use value from one commodity, they hope to profit from the exchange value in which it results, in the sale of another.
Time, thus, represents the means by which all else is calculated in Marx’s substantialist schema, and the basis for the surplus that accrues to the capitalist in the form of value. Commodities, for Marx, are to be understood as ‘congealed labour-time’, and, where the substance of value is human labour, the measure of its magnitude is nothing other than labour-time.80 However, it might be said that, if this state of affairs were really the case and labour-time directly determined value, then work conducted at a relaxed pace would be represented in a greater amount of value than more fastidious and efficient efforts.81 To clarify, Marx himself forewarns against the substantialist pitfall of regarding labour-time as the measure of commodity value whilst in the same instance ‘confusing the labour which is materialised in the exchange value of commodities and measured in time units with the direct physical activity of individuals’.82 This has implications that, as we will see in subsequent chapters, cannot be neatly contained in a substantialist approach to the value problematic.
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Scholars like Jean Baudrillard have suggested that Marx’s critique, in its continuation of themes from classical political economy, remains too close to its object in assuming the standpoint of one of its conceptual poles, labour.83 Indeed, partly owing to the political expendiencies of the time in which Marx was writing, in places he did endow production and labour with a ‘revolutionary title of nobility’. This ‘productivism’, Baudrillard argues, exhibits a tendency to ascribe to production the status of the ‘active moment’ in the determination of value, and to other moments, such as consumption, a relative and absolute passivity. This conceptually subordinates ‘[s]ocial wealth or language, meaning or value, sign or phantasm’ to some kind of ‘production’ at the hands of one or another type of ‘labour’. This productivist logic, Baudrillard suggests, mimics that of capitalist society itself in subordinating everything, ‘all human material and every contingency of desire and exchange’, to the ends of ‘value, finality, and production’.84 Delving into the realm of production brings us no closer to the truth of the matter, Baudrillard asserts, for, ‘instead of the shadows of the market place, we are sent to an equally obscure underside of the system: the place of production’.85 The latter cannot be understood in isolation from its contradictory unity with the sphere of circulation, just as use value has no existence independent of its contradictory unity with exchange value – the each being the precondition of the other – and concrete labour no existence independent of its contradictory unity with abstract labour.86 However, Baudrillard argues that this did not stop Marx positivizing the first term of each over the other as the underpinning principle of a wider social transformation, remaining mired in the ‘repressed side’ of the concepts of classical political economy and the capitalist society it sought to describe.87
As such, in basing itself in the perspective of production, a part of Marx’s critique was left incomplete, and, at its best, it merely served to ‘interiorize’ and ‘complete’ its object, substituting one naturalization – of Homo economicus in Smith and Ricardo – for another.88 In this way, Marx’s theories are ‘taken in by the [same] socially produced appearance (Schein)’ of economic objectivity that Marx’s critique itself attempted to decipher.89 In taking for granted the appearance of value as having been ‘created’ by a substantial, physical, concrete brand of labour, Marx adopted a part of the object he sought to critique, namely Ricardo’s labour theory of value. Since then, over the course of its reception, ‘Marx’s theory of value has been mistakenly identified with the classical, or Ricardian, labour theory of value’, and not, as we will go on to see, the study of ‘the specific social form of labour’ that we find elsewhere in Marx.90 Part of the difficulty arises from the fact ‘that Marx left behind no finished version of the labour theory of value’. In this context, ‘there remains … an urgent priority … to reconstruct out of the more or less fragmentary presentations and the numerous individual remarks strewn in other works, the whole of the value theory’.91 Rather than a question of theological correctness, uncovering the essence of Marx’s work is more a matter of where to place emphasis in his sprawling and unfinished output. Stressing the ‘labour’ theory of value or his theory of exploitation, as we have done here alongside other ‘substance’ theories of value, only serves to ‘neglect his originality and reduce him to something which was already reached before’.92 As we see next, it is rather the specific monetary character of his theory that distinguishes it from what went before, moving closer to later ‘subjective’ theories of value as a relation than the ‘objective’ theories of value as a substance considered in this chapter. This can be done only by ‘tearing the theory apart and putting it together in a new form to reach the goal that it has set itself better’, in the words of Jurgen Habermas.93
Notes
1 1 R. L. Heilbroner, 1983. The Problem of Value in the Constitution of Economic Thought. Social Research, 50(2), pp. 253–77 (p. 259).
2 2 P. Mirowski, 1989. More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics. Cambridge University Press, pp. 192, 399.
3 3 Aristotle, 2000. The Politics. Trans. T. A. Sinclair. London: Penguin; Aristotle, 2004. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. J. A. K. Thompson. London: Penguin; Mirowski 1989, p. 145; A. Monroe, ed. 1924. Early Economic Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 27.
4 4 Mirowski 1989, p. 142.
5 5 P. Mirowski, 1990. Learning the Meaning of a Dollar: Conservation Principles and the Social Theory of Value in Economic Theory. Social Research, 57(3), pp. 689–717 (p. 697); Mirowski 1989, p. 142.
6 6 A. Smith, 1982. The Wealth of Nations. London: Penguin, p. 150, and D. Ricardo, 1981. The Works and Correspondence of David Ricardo. Vol I, ed. P. Sraffa and M. Dobb. Cambridge University Press; K. Marx, 1976. Capital. Vol. I. London: Penguin.
7 7 Mirowski 1989, p. 148. This section draws, in part, on the discussion in M. Bolton and F. H. Pitts, 2018. Corbynism: A Critical Approach. Bingley: Emerald, pp. 135–8.
8 8 M. Mazzucato, 2019. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. London: Penguin, p. 26.
9 9 Mirowski 1989, p. 148.
10 10 Mirowski 1989, pp. 159–60.
11 11 Mazzucato 2019, p. 28.
12 12 Mazzucato 2019, p. 33.
13 13 K. Marx, 1970. Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy. London: Lawrence and Wishart, pp. 54–5.
14 14 Marx 1970, pp. 55–7.
15 15 Mazzucato 2019, p. 33.
16 16 Mazzucato 2019, pp. 37–40.
17 17 Heilbroner 1983, p. 263.
18 18 Smith 1982, pp. 430–1.
19 19 Heilbroner 1983, pp. 263–4.
20 20 S. Clarke, 1991. Marx, Marginalism and Modern Sociology. London: Palgrave, pp. 21-–8, 97–9; K. Marx, 1991. Capital. Vol. III. London: Penguin, pp. 953–70.
21 21 S. Veca, 1971. Value, Labor and the Critique of Political Economy. Telos, 1971(9), pp. 48–64 (p. 52).
22 22 Marx 1970, pp. 50, 57–8.
23 23 Veca 1971, pp. 48–52.
24 24 A. Dinerstein and M. Neary, 2002.
