the necessity of proving the concept of value comes from complete ignorance both of the subject dealt with and of scientific method. Every child knows that a nation which ceased to work, I will not say for a year, but even for a few weeks, would perish. Every child knows, too, that the masses of products corresponding to the different needs require different and quantitatively determined masses of the total labor of society. That this necessity of the distribution of social labor in definite proportions cannot possibly be done away with by a particular form of social production but can only change the mode of its appearance, is self-evident. No natural laws can be done away with. What can change in historically different circumstances is only the form in which these laws assert themselves. And the form in which this proportional distribution of labor asserts itself, in the state of society where the interconnection of social labor is manifested in the private exchange of the individual products of labor, is precisely the exchange value of these products. Science consists precisely in demonstrating how the law of value asserts itself. So that if one wanted at the very beginning to "explain" all the phenomena which seemingly contradict that law, one would have to present the science before the science. (...) The vulgar economist has not the faintest idea that the actual everyday exchange relations can not be directly identical with the magnitudes of value. The essence of bourgeois society consists precisely in this, that a priori there is no conscious social regulation of production. The rational and naturally necessary asserts itself only as a blindly working average. And then the vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, as against the revelation of the inner interconnection, he proudly claims that in appearance things look different. In fact, he boasts that he holds fast to appearance, and takes it for the ultimate. Why, then, have any science at all?"[95]

The modern debate

In 1989, Simon Clarke captured the essence of the modern value-form debate within Western Marxism, as a hyper-abstract debate about the form and content of economic value:

"The Ricardians focus on embodied labour as the substance of value, to the neglect of the central question of the form of value, so obliterating the fundamental distinction between labour-time and value. The Rubin School, on the other hand, brings the form of value to the centre of the stage, but at the risk of losing sight of labour as the substance of value. For the Rubin School, the substance of value is not embodied labour but abstract labour. However [according to Rubin] the amount of abstract labour embodied in a commodity cannot be defined independently of the exchange of commodities through which private labours are reduced to their common social substance. The only measure of abstract labour is correspondingly a monetary evaluation of the products of labour, expressed in their prices. The danger of [Rubin's] interpretation is that reference to labour as the substance of value is reduced to an empty rhetorical gesture in a theory which never manages to penetrate the appearances of exchange relations because it obliterates the distinction between value and exchange value."[96]

Since 1972, when Isaac Rubin's book[97] was republished in translation, this Western Marxist controversy has continued for nearly half a century. Different schools of thought have emerged, without however reaching a definite solution amenable to all. However, in reality, the intellectual controversy has much deeper historical roots.[98] As Rubin himself stated, "All post-Ricardian political economy revolved around the question of the relation between production price and labor-value. Answering this question was an historic task for economic thought. In Marx's view, the particular merit of his theory of value was that it gave a solution to this problem."[99]

Rubin's claim was that, in Marx's view, the labor theory of value and the theory of production prices represent "two logical stages or degrees of abstraction from the same economic phenomena" instead of being two models that contradict each other.[100] The next problem however was, that Rubin's vague "levels of abstraction" interpretation never clarified what exactly this means in verifiable and quantifiable scientific terms. And therefore, critics argue, Rubin's alleged "solution" is no scientifically acceptable solution at all, of the problem of the relationship between production prices and labour-values - it is just a "definition".[101]

In Marx's finished theory of value, the "value" of a commodity turns out to be the social valuation of its average, current replacement cost in labour time (a synchronic economic reproduction cost)[102] but this particular labour requirement turns out to be quite a different quantity than either "labour embodied" in production (the actual worktime performed to make the commodity) or "labour commanded" in exchange (how much worktime can be purchased, on average, for the money-price of the commodity).[103]

Kozo Uno School

Because of the controversy over the substance of value, the famous Japanese Marxist scholar Kozo Uno argued in his classic Principles of Political Economy that Marx's original argument had to be revised.[104] In the revised version, the theory of the value-form is integrated in the theory of commodity circulation, and does not refer to the substance (content) of value at all.[105] The form and substance of value are radically separated. The substance of value as labour then becomes apparent (and is theoretically demonstrated) only in the analysis of the production of commodities "by means of commodities". Some Western Marxists do not find this Unoist approach very satisfactory however, among other things because of Marx's insistence that the formation of product values is an outcome of both the "economy of labour-time" and "the economy of trade" working in tandem.[106]

The value-form school

From the 1970s, the so-called "value-form theorists" ("value-form school")[107] have emphasized—influenced by Theodor W. Adorno[108] and the rediscovery of the writings of Isaak Illich Rubin[109]—the importance of Marx's value theory as a qualitative critique—a cultural, sociological or philosophical critique of the reifications involved in capitalist commercialism. In this way, the quantitative attack by neo-Ricardians against Marx's value theory is considered to become irrelevant. The value-form school has become very popular especially among Western Marxists who are not economists.[110] Supporters of the "value-form school", especially in Germany and Britain, often regard Marx's theory of the form of value as proof of a radical break from all conventional economics.[111] This implies there is little point in engaging with conventional economics, because conventional economics makes quite incompatible theoretical assumptions. Critics of the value-form school often see this intellectual tradition as an "evasive tactic", which avoids difficult quantitative problems concerning the relationship between economic value and money-prices which still need to be solved.[112]

Value-form theory as a special branch of radical theory has been popular among intellectual supporters of Autonomism[113] and Anarchism,[114] although Antonio Negri thinks the theory is outdated now.[115] Negri's theory is roughly the same as that of the Financial Times journalist John Kay, who believes that "The political and economic environment in which Marx wrote was a brief interlude in economic history."[116] Both writers regard Marx's theory of value as outdated, although they still like to use some of Marx's rhetorics. There also exists a post-Marxist value criticism school.

Sohn-Rethel's social nexus

In a text which had a big influence on the scholarly discussion, Alfred Sohn-Rethel examined the meaning and implications of Marx’s concept of the forms of value in some detail. He claimed that “The formal analysis of the commodity holds the key not only to the critique of political economy, but also to the historical explanation of the conceptual mode of thinking and of the division of intellectual and manual labour, which came into existence with it.”[117] Marx had noted that by equating their products in exchange as values, people also equate the quantities of human labour ordinarily required to produce them, regardless of whether they are aware of it or not (very likely they would not – and could not – know accurately how much labour the products represent, or even where the products originated). This is a “functional effect” of the trading relationship.[118] Sohn-Rethel calls this a “real abstraction” – it is an abstraction performed not primarily by thinking, but unintentionally by doing and participating in a system of symbolic conventions.[119] Subsequently the “real abstraction” is however transformed into a “conceptual abstraction” which, he argues, has very large implications for the further evolution of human thought. It then seems that abstract labour is purely an effect of economic exchange.

Sohn-Rethel pondered the question of what holds society together, when all production is carried on by private agents acting independently of each other. He concludes that society can in that case cohere only through “buying and selling”. It then seems to follow, that "The nexus of society is established by the network of exchange and nothing else."[120] This idea however departs from Marx’s theory since, for Marx, it is not the relations of exchange (the market) that hold society together, but the cooperative relations of production (governed by property rights), that form the economic structure of society.[121]

What disappears from view in Sohn-Rethel’s interpretation is that, in the production and reproduction of human life, people must also cooperate in many ways which have nothing to do with trade. His radical idea is moreover not even very plausible, since (1) society does not simply collapse everywhere, if, in a crisis, the trading process breaks down to some large degree, and (2) at any time, the majority of the stock of objects of value in society (stored, or in use) is not being traded at all. So in reality, the “social nexus” or “social synthesis” involves at any time far more relations of cooperation than trade alone.

