itself from royal or divine determination.9 We can follow Heilbroner in broadly identifying ‘five distinct attempts to unravel the value problematic’: substantialism, the cost-of-production approach, Marx’s theory of value, utility theory and the normative theory of value. These map roughly onto Mirowski’s demarcation between conservation or substance theories of value, comprising substantialism and cost of production; field theories of value, which span Marx and utility theory; and the social theory of value, of which Heilbroner seems to be speaking too in his delineation of the ‘normative’ institutionalist approach to value.10 This book broadly tracks this typology, covering each of these strands in turn, as well as some others along the way.
Chapter 1, ‘Value as Substance’, considers theories of value that posit a conserved substance in the commodity itself, typically put there by labour. This idea develops through so-called ‘balance of trade’ mercantilism based on trade and competition between nations, which vied with physiocratic accounts of the productive centrality of agriculture to nascent capitalist economies. It blossoms in classical political economy and its focus on the surplus, before reaching its climax in the critique of political economy by Marx, who moved beyond market exchange to confront the classed dynamics of the workplace in determining the production and distribution of value.
Chapter 2, ‘Value as Relation’, considers the development of so-called ‘field’ theories of value that situate value not in any thing or activity but rather in the money-mediated relationship between them. First, we survey the contribution of ‘free trade’ mercantilists and the work of Samuel Bailey, before using the so-called ‘new reading’ of Marx to demonstrate how the full development of the latter’s value theory breaks with substantialist accounts of the production of value, stressing instead the sphere of circulation and the moment of monetary exchange in ascribing value to products of labour. This places Marx on the path to a proto-marginalist ‘subjective’ theory of value – a historically decisive break with the ‘objective’ theories of value associated with prior political economy.
Chapter 3, ‘Value as Utility’, examines the development of the relational ‘field’ theory of value marginalist utility theory. We first explore its foundations and political imperatives through the work of Bernoulli and Bentham, before a discussion of its central unit of analysis, the ‘util’. Drawing on critical reconstructions in the work of institutionalists such as Mirowski, we identify utility theory’s incomplete break with a concept of substance. Finally, we explore, through a consideration of the so-called ‘Weber–Fechner’ debate, issues in the marginalist tradition around the measurability of marginal utility. Whilst utility theory has some advantages, moving from a production-based standpoint to include other moments of consumption and exchange within the determination of value, its individualized and asocial view of capitalist society leaves significant conceptual gaps with problematic real-life consequences.
Chapter 4, ‘Value and Institutions’, surveys how ‘social’ and ‘normative’ theories of value plug gaps inherent in other approaches to value. We first explore the ‘normative’ theory of value inaugurated with Aristotle, before charting the development of the ‘social’ theory associated with institutionalists like Thorstein Veblen and John Commons, before moving on to the more recent ‘power’ theory of value promoted in the work of Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler. We then discuss the increasingly significant ‘Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation’ – specifically, how social and political processes of valuation are theorized in the work of Arjun Appadurai, and the ‘valuation studies’ that develop from his work an analysis of the ‘regimes of value’ enacted in so-called ‘market devices’, as well as the ‘cultural economy’ approach influenced by Michel Callon and Pierre Bourdieu. Continuing a focus on the ‘performativity’ of both value and theories of it, we use the work of Mazzucato to explore the past and present politics of productiveness and unproductiveness that both influence the development of different theories of value and represent their real-world outcome.
Chapter 5, ‘Value as Struggle’, revisits aspects of both the ‘substantialist’ and the ‘relational’ Marx introduced in the first and second chapters, using open Marxism and autonomist Marxism to delve deeper to unfold the historical constitution of value in a set of classed, gendered and racialized social relations based on the separation of individuals from the independent means to reproduce the conditions of living, and how the dual character of labour as concrete and abstract within the production process itself represents the terrain for class struggle over the form and content of work and value in capitalist society.
Chapter 6, ‘Value in Crisis’, closes the book by considering the possible futures of value in a financialized economy based on modes of ‘immaterial’ production. The ‘postoperaist’ school of Italian post-Marxism proposes a crisis in the law of value, wherein the value produced by contemporary digital labour exceeds the capacity of capital to capture it through means such as financialization. We conclude by insisting on the persistence of value in spite of its purported ‘crisis’ – if not as an economic category, then as a subject of social and political struggle that will rage into a new decade of populism, technological change and, now, at the time of writing this introduction, pandemic.
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Finally, some acknowledgements. This book brings together threads from a decade-long empirical and theoretical interest in value, but the initial spark for much of the work represented here was a project led by Lee Marshall of the University of Bristol on ‘The Value of Music in the Digital Age’, funded by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law. My thanks go to Lee for his input and support with the original mapping of, and early work on, the book that followed. I have also learnt a great deal from conversation and collaboration on the topic of value with other colleagues and friends over the past years – in particular, Matt Bolton, Jon Cruddas, Ana Dinerstein and Patrizia Zanoni. Sincere thanks are also due to George Owers at Polity for suggesting that I write the book in the first place, and the excellent editorial support received thereafter from him and his team. In particular, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their incredibly generous and helpful comments on the manuscript at an earlier stage. All the usual disclaimers apply, especially seeing as I did not have the space to respond to their recommendations in full. The book is dedicated to my youngest daughter Nico – funnily enough, not the first baby in recent family history to be born in the breathing space between submission and revision of a book I was writing. With that in mind, I would like to thank my partner and children for bearing with me in the final throes of writing and revising the book amidst the strange and slightly crazed lockdown days of the first half of 2020. The book was written before the pandemic hit, but the debates raging in its wake – about the value of previously undervalued forms of work, or the value of human life and health versus the value of continuing economic activity – will only intensify in the inevitable crisis to come, sharpening the political and material significance of the issues discussed in the pages that follow.
Notes
1 1 W. Bonefeld, 2014. Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason. London: Bloomsbury; R. Bellofiore and T. R. Riva, 2015. The Neue Marx-Lekture: Putting the Critique of Political Economy Back into the Critique of Society. Radical Philosophy, 189, pp. 24–36; F. H. Pitts, 2015. The Critique of Political Economy as a Critical Social Theory. Capital & Class, 39(3), pp. 537–45.
2 2 M. Horkheimer, 1976 [1937]. Traditional and Critical Theory. In P. Connerton (ed.), Critical Sociology. London: Penguin, pp. 206–24.
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