Moishe Postone's moment of specificity

Borrowing ideas from (among others) Patrick Murray and Derek Sayer,[122] Moishe Postone bases his value-form interpretation on an excerpt of a footnote from Marx's Capital, Volume I, which was incorrectly translated by Ben Fowkes:

"The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most general form of the bourgeois mode of production. This mode is thereby characterized as a particular sort of social production and, therefore, as historically specific. If one then makes the mistake of treating it as the eternal natural form of social production, one necessarily overlooks the specificity of the value-form, and consequently of the commodity form together with its further developments, the money form, the capital form, etc."[123]

Postone alleges that in "traditional Marxism" (such as "Sweezy, Mandel, and others"),[124] the meaning of “value” and “labour” was wrongly interpreted:

Postone concludes from his story among other things that "the law of value, then, is dynamic and cannot be understood adequately in terms of an equilibrium theory of the market"[130] and that the movement of history "can be expressed indirectly by time as a dependent variable; as a movement of time, though, it cannot be grasped by static, abstract time”.[131]

Monetary theory of value: Reuten, Heinrich, Milios

The suggestion of some authors (such as Reuten/Williams)[132] is that although Marx's labour theory of value is theoretically wrong as stated, his theory can be modified such that, rather than value being created by co-operative human labour, value and abstract labour can be regarded as effects ("social forms") created by the exchange-process itself.[133] Simply put, the value of goods is nothing more than the money they will exchange for, from which it seems to follow that if there is no money, value does not exist either. This interpretation is often called the "monetary theory of value".[134] Thus, Michael Heinrich claims that:

“Marx’s value theory is... a monetary theory of value: without the value form, commodities cannot be related to one another as values, and only with the money form does an adequate form of value exist. ‘Substantialist’ conceptions of value, which attempt to establish the existence of value within individual objects, are pre-monetary theories of value. [. . .] The usual ‘Marxist’ value theory that alleges that value is already completely determined by ‘socially necessary labor-time’ is also a pre-monetary value theory”.[135]

Marx himself denied this "monetary" interpretation of value when he said explicitly in chapter 2 of Capital, Volume I that "The act of exchange gives to the commodity converted into money, not its value, but its specific value-form".[136] In other words, for Marx, the fact that commodities have the property of value in the first place, has nothing to do with exchange as such. It has to do with the reality that the commodities are the products of quantities of social labour (they have an average replacement cost in labour time; some people have to do work, so that others can acquire the products). There do not exist any "substantialist" scholars in economics who think that "value" is literally a kind of "stuff" inserted into every commodity when it is produced. Modern money is fiduciary currency, or money of account, that actually has very little intrinsic value.[137]

The act of exchange (whether a cash deal, barter, or a credit arrangement) reveals the form in which the value of commodities is expressed, accurately or inaccurately; the trading process provides various possibilities for expressing the value of products (using different price assumptions, valuations, currencies etc.). Marx's whole theory of economics is based on the idea that it is not the market which creates value, but that value is created in real production, involving the work of billions of workers. If those workers are not there, it leaves only a derelict area or ghost town situation.

Marxian economist John Milios also argues for a "monetary theory of value", where "Money is the necessary form of appearance of value (and of capital) in the sense that prices constitute the only form of appearance of the value of commodities."[138] Critics of this interpretation think that it cannot be correct, for three reasons:

Value as power

In various works, the Australian phenomenologist Michael Eldred radicalizes the reading of 'form' in the value-form to a socio-ontological category.[140] According to Eldred, the phenomenon of exchange-value is substantially one of social power. Hence, money reveals itself to be the quintessential, rudimentary form of reified social power in capitalist society. The further value-forms developed during the course of the capital-analysis, starting with the capital-form and the wage-form of value, through the value-forms of ground-rent, interest, profit of enterprise, to the revenue-form of these income-sources on the surface of economic life, unfold the socio-ontological structure and movement of capitalism as a "reified power-play". Eldred argues that such a total ontological structure of capitalist power-play can only come into view, if the whole of Marx's capital-analysis is reconstructed, not just the famous, notoriously difficult first chapter of Marx's Capital.

From a different angle, Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler also depict the phenomena of economic value as power relationships.[141] While retaining some of the language of Marx, they however reject Marx's theory of value. The power dimension of value relationships is also prominent in Harry Cleaver's commentary Reading Capital Politically.[142]

This interpretation also has its critics, the main criticism being that by reducing all economic phenomena to a matter of power, the concept of power itself becomes a nebulous idea, which explains "everything and nothing".[143] "Power", like economic value, is by no means a straightforward, simple concept. Power is often circumstantial. It cannot be automatically inferred, from the position taken by participants in market trade, what kind of power they really have.[144]Particularly in economic crises, it is often discovered that those who were thought to have a lot of power, do not really have it (leading to political crises).

Subjective and objective dimensions

There are also anthropologists such as the socialist Lawrence Krader and the anarchist David Graeber who have argued that Marx's value categories should be modified in the light of historical and anthropological research about how human communities value objects.[145] Ever since Werner Sombart and Nikolai Bukharin first argued it,[146] Marx's theory of value has been described as a purely objective theory of value, as opposed to the subjective theory of the bourgeois economists.[147] However, Krader argued (just like Oskar R. Lange) that Marx's theory of value and the theory of utility are compatible, i.e., the one does not exclude the other; and Krader insisted that value has both objective and subjective aspects. Graeber's work is very focused on how value categories shape human lives, and the direct political effects of that.[148]

More heat than light

In his widely-read book More heat than light, Philip Mirowski examined in greater detail the theoretical conflicts between "substance" theories of value and "field" theories of value. [149] He claims that "Marx vacillated between two mutually exclusive labor theories of value", which according to him explains "the incoherence of his attempt to solve the transformation problem". One theory is the "embodied" labour theory of value (or crystallized labour), the other theory is a "cost" theory of value. "Crystalized labor highlights exploitation and fixes the locus of surplus generation in production; real-cost labor values obscure the generation of surplus and open up the possibility that the global magnitude of profit is altered (and hence generated) in exchange".[150]

This interpretation is essentially a version of the conventional neo-Ricardian critique, which claims there is an unbridgeable inconsistency between the value theory of Capital, Volume I and the value theory of Capital, Volume III. Mirowski claims that Marx, in the tradition of classical political economy, believed that "regular capitalist trades are normally trades of equivalent values"[151] This claim is not easy to sustain, since the whole architecture of Capital, Volume III is built upon the idea that product-values, prices of production and market prices systematically diverge from each other, and can diverge very considerably for a prolonged time – profit-making does not require that commodities trade at their values, and, as Marx himself notes at the beginning of Capital, Volume III, good profits can be made by trading large quantities of goods below their value (the classical principle of competition). According to Ian Paul Wright, "Mirowski unfortunately misreads Marx’s concept of substance."[152]

Capital without production

As the accumulation of capital grows, more and more durable and financial assets exist external to the sphere of production. When society becomes wealthier, the total value of the personally owned properties of individuals (assets owned by households) and public property increases, even if some people own little and others own a lot. Marx was primarily concerned with the value of newly produced commodities, but it is unclear from his theory about the capitalist mode of production what determines the value of a growing stock of durable assets in society, a stock of assets which is neither an input nor an output of current production (except the maintenance labour for already existing physical and financial assets).

The old reproduction schemes of Otto Bauer, Nikolai Bukharin, Rosa Luxemburg, Henryk Grossman, Ernest Mandel and other famous Marxists all have in common, that they assume that the income obtained from the use of capital and labour is either used up in consumption expenditure, or re-invested in production. But this conflates the self-reproduction of the capitalist mode of production with the reproduction of capitalist society as a whole, and it conflates the accumulation of production capital with the accumulation of total social capital. In reality, as capitalist development advances, the value of non-productive accumulation becomes increasingly more important, as shown by capital market data and data on national asset wealth for the advanced capitalist countries.

Non-material goods

In value theory, there is also the problem of so-called "non-material goods and services", such as intellectual property (all kinds of texts, data sets, software, designs, techniques, knowledge, inventions, information services etc.).[153] Obviously intellectual property existed already in Marx's time, but its scope and volume was fairly small. In modern times, in which science and education have become large-scale businesses, there is general tendency to attach a property right and a price-tag to more and more ideas, which are given precise boundaries.[154] However, it remains unclear what regulates the value of intellectual property in an economic sense.[155] How is the value of intellectual property correctly defined and calculated? Often the prices paid for intellectual assets are not proportional to real production costs.[156]

Redundancy of value theory

This criticism (made primarily by neo-Ricardians and post-Keynesians) is basically that all the problems Marx tries to solve with his theory of the forms of value can be solved much better and more plausibly with modern price theory. In a 1975 paper subtitled "Was Marx's Journey Really Necessary?", the influential Marxian economist Ronald L. Meek argued that Marx's value theory had become redundant because all economic relationships can be described and explained in terms of prices.[157] Indeed, what Marx calls "value" can be regarded simply as a kind of "theoretical price". In this interpretation, the conclusion drawn is that Marx's value theory really adds nothing much to the economic arguments, and is therefore probably best abandoned.[158]

The Western Marxist response to this criticism[159] was extraordinarily weak; most Marxists had accepted the conventional price-theories of economics as largely correct and unproblematic,[160] and just kept insisting that value-theory was a necessary "add-on" to make sense of the economy.[161] Alternatively, Marxists argued that value theory had nothing much to do with the market economics of prices, because it referred to a quite different "level of abstraction" or had a different intention.

In his 2016 magnum opus, the classical economist Anwar Shaikh achieves the remarkable feat of showing that all the main economic propositions of Marx's Capital can be demonstrated in a coherent way and verified empirically - without any necessary reference to Marx's own dialectical narrative about value, which proved to be so controversial and troublesome.[162] Shaikh devised ingenious techniques to test classical theories of value empirically, using input-output data, capital stock data, labour data, price indexes and incomes data. He claims that generally the deviation of estimated product-values from the corresponding observable market prices of products is not very great (around 1/8th or so), which suggests that the classical transformation problem is empirically much less significant than previously thought.

Chartalist challenge

An implicit technical and historical criticism of Marx's value-form theory is made by some Post Keynesian[163][164][165] and heterodox Marxian economists[166] as well as anarchists like David Graeber,[167] who are inspired by the chartalist theory of money. These economists interpret Marx's narrative about how money originates in the exchange process as a theory of commodity money, or the "commodity theory of money". That is, they believe that Marx's theory is more or less the same as the "barter theory of money".

The "neo-Chartalist" interpretation of money entails, that the commodity theory of money is false;[168][169] the latter, it is argued by neo-chartalists, can neither explain the origin of money and credit, nor provide a credible account of monetary phenomena in the modern world.[170] Chartalists argue that money is completely "a creature of the state" – it first arises as a unit of account for state debts, credits and taxes, and is then gradually imposed on the whole of the trading process in society.[171] If this Chartalist argument is true, then it cannot also be true that, as Marx argues, money originates as a "special commodity" (a referent of value and a universally exchangeable good) within the exchange process itself. The neo-Chartalist theory is known as Modern Monetary Theory (MMT).[172]

The controversy about this challenge to Marx's idea is far from being resolved at this stage,[173] for five reasons:

The main objection to the Chartalist theory of the origins of money is that, for the largest part of recognizably human history, economic exchange in whatever form took place without using a sovereign currency, and that all kinds of physical goods (such as minerals, cattle, hides, shells and slaves) were used as a kind of money.[191] That is, commodity money existed long before sovereign currency emerged, and the economic significance of the early state was very small.[192] Because labour productivity was comparatively low, the surplus product was relatively small and the ability of early states to appropriate it through levies and taxes was also limited. In addition, large trading houses — such as the Dutch East India Company— sometimes issued their own currency, quite independently of the state. So the ability of tokens of value to function as money does not necessarily depend on the state at all, even although, in the modern era, money has mostly taken the form of state-issued currency and, after the demise of the Bretton-Woods Agreement is always in the form of fiat money.

Neo-Chartalists argue however that, although we will never be certain, for lack of definite archaeological proofs, about the origins of money, the first instances of units of account are debt markets, the so-called "tally sticks" in antiquity. Money issued is always debt issued, and, therefore, the notion that money originated as a means of exchange first is regarded as false.[193][194]

Role of market value in human freedom and progress

A fifth line of criticism, articulated especially by libertarians such as Friedrich von Hayek, is that Marx and Engels tend to present "value" and "value relations" as negative, alienating and reifying phenomena that cause people to get used by others, for ends they can no longer fathom. Yet value can also be viewed as a very positive thing. Hayek stated that:

"My whole concept of economics is based on the idea that we have to explain how prices operate as signals, telling people what they ought to do in particular circumstances. (...) In a system in which the knowledge of relevant data is dispersed among millions of agents, prices can act to coordinate the separate actions of different individuals."[195]

According to Marxists, value phenomena belong to the prehistory of humanity that closes with the abolition of capitalism.[196] Thus, for example, Iring Fetscher claims: "Marx's criticism is directed against value as such, not merely against its consequence, capital."[197] In other words, the negative, dehumanizing features of market valuations for workers' lives have had prominence for Marxists,[198] even although Marx also acknowledges here and there that markets have some progressive, developmental and "civilizing" features.[199] Marx and Engels seem to depict the forms of value as an alien, impersonal and corruptive force that gradually subordinates anything and everything to "making money" — and it leads to the reification of human life (and to wars).[200] This opens up a far-reaching and complex theme of criticism.

Five main objections

The first objection is that such an historical judgement is not objective, because, on balance, the results for human civilization of the valuation of labour by capital have had much more progressive effect than Marx & Engels were willing to acknowledge. The proof is said to be, that workers themselves prefer choosing their own employer, purchasing goods at stable prices, and owning private property; market trade has improved their standard of living faster than any other method.[201] On this view, Marxists exaggerated the "money-making" aspect of business, by simply ignoring many other human considerations involved in it (Marx wrote almost nothing on civil society and the sphere of consumption).

A second objection is that Marxists are wrong to think that value disappears when commercial trade is abolished.[202] Here the argument is that humans would simply continue to make valuations anyway, and that goods continue to have value, except that knowing what exactly the magnitude of that value is, becomes much more problematic because a general, shared standard of valuation (expressed in money quantities) is absent.[203] The proof of this is supposed to be the experience of Soviet-type societies where a very large amount of goods was effectively "bartered" or allocated by government decree.[204] Even if there was no trade at all, however, the Soviet authorities knew very well that the products of human labour had value, and, with experience, they could estimate fairly accurately how much labour would need to be employed to produce various kinds of outputs. More generally, it can be argued that human beings as moral subjects are intrinsically valuing subjects, and therefore human relations without values or valuations of some sort do not exist.[205] At best one could say (as Marx did), that the type of value or valuation can change.

A third objection is that people can distinguish quite well between the means/ends rationality of commerce, and non-commercial relationships.[206] Therefore, it is simply an inaccurate and false subjective opinion to claim that there exists some kind of "monumental domination" of commercial relationships over people's lives, because that is not true—except perhaps for people who are obsessively focused on trading relationships. What is ignored is that markets can offer a freedom of choice and development to those who value themselves, and believe in their own self-worth.[207] This kind of argument suggests that the "oppression by economic value" or the "domination of economic value" only exists as a belief or an interpretation which itself can be oppressive.

A fourth objection made is that without the "discipline" and "incentives" of value relations, it is simply impossible to reconcile self-interest and the common interest in any efficient and fair manner, and achieve sensible cost-economies in the use of resources. Again, this is supposed to be proved by the resource waste and ecological damage[208] suffered by Soviet-type societies.[209] If people don't have to work for a living, they will just try to live at the expense of other people. But giving people monetary rewards and costs as a framework to reckon with in making choices about their lives, is vastly preferable to forcing them to work with the threat of real punishment if they don't.

A fifth objection is that it is practically impossible to abolish trade as such in complex societies, and that trade could not be prevented, even if a central state authority allocated resources to individuals through some kind of credit or rationing system. So long as people can privately own belongings, they will trade them, if it is in their interest to do so. In Soviet-type societies, trading continued to occur anyway, even if it was highly regulated, or driven underground (the "grey economy" or black market). Since there is practically no alternative to trading, it is argued the only dispute there can be, concerns the terms on which goods and services are traded—whether that is efficient or morally justifiable. Any policy that aims to regulate or control how people may trade, libertarians argue, represents an attack on their liberty and presumes wrongly that the regulators know better what trade is beneficial, than the trading individuals do themselves (see further socialist calculation debate).[210]

Market socialism and the value-form: a journey to a possibly new kind of socialism

Already from the time that they wrote the Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels were very aware that there was not only "one kind of socialism", but many possible varieties of socialisms – some more desirable than others.[211] They often defended their own socialism against competitors, though sometimes in obscure and little-known polemics. They envisaged socialism as a democratic society of "freely associated producers" organized in councils, communes and cooperatives, without social classes or commercial huckstering, and with a state that would continuously shrink in size.[212] Arguing against total statification such as in the Soviet Union, many modern socialist theorists have claimed however that markets aren't necessarily a bad thing. It all depends on how property rights are organized and institutionalized. Instead, they argue, markets should combine with non-market allocative methods within a market socialism.[213]

Similar to classical social-democratic reformism, the principle is argued that the more that economic goods are allocated by the market, the more the financially strong will defeat the financially weak, and the more socio-economic inequality there will be.[214] Therefore, it is argued, a more egalitarian society requires both market and non-market mechanisms, to allocate goods in a fair way. In this respect, there are many different possible combinations of argument.[215]

All these arguments[268] remain much in dispute among economists seeking economic reform; the debaters still cannot agree about basic concepts of economics, about the possible ways that production, trade and democracy can be combined, or about what factual evidence would finally clinch the controversy.[269] At a fundamental level, the theorists still cannot agree about what capitalism is, what socialism is, and how you get from the one to the other.

In addition, in the cyber-age of the internet, a whole new language is emerging to conceptualize the battle with capitalist value relations - meaning that often the old traditions do not speak clearly anymore to the new situation; their precise relevance is in dispute. With the growth of social media, what socialism means is no longer under the control of academics and political elites. For some, this is a good thing: they argue that the academics and the elites never got it correct anyway, only real workers did. For others, it is a bad thing: they argue that at least the academics and the elites had some rational, thought-through and coherent ideas about socialism.

The alternative to the value-form: the crisis of Marxism

In 1977, at an Il Manifesto conference in Venice, Louis Althusser (the recognized "pope" of Marxism-Leninism in the West at that time) officially announced the "crisis of Marxism", by which he meant primarily the political fragmentation of the communist movement into a plurality of warring parties and sects.[270] However, another speaker at the conference, Rossana Rossanda, went much further than that, arguing that the experience of actually existing socialism had put into question "the very idea of socialism, not as generic aspiration, but as a theory of society, a different mode of organisation of human existence."[271] Moishe Postone added that "The Marxian categories, as traditionally interpreted, are of little use in formulating a social critique of a society that is regulated and dominated by the state" and therefore they "cannot grasp the grounds for continued or increased unfreedom in "actually existing socialism".[272] In the early 1980s, Margaret Thatcher announced the apparent new consensus that there is no alternative to market capitalism.[273] In response, the World Social Forum adopted the slogan "Another world is possible".

Some think the crisis of Marxism cannot easily be overcome anymore, because the millennial generation was born after the collapse of socialist countries; they have been educated to think that socialism was a failure, and they mostly have no knowledge and experience about socialist societies, or they think that real socialism never existed anyway. Universities and libraries have eradicated much of the knowledge about socialist societies and Marxism; the old texts were dumped into their bargain bins, courses were closed down, and lecturers lost their jobs. In 1998, the US Left journal Against the Current complained that "an extreme pessimism of the spirit is weakening our participation in the centuries-old battle of ideas".[274] Others[275] think, that the "crisis of Marxism" is a good and refreshing thing, because it frees the new discussions from dreary dogmatism, from appeals to "sacred" leaders or texts that can't be wrong, and from turgid doctrinairism. They point out that socialism is more popular than ever among young American adults,[276] who are faced with steep housing and education bills, the burden of debt repayments for up to thirty years into the future,[277] and low job and earnings opportunities - a situation regarded as unfair.[278]

The problems which the old socialism was supposed to solve are still there, but the old socialism is not enough to solve them now, which is the problem of the new generation.[279] However few Western Marxists feel able to admit theoretically that real socialism may not be heaven on earth, or that some forms of capitalism may be vastly preferable to some forms of socialism (and vice versa). The Western Left is nowadays very happy to talk about “varieties of capitalism”,[280] but talking about “varieties of socialism” remains almost an absolute "no-no".[281] Most Marxists continue to believe in only one (Marxian) socialism: either that, or nothing at all. Either a society or movement conforms to the true concept of socialism, or it does not; and if it does not, it cannot be socialism. This interpretation originated with Friedrich Engels and Karl Kautsky who promoted Marxist socialism as the one and true "scientific socialism" within the Socialist International, and with Lenin's Communist International (a deliberate split with the social democrats) which adopted Marxist socialism as its official political doctrine. It created the doctrinal problematic of orthodoxy and deviations from orthodoxy.

For much of the 20th century, the official communist parties aimed very consciously to eradicate and discredit any socialism that wasn't Marxist-Leninist as deviant, fake and wrong. It became a kind of political habit among Marxists and therefore, the whole idea of a legitimate socialist pluralism, still common in the time of Marx and Engels, was lost. It began to re-emerge slowly only from the 1960s, with the growth of the Western New Left alongside the decline and fragmentation of the official communist movement and social democracy.[282] Thus, for example, Albert Szymanski explicitly acknowledged in his 1979 pro-Soviet appraisal Is the red flag flying? that "there are many different types of socialism."[283] In this approach, the primary question is not whether a particular socialism corresponds, or does not correspond, to a preconceived ideal type of socialism, but what kind of socialism it empirically is, how it works and how progressive it really is (or not).[284] It is an approach which coheres better with the new "programming mentality"[285] pervading modern academia, because in programming it is acknowledged that the same problem can be solved with various different procedures which can all be valid and workable.

The reality of the value-form

The Marxist philosophers have interpreted the meaning of the value-form, in various ways – intending to prove that Marx’s story does or does not make sense, or needs to be modified. They have explored possible theoretical relationships between the concepts of value, price, trade and labour. Yet there has never been much agreement between them, about what is the correct understanding of the forms of value. At a supremely high level of abstraction, it is of course possible to distinguish oneself from other scholars in very subtle ways.

There is, however, also another approach possible, not philosophical, but scientific: to test out the validity of the value-form idea empirically against observable experience, to understand how things work out in reality.[286] What actually happens, when money suddenly almost disappears in a modern society, because its purchasing power falls sharply to a very low level, money tokens become very scarce, and financial institutions malfunction so that monetary transactions cannot be operated? Does the value of commodities in that case largely vanish, because most of them can no longer be traded for money? Does the commodity form itself disappear, because of rapid demonetization, and the failure of financial institutions to facilitate transactions?

The empirical answer is clearly that commodities and the value of commodities do not go away, when money disappears. The products of human labour continue to have value, and ordinary people know this very well, but they are not traded and paid for anymore in money tokens. Instead, they are bartered on a grand scale (in some cases, up to 50% or 70% of the real gross product),[287]according to variable exchange-ratios or according to fairly stable exchange-ratios. Effectively, the simple form, the expanded form, the general form, and the money form of value then occur side by side in the trading process, while credits and debits are mainly reckoned in quantities of goods, not in money. In recent history, such situations have occurred, for example, in Eastern Europe and in Russia, and they have been studied by Western social scientists intrigued to find out how trade could possibly continue under those conditions.[288]

For conventional economic theory, this phenomenon is "puzzling".[289] After all, barter – bilateral and multilateral – is something that supposedly occurs only in primitive societies, featuring a simple division of labour, and not in modern societies with a complex division of labour. Some leftwing theorists, such as the post-Keynesian economist Michael Beggs and the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber, even deny that barter has ever existed on any large scale.[290] In modern societies, countertrade is supposed to be only a marginal phenomenon, occurring on the periphery of monetized trade. If barter nevertheless does happen on a huge scale, it contradicts the theory of the transaction costs of barter, and the theory of comparative advantage in trade. Why would people choose barter, instead of payment in money, when money is more efficient than barter?[291] How is it possible for this to occur, for a prolonged time, on such a grand scale? And how is a return to monetization accomplished? All the known theories of trade, value and money are tested in such situations. However, so far only a few scholars in the Western Marxist tradition (such as Simon Clarke and Michael Burawoy) have grappled with the theoretical implications.[292]

See also

References

  1. ↑ In English, one would normally say "the form of value", "the form that value takes" or "the form in which value is expressed" but the expression "value-form" is often used, because of the specific concept that Marx had in mind.
  2. ↑ Costas Lapavitsas, Social foundations of money, markets and credit. London: Routledge, 2003; Simon Mohun, "Value, Value Form and Money", in Simon Mohun (ed.), Debates in Value Theory. Macmillan: London, 1994; Alfredo Saad-Filho, The value of Marx. London: Routledge, 2002, section 2.2.
  3. ↑ Hoon Hong, “Marx’s value forms and Hayek’s rules: a reinterpretation in the light of the dichotomy between physis and nomos.” Cambridge Review of Economics, Vol. 26, No. 5, September 2002, pp. 613-635.
  4. ↑ "What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the “commodity.” This I analyse, initially in the form in which it appears. Here I find that on the one hand in its natural form it is a thing for use, alias a use-value; on the other hand, a bearer of exchange-value, and from this point of view it is itself an “exchange-value.” Further analysis of the latter shows me that exchange-value is merely a “form of appearance,” an independent way of presenting the value contained in the commodity, and then I start on the analysis of the latter... the concrete social form of the product of labour, the “commodity,” is on the one hand, use-value and on the other, “value,” not exchange value, since the mere form of appearance is not its own content." - Karl Marx, Notes on Adolph Wagner's “Lehrbuch der politischen Ökonomie, 1879.
  5. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin, 1976, p. 90. Marx also uses the expressions "elementary form" [Elementarform] and "germinal form" [Keimform]
  6. ↑ Marx describes capitalist society as "a society where the commodity-form is the universal form of the product of labour, hence the dominant social relation is the relation between people as possessors of commodities". He argues that "The capitalist epoch is... characterized by the fact that labour-power, in the eyes of the worker himself, takes on the form of a commodity which is his property; his labour consequently takes on the form of wage-labour... it is only from this moment that the commodity-form of the products of labour becomes universal." Thus, "...from the moment there is a free sale, by the worker himself, of labour power as a commodity... from then onwards... commodity production is generalized and becomes the typical form of production." – Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin edition 1976, resp. p. 152, p. 274, p. 733.
  7. ↑ Isaak Illich Rubin, Essays on Marx’s theory of value. Detroit: Black & Red, 1972, p. 37ff and p. 137ff.
  8. ↑ The German term for transformation is Verwandlung, which also means metamorphosis
  9. ↑ Roman Rosdolsky,The Making of Marx's Capital. London: Pluto, 1977.
  10. ↑ See Tino Heim, Metamorphosen des Kapitals: kapitalistische Vergesellschaftung und Perspektiven einer kritischen Sozialwissenschaft nach Marx, Foucault und Bourdieu. Bielefeld: transcript Verlag, 2013.
  11. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Pelican edition, p. 182.
  12. ↑ See Wolfgang Fritz Haug, Critique of Commodity Aesthetics: Appearance, Sexuality and Advertising in Capitalist Society. Introduced by Stuart Hall. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1986, chapter 1; Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and manual labour: a critique of epistemology. London: Macmillan, 1978.
  13. ↑ Capital, Volume I, Penguin ed., pp. 179–180.
  14. ↑ See further Scott Meikle, Aristotle's economic thought. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995; Mark Blaug (ed.), Aristotle (384–322 BC). Aldershot: Elgar, 1991; Cosimo Perrotta, "Economic Value and Moral Value in Aristotle", in: Tony Aspromourgos and John Lodewijks (eds.), History and Political Economy. Essays in Honour of P.D. Groenewegen. London: Routledge, 2004; Spencer J. Pack, Aristotle, Adam Smith and Karl Marx. On Some Fundamental Issues in 21st Century Political Economy. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2010, Part 1.
  15. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin ed. 1976, pp. 174–175.
  16. ↑ A. Anikin, A science in its youth: pre-Marxian political economy. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975, p. 80.
  17. ↑ Ulrich Krause, Money & abstract labour; on the analytical foundations of political economy. London: NLB, 1982, p. 161-162 note 1; Samuel Bailey, A critical dissertation on the nature, measures, and causes of value; chiefly in reference to Mr Ricardo and his followers. London: R. Hunter, 1825; Samuel Bailey, Money and Its Vicissitudes in Value; as They Affect National Industry and Pecuniary Contracts : with a Postscript on Joint Stock Banks. London, 1837; See Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978, Part III, pp.139-168, or Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 32 (New York: International Publishers, 1989), pp. 313-353.
  18. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin 1976, p. 141 note 17.
  19. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume II, Penguin 1978, p. 186.
  20. ↑ In Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Ch.5
  21. ↑ Evald Ilyenkov, The Dialectics of the Abstract and the Concrete in Marx's Capital, Moscow: Progress, 1982, p. 93.
  22. ↑ See Karl Marx, Grundrisse, Pelican edition 1973, pp. 171–172.
  23. ↑ Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, Letters on Capital. London: New Park, 1983, pp. 107-108.
  24. ↑ Karl Marx, "The Value Form", Capital and Class, No.4, Spring 1978, pp.130-150, at p. 134., or Albert Dragstedt, Value: studies by Marx. London: New Park Publications, 1976, p. 49.
  25. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, chapter 1, section 3.
  26. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Pelican edition, pp. 141–142.
  27. ↑ Hans G. Ehrbar, "Critical realist arguments in Marx's Capital", pp. 43-56 in: Andrew Brown, Steve Fleetwood and John Michael Roberts (eds.), Critical Realism and Marxism. London: Routledge, 2002.
  28. ↑ Capital, Volume I, Penguin ed., pp. 89–90).
  29. ↑ Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin ed. 1976, p. 273.
  30. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin 1976, p. 139.
  31. ↑ Penguin ed., p. 241ff.
  32. ↑ Capital, Volume I, Penguin ed., p. 90.
  33. ↑ Capital, Volume I, Penguin ed., p. 94).
  34. ↑ Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring - Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (1878), Part III, chapter 4. In: Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 295.
  35. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin ed. 1976, p. 186.
  36. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin 1976, p. 167.
  37. ↑ Roman Rosdolsky,The Making of Marx's Capital. London: Pluto, 1977, p. 118ff.
  38. ↑ Ibid.
  39. ↑ See the first part of the first chapter of Capital, Volume I; Marx distinguishes between "use-value" and "value", and then considers successively the substance of value, the magnitude of value and the form of value. The point is made very explicit in op. cit., p. 152.
  40. ↑ Capital, Volume III, chapter 1.
  41. ↑ Makoto Itoh, The basic theory of capitalism: the forms and substance of the capitalist economy. London: Macmillan, 1988.
  42. ↑ Karl Marx, Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 3, section 11
  43. ↑ Makoto Itoh and Costas Lapavitsas, Political economy of money and finance. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002, p.5 & 12).
  44. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, Penguin 1981, p. 892.
  45. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin ed., 1976, p. 90.
  46. ↑ Louis Althusser, "Preface to Capital Vol. 1" (1969), in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. London: New Left Books, 1971.
  47. ↑ Ulrich Krause, Money & abstract labour; on the analytical foundations of political economy. London: NLB, 1982, p. 162; Scott Hamilton, "Necessity and contingency: the return of Althusser", Labor Tribune July 2006 .
  48. ↑ Allen Oakley, Marx's critique of political economy. London: Routledge, 1985.
  49. ↑ Jacques Bidet, Exploring Marx's Capital: philosophical, economic and political dimensions. Leiden: Brill, 2007, chapters 2 & 3.
  50. ↑ Howard Engelskirchen, Capital as a Social Kind: Definitions and Transformations in the Critique of Political Economy. London: Routledge, 2011.
  51. ↑ Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, "Value and Price in the Marxian System", International Economic Papers, no. 2, 1952, p. 6, note 2.
  52. ↑ John Eatwell, "absolute and exchangeable value". In: Steven N. Durlauf and Lawrence E. Blume (ed.), The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Second Edition, 2008.
  53. ↑ Arne Heise, "'When the facts change, I change my mind...'Some developments in the economic scientific community and the situation in Germany." Real World Economics Review, issue 62, December 2012. Paul Davidson, Financial markets, money and the real world. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2002, p. 43.
  54. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, chapter 45 .
  55. ↑ Althusser, Reading Capital, p. 314; "Structuralist Marxists, like Louis Althusser, were intent on reading Left Hegelianism out of the Marxist canon. They therefore treated Marx's references to fetishes and gods as ironic figures of speech, even as they attempted to enlist the text on commodity fetishism in the service of opposition to Marxist humanism." - Andrew Levine, "Commodity Fetishism", in: The New Palgrave Dictionary of Economics, Second Edition, 2008; John Milios, "Capital after Louis Althusser. Focusing on Value-Form Analysis." Paper presented at the Conference “Rileggere Il Capitale: La lezione di Louis Althusser”, Department of Historical Studies, University Ca’ Foscari (Venice), November 9-11, 2006, 15 pp.
  56. ↑ One notable exception is the journal Capital & Class, which published a translation by Mike Roth and Wal Suchting of Marx's original text on the value-form as it appears in the first edition of Capital, Volume I. See "The value-form", in: Capital and Class, No.4 Spring 1978, pp. 130–150. Two other journals referring to the value-form discussion are Thesis Eleven and Telos.
  57. ↑ By "social labour" is meant "cooperative labour to produce things which are used by others".
  58. ↑ This is discussed by Marx especially in Part 7 (the last part) of Capital, Volume III, chapters 48 to 52.
  59. ↑ For example, Ernest Mandel, Karl Marx, Part 4: "For Marx, labour is value." Bertell Ollman Alienation: Marx's conception of man in capitalist society. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975, chapter 26, p. 176.
  60. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin ed., p. 146.
  61. ↑ Eric Rutkow, American Canopy: Trees, Forests, and the Making of a Nation. Scribner, 2012.
  62. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin 1976, p. 154.
  63. ↑ Paul Einzig, Primitive money in its ethnological, historical and economic aspects. Pergamon, 1966.
  64. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin ed., p. 183.
  65. ↑ Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, in Marx-Engels Collected Works, Vol. 3. Moscow: Progress, 1975, p. 312. Karl Marx,Capital, Volume II, chapter 4. .
  66. ↑ Bruce G. Trigger, Understanding Ancient Civilizations. Cambridge University Press, 2003, p. 343.
  67. ↑ Henry C. K. Liu, "The London Gold Market", Asia Times, 27 January 2011.
  68. ↑ See Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, chapter 3 section 3C.
  69. ↑ Jan Toporowski, "How the Global Crisis Is Transmitted to Developing Countries", Development Viewpoint, No. 24, February 2009.
  70. ↑ There is a long-running academic dispute about whether the development of the value-form presented by Marx describes an historical sequence, whether it is only a logical exposition, or whether it is both.
  71. ↑ The causal mechanism of price discovery is however not altogether clear, since it could be that the interaction of traders necessary for price discovery determines prices, or that inversely prices determine the interaction of traders.
  72. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin ed. 1976, p. 733.
  73. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume III, Penguin ed., p. 278. Archaeologists and scholars of ancient trade (such as Philip D. Curtin) nowadays reject the idea that primitive trade occurred initially only in the periphery of economic communities.
  74. ↑ Richard Sennett provides a eulogy for the vanishing art of craftsmanship in capitalist society. See: Richard Sennett, The Craftsman. Yale University Press, 2009.
  75. ↑ Oskar Morgenstern, On the accuracy of economic observations, 2nd ed. Princeton University Press, 1963; Michael Ward, Quantifying the world. UN ideas and statistics. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004; John Irvine, Ian Miles & Jeff Evans (eds), Demystifying Social Statistics, Pluto, London, 1979; Radical Statistics Group website
  76. ↑ "Throughout this work I assume that gold is the money commodity, for the sake of simplicity." – Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin edition, chapter 3, p. 188.
  77. ↑ Martin Wolf, "Intolerable choices for the eurozone". Financial Times, 31 May 2011 (in the US, it is about 7%; in 1960 according to Federal Reserve data series, it was about 50%)
  78. ↑ For more information, see Willi Semmler, Asset Prices, Booms and Recessions: Financial Economics from a Dynamic Perspective, 2nd edition. Springer, 2006.
  79. ↑ Marx, Capital, Volume I, Pelican Books, p. 174, note 34.
  80. ↑ For Marx's discussion of the price form in the Grundrisse, see: Adalbert G. Lallier, The economics of the Grundrisse: an annotated summary. New York: St, Martins Press, 1989, chapter 11.
  81. ↑ "Exchange value posited in terms of money is price"- Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 124.
  82. ↑ See: Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Letters on Capital. London: New Park Publications, 1983, p. 108. In the final text, the simplest price form is expressed as "X quantity of use-value = Y quantity of money".
  83. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin 1976, p. 197.
  84. ↑ Howard Nicholas, Marx's theory of price and its modern rivals. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.
  85. ↑ See further: Juan Iñigo Carrera, "The reason for being of value or price according to political economy", translation of chapter 1 by Leonardo Kosloff in Carrera, Conocer el capital hoy. Usar crísticamente El Capital. Volumen I. La mercancía, o la conciencia libre como forma de la conciencia enajenada. Buenos Aires: Imago Mundi, 2007.
  86. ↑ Francis Wheen, Marx's Das Kapital: a biography. Grove Press, 2008, p. 42. See also Francis Wheen, Karl Marx. London: Fourth Estate, 1999, p. 299f.
  87. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin edition, 1976, pp. 99–100.
  88. ↑ Gerald Cohen, Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence. Princeton University Press, 1978, reprint 2001.
  89. ↑ Ibid., p. 353.
  90. ↑ Marcel van der Linden & Ronald Commers, Marx en het wetenschappelijk socialisme. Antwerp: Uitgeverij Leon Lesoil, 1982, p. 44.
  91. ↑ Johann Witt-Hansen, Historical materialism, the method, the theories. Exposition and critique. 1. The method. Copenhagen : Munksgaard, 1960.
  92. ↑ V.I. Lenin, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats (A Reply to Articles in Russkoye Bogatstvo Opposing the Marxists) (1894), Part 1, Lenin Collected Works, Vol. 1. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1937. .
  93. ↑ Friedrich Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific (an excerpt from Herr Eugen Dühring’s Revolution in Science, also known as the Anti-Dühring).[ https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/soc-utop/]
  94. ↑ Karl Marx & Frederick Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 532.
  95. ↑ S. W. Ryazanskaya (ed.), Marx Engels Selected Correspondence, 3rd revised edition. Moscow: Progres Publishers, 1975, pp.196-197.
  96. ↑ Simon Clarke, "The Basic Theory of Capitalism: A Critical Review of Itoh and the Uno School", in: Capital & Class, Vol. 13, No. 1, March 1989, pp. 133–149 at p. 135.
  97. ↑ Isaac I. Rubin, Essay's on Marx's theory of value. Detroit: Black & Red, 1972.
  98. ↑ Hans-Georg Backhaus, "On the dialectics of the value-form". Thesis Eleven, Vol. 1 No. 1, February 1980, pp. 99-120.
  99. ↑ Ibid. p. 250, translation corrected.
  100. ↑ Ibid.p. 251. See also Ronald L. Meek, "A plain person's guide to the transformation problem". In: Ronald L. Meek, Smith, Marx and after. Ten essays in the development of economic thought. London: Chapman & Hall, 1997, pp. 95-119.
  101. ↑ Perhaps Rubin's manuscript on the transformation problem was lost or destroyed. See: Ivan Boldyrev & Martin Kragh, "The Fate of Social Sciences in Soviet Russia: The Case of Isaak Il’Ich Rubin". Higher School of Economics, Research Paper No. WP BPR 17/HUM/2013 Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, 2013.
  102. ↑ "...the value of a commodity is determined not by the quantity of labour actually objectified in it, but by the quantity of living labour necessary to produce it." - Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin 1976, p. 676-677. "...the value of commodities is determined not by the labour-time originally taken by their production, but rather by the labour-time that their reproduction takes, and this steadily decreases as the social productivity of labour develops." - Marx, Capital, Volume III, Penguin 1981, p. 522.
  103. ↑ Howard Nicholas, Marx's theory of price and its modern rivals. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011; Ian Paul Wright, The Law of Value: A Contribution to the Classical Approach to Economic Analysis. Phd dissertation, Open University, 2015; Anwar Shaikh, Capitalism: competition, conflict, crises. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.
  104. ↑ Kozo Uno, Principles of Political Economy. Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society. Translated from the Japanese by Thomas T. Sekine. Brighton, Atlantic Highlands/New Jersey: Harvester Press, 1980. See also Samezo Kuruma, Theory of the Value-Form & Theory of the Exchange Process. Tokyo: Iwanami Shoten, 1957
  105. ↑ Thomas T. Sekine, An outline of the dialectic of capital, Vol. 1. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1997, Part 1 section 1, p. 25ff.
  106. ↑ See Simon Clarke, op. cit.; Jim Kincaid, "A Critique of Value-Form Marxism". Historical Materialism, volume 13, No. 2, 2005, pp. 85–119 ; Elena Louisa Lange, "Failed Abstraction – The Problem of Uno Kōzō’s Reading of Marx’s Theory of the Value Form". Historical Materialism, Vol. 22 No. 1, May 2014, pp. 3-33.
  107. ↑ Pichit Likitkijsomboon, "Marxian Theories of Value-Form". Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 27 no. 2, June 1995, pp. 73-105.
  108. ↑ Helmut Reichelt, "From the Frankfurt School to Value-Form Analysis". Thesis Eleven, No. 4, 1982, pp. 166–169.
  109. ↑ Isaak Illich Rubin, Essays on Marx’s theory of value. Detroit: Black & Red, 1972.
  110. ↑ A good example is: Christopher J. Arthur, The New Dialectic and Marx’s ‘Capital’. Leiden: Brill, 2004.
  111. ↑ Riccardo Bellofiore and Tommaso Redolfi Riva, "The Neue Marx-Lektüre: putting the critique of political economy back into the critique of society." In: Radical Philosophy No. 189, January–February 2015.
  112. ↑ Cf. Paolo Giussani, "Orthodoxy in Marxian Price Theory". In: International Journal of Political Economy, vol. 28, no. 4, winter 1998–99, pp. 6–22. Paolo Giussani, La 'value form school', October 1997. Paper for the conference of the International Working Group on Value Theory, 1997. Andrew Kliman, "On Capitalism’s Historical Specificity and Price Determination Comments on the Value-Form Paradigm." Critique of political economy, Vol. 1, September 2011.
  113. ↑ Axel Kicillof & Guido Starosta, "Value form and class struggle: A critique of the autonomist theory of value". Capital & Class, Summer 2007.
  114. ↑ Anon., "Communisation and value-form theory". Endnotes No. 2, April 2010
  115. ↑ Antonio Negri, "Thesis 5" in: Theses on Marxism
  116. ↑ John Kay, "Let's talk about the market economy", Financial Times, 10 January 2012.
  117. ↑ Alfred Sohn-Rethel, Intellectual and manual labour: a critique of epistemology. London: Macmillan, 1978, p. 33.
  118. ↑ Ibid. p. 49.
  119. ↑ Similarly, Marx claims that "Those who consider the autonomization [Verselbständigung] of value as a mere abstraction, forget that the movement of industrial capital is this abstraction in action. Here value passes through different forms, different movements in which it is both preserved and increases, is valorized." - Karl Marx, Capital, Volume II, Penguin 1978, p. 185.
  120. ↑ Ibid. p. 29, emphasis added. A similar idea is proposed by Richard Sennett in his book Together: The Rituals, Pleasures and Politics of Cooperation. London: Penguin, 2013, p. 72: "'Exchange simply names the experience of give and take among all animals."
  121. ↑ "In the social production of their existence, people inevitably enter into definite relations, which are independent of their will, namely relations of production appropriate to a given stage in the development of their material forces of production. The totality of these relations of production constitutes the economic structure of society, the real foundation, on which arises a legal and political superstructure and to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness." - Karl Marx, 1859 Preface to A contribution to the critique of political economy.
  122. ↑ Moishe Postone, Time, labor, and social domination: A reinterpretation of Marx's critical theory. Cambridge University Press, 1993, acknowledged at p. 3 note 1. See Rubin, op. cit.; Harry Braverman, Labour and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974; Roman Rosdolsky, The Making of Marx's "Capital. London: Pluto, 1977; Derek Sayer, Marx's method: ideology, science and critique in Capital. Sussex: the Harvester Press Ltd., 1979; Michael Burawoy, The Politics of Production: factory regimes under capitalism and socialism. London: Verso, 1985; Patrick Murray, Marx's Theory of Scientific Knowledge. Atlantic Highlands, N.J., 1988.
  123. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin 1976, p. 174 note 34 (translation as amended by Postone). See Postone, op. cit., p. 55. The German original text is: "Die Wertform des Arbeitsprodukts ist die abstrakteste, aber auch allgemeinste Form der bürgerlichen Produktionsweise, die hierdurch als eine besondere Art gesellschaftlicher Produktion und damit zugleich historisch charakterisiert wird. Versieht man sie daher für die ewige Naturform gesellschaftlicher Produktion, so übersieht man notwendig auch das Spezifische der Wertform, also der Warenform, weiter entwickelt der Geldform, Kapitalform usw." - Marx Engels Werke, Vol. 23, p. 95, note 32. Thus, Postone's revised translation is also inexact. In the MEGA2 edition (II/10), the German passage occurs at p. 79:39 and is exactly the same at the MEW version, except for retaining the archaic spelling.
  124. ↑ Postone, op. cit., p. 45.
  125. ↑ Ibid. p. 45.
  126. ↑ Ibid. p. 63.
  127. ↑ Ibid. p. 47.
  128. ↑ Ibid. p. 48.
  129. ↑ Ibid., p. 55.
  130. ↑ Ibid., p. 290.
  131. ↑ Ibid., p. 297.
  132. ↑ Geert Reuten & Michael Williams, Value-form and the State. The Tendencies of Accumulation and the Determination of Economic Policy in Capitalist Society. London, 1989.
  133. ↑ Geert Reuten's papers are available at his personal web page
  134. ↑ Kolja Lindner, "The German Debate on the Monetary Theory of Value. Considerations on Jan Hoff's Kritik der klassischen politischen Ökonomie", Science & Society Vol. 72, No. 4, 2008, pp. 402–414. Jean Cartelier, "Marx's Theory of Value, Exchange and Surplus Value: A Suggested Reformulation". Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 15, no. 3, September 1991, pp. 257–269.
  135. ↑ Michael Heinrich, Michael, An introduction to the three volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012, pp. 63–64, emphasis added.
  136. ↑ Karl Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin edition, 1976, pp. 184–185.
  137. ↑ Printing a US$1 banknote costs around 5 cents. Federal Reserve Board FAQ page, How much does it cost to produce currency and coin?.
  138. ↑ John Milios, "Marx's Value Theory Revisited. A ‘Value-form' Approach." Proceedings of the Seventh International Conference in Economics, Economic Research Centre, METY, Ankara, September 6–9, 2003. (Part 5, p. 9)
  139. ↑ Marx, Capital, Volume I, Penguin 1976, p. 196.
  140. ↑ Michael Eldred, Critique of competitive freedom and the bourgeois-democratic state: outline of a form-analytic extension of Marx's uncompleted system. Copenhagen: Kurasje, 1984; Michael Eldred,Social Ontology: Recasting Political Philosophy Through a Phenomenology of Whoness. Frankfurt: Ontos Verlag, 2008; Michael Eldred, Anglophone Justice Theory, the Gainful Game and the Political Power Play, 2011.
  141. ↑ In their book Capital as power (Routledge, 2009).
  142. ↑ Harry Cleaver, Reading Capital Politically. University of Texas Press, 1979.
  143. ↑ For example, Andrew Kliman argues that Nitzan & Bichler seek to define power "in terms of market capitalization: a market cap that is 1000 times as great as the average doesn't give the owners 1000 times as much power; it simply is 1000 times as much power. This identification of capital and power—capital as power—is certainly not correct in a literal sense." Andrew Kliman, "Value and Crisis: Bichler and Nitzan versus Marx." in: Journal of Critical Globalisation Studies, issue 4, 2011, p.67.
  144. ↑ Robert H.Bork & J. Gregory Sidak, "The misuse of profit margins to infer market power". Journal of Competition Law & Economics, Vol. 9, No. 3 2013, pp. 511-530.
  145. ↑ Lawrence Krader, A Treatise of Social Labour. Assen: Van Gorcum, 1979 and Labor and value, ed. by Cyril Levitt and Rod Hay. New York: Peter Lang, 2003. David Graeber, Towards an Anthropological Theory of Value: The False Coin of our Own Dreams. Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.
  146. ↑ In The Economic Theory of the Leisure Class (completed 1914), Bukharin cites Werner Sombart's review article "Zur Kritik des oekonomischen Systems von Karl Marx", in Archiv für soziale Gesetzgebung und Statistik, vol. VII, 1894, pp. 591, 592. See further David P. Levine, Subjectivity in political economy. Essays on wanting and choosing. London: Routledge, 1998.
  147. ↑ J. E. King and Michael McLure, "History of the concept of value". Discussion paper 14.06, Business School, University of Western Australia, 2014.
  148. ↑ David Graeber, "Value: anthropological theories of value", in: James G. Carrier, A Handbook of Economic Anthropology. Edward Elgar, 2005, p. 453.
  149. ↑ Philip Mirowski, More heat than light: economics as social physics, physics as nature’s economics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989.
  150. ↑ Ibid., p. 184.
  151. ↑ Ibid. p. 178.
  152. ↑ Ian Paul Wright, The Law of Value: A Contribution to the Classical Approach to Economic Analysis. Phd dissertation, Open University, 2015, p. 139.
  153. ↑ Eran Fisher & Christian Fuchs, Reconsidering value and labour in the digital age. Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015; Christian Fuchs & Vincent Mosco, Marx in the age of digital capitalism. Leiden: Brill Publishers, 2016.
  154. ↑ Michael Perelman, Steal This Idea; Intellectual Property and the Corporate Confiscation of Creativity. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003; Hal Varian, Economics of Information Technology. March 23, 2003. Working paper, University of California, Berkeley, 203.
  155. ↑ Hamid R. Ekbia and Bonnie A. Nardi, Heteromation, and Other Stories of Computing and Capitalism. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2017. Hamid R. Ekbia and Bonnie A. Nardi, "Heteromation and its (dis)contents: the invisible division of labour between humans and machines. First Monday, Volume 19, Number 6, June 2014.
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  157. ↑ Ronald L. Meek, "From values to prices: was Marx's journey really necessary?". In: Ronald L. Meek, Smith, Marx and after. Ten essays in the development of economic thought. London: Chapman & Hall, 1997, pp. 120-133.
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  160. ↑ Thus, for example, in his textbook Monetary Theory (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1981) the prominent English Marxian economist Laurence Harris, well known for his contributions to Marxian value theory, paid no attention to the price-form itself.
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  205. ↑ "A world without values stops being a human civilization, looking rather like a society of Hymenoptera. Human beings would return to animality or change into a bio-mechanical aggregate. Directly or symbolically, values express people's projects, the constellation of their preferences professed and aimed at, the hierarchy of their preferences, their way of making a choice and being chosen. It is only through the values assumed and promoted that a person's synthetic project called happiness acquires shape." - Ludwig Grünberg,The Mystery of Values: Studies in Axiology. Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2000, p. 127.
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  207. ↑ This is argued most powerfully by Milton Friedman in his book Free to Choose.
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  254. ↑ Charles Bettelheim, The transition to socialist society. Hassocks, Sussex: Harvester Press, 1975, p. 150.
  255. ↑ Robert Weil, Red Cat, White Cat: China and the Contradictions of "Market Socialism". New York: Monthly Review Press, 1996.
  256. ↑ See the homepage of Erik Olin Wright.
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  258. ↑ Michael Lebowitz, The Socialist Alternative: Real Human Development. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2010. Michael Lebowitz,Build it Now: Socialism for the 21st Century. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012. Michael Lebowitz,The Contradictions of "Real Socialism": The Conductor and the Conducted. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2012. Michael A Lebowitz, The Socialist Imperative: From Gotha to Now. New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015.
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  260. ↑ Anthony Giddens, The Third Way. The Renewal of Social Democracy. Cambridge : Polity, 1998; Robert Rowthorn, Democracy and Efficiency in the Economic Enterprise. Taylor & Francis, 2003; Geoffrey Hodgson, Economics and utopia. London: Routledge, 1999.
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  262. ↑ Diane Elson, “Socialized Markets, not Market Socialism”. Socialist Register 2000, pp. 67-85 at p. 68. Diane Elson, “Market Socialism or Socialization of the Market?” New Left Review, no. 172, Nov/Dec 1988, pp. 3–44. Commentary by Peter T. Manicas.
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  264. ↑ Frank Furedi, "Capitalism after the ‘credit crunch’: what is it good for?". Spiked, 30 October 2008.
  265. ↑ See e.g., Samuel Bowles & Herbert Gintis, A cooperative species: human reciprocity and its evolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2011.
  266. ↑ Samuel Bowles, "The end of liberalism", in: The Boston Globe, 20 June 2017.
  267. ↑ Gary Chartier & Charles W. Johnson (eds.), Markets, not capitalism. Individualist anarchism against bosses, inequality, corporate power and structural poverty. New York: Autonomedia, 2011.
  268. ↑ Some of the historical Marxist debates in Europe are reviewed in Catherine Samary, Plan, Market and Democracy, IIRE Notebook for study and research 7/8, 1988.
  269. ↑ Many of the important technical discussions in socialist or post-socialist societies have unfortunately never been translated into English, and the controversies are often strongly influenced by ideological, political or moral positions or cherished dogmas.
  270. ↑ Ronaldo Munck, Marx@2000: late Marxist perspectives. London: Zed Books, 2002, p. 16.
  271. ↑ Il Manifesto, Power and opposition in post-revolutionary societies. London: Ink Links, 1979, p. 9.
  272. ↑ Moishe Postone, Time, labor, and social domination: A reinterpretation of Marx's critical theory. Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 11.
  273. ↑ According to the official Thatcher biography, the phrase "there is no alternative" was in reality due to chancellor Geoffrey Howe.
  274. ↑ James D. Young, "Pessimism of the Spirit and Contemporary Socialism: Recovering Louis Fraina's Time.". Against The Current, issue 75, July–August 1998.
  275. ↑ For example, Bhaskar Sunkara and Jacobin
  276. ↑ Dylan Matthews, "Inside Jacobin: how a socialist magazine is winning the left's war of ideas." vox.com 21 March 2016.
  277. ↑ Zack Friedman, "Student Loan Debt In 2017: A $1.3 Trillion Crisis." Forbes, 21 February 2017.
  278. ↑ Harold Meyerson, "Why are there suddenly millions of socialists in America?". The Guardian, 29 February 2016.
  279. ↑ Roger Burbach, Orlando Nunez, Boris Kagarlitsky, Globalization and Its Discontents: The Rise of Postmodern Socialisms. London: Pluto Press, 1997; Robert Albritton, Shannon Bell & Richard Westra (eds.), New Socialisms: Futures Beyond Globalization. London: Routledge, 2004.
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  281. ↑ Richard Westra, Robert Albritton, Seongjin Jeong, Varieties of Alternative Economic Systems: Practical Utopias for an Age of Global Crisis and Austerity. London: Routledge, 2017.
  282. ↑ In the era of de-Stalinization, the Italian communist leader Palmiro Togliatti advocated his theory of polycentrism which aimed to provide more independence for individual communist parties from the Moscow line, more appropriate to local conditions. See: Donald Sassoon, The Strategy of the Italian Communist Party. Palgrave Macmillan, 1981, pp. 99-116.
  283. ↑ Albert Szymanski, Is the red flag flying? The political economy of the Soviet Union today. London: Zed Press, 1979, p. 32.
  284. ↑ David Lane, The Rise and Fall of State Socialism: Industrial Society and the Socialist State. Polity Press, 1996.
  285. ↑ "Programming in object-oriented programming is all about modeling the real world in code. You solve problems by creating objects and giving them properties and make methods that perform actions to solve problems." Darrell Nicholas, "Can the programming mindset be taught?", Quora blog, 22 February 2015.
  286. ↑ "One has to “leave philosophy aside”... one has to leap out of it and devote oneself like an ordinary man to the study of actuality, for which there exists also an enormous amount of literary material, unknown, of course, to the philosophers... Philosophy and the study of the actual world have the same relation to one another as onanism and sexual love." - Karl Marx & Friedrich Engels, The German Ideology, chapter 3.
  287. ↑ Paul Seabright (ed.), The vanishing rouble: barter networks and non-monetary transactions in post-socialist societies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp. 98-99, 127, 147, 207, 241.
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  289. ↑ Simon Commander, Irina Dolinskaya and Christian Mumssen, "Determinants of barter in Russia: an empirical analysis." Washington DC: IMF Working Paper, October 2000, p. 3.
  290. ↑ Ilana E. Strauss, "The myth of the barter economy." The Atlantic, 26 february 2016.
  291. ↑ David Woodruff, "Barter of the Bankrupt: The Politics of Demonetization in Russia's Federal State." In: Michael Burawoy and Katherine Verdery (eds.), Uncertain Transition: Ethnographies of Change in the Postsocialist World. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999, pp. 83-113.
  292. ↑ Michael Burawoy, Simon Clarke, Peter Fairbrother, and Pavel Krotov (eds.), What About the Workers? Workers and the Transition to Capitalism in Russia. London: Verso, 1993; Simon Clarke, The development of capitalism in Russia. Milton Park: Routledge, 2007.
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