Marx vs. Aristotle on the Labor Theory of Value (UNLOCKED)
In the first chapter of Capital, Marx praises Aristotle--and writes about his historically determined moral blinders.
Aristotle is mentioned twice in the first chapter of Capital. In the first passage, Marx calls Aristotle “the great investigator” and credits him for pioneering insights about a wide variety of “forms of thought, society, and nature.” In the second, he calls him a “great thinker.”
In neither case, though, is Marx bringing him up to agree with him.
“Marxism” is often used as a synonym for a normative political program—roughly, advocacy of organizing a movement based in the working class with the goal of overcoming capitalism and instituting socialism. And of course that is the goal in service of which Marx developed “Marxism” as a descriptive intellectual project. To whatever extent that project deserves his collaborator Engels’s label of “scientific socialism,” it’s an applied science, like medicine or engineering. Marx is trying to understand the world because he wants to change it.
That project of understanding the world in turn breaks down into (a) a theory of the stages of history, individuated by how production is organized (e.g. “feudalism” or “capitalism”) and (b) a theory of the transitions between stages. Roughly, Marx thinks the level of development of the “forces of production” (i.e. a society’s capacity to produce things) is upstream of the “relations of production” (e.g. relations between lords and serfs or between workers and capitalists), and that these productive relations are themselves upstream of the legal and political “superstructure” characteristic of that stage.
Struggle between contending social classes can result in the transition from one stage to another—although when and in what ways this is possible depends on the level of the productive forces. Marx didn’t think that an underdeveloped country like Tsarist Russia, for example, could leapfrog from semi-feudalism all the way to socialism unless “the Russian Revolution becomes the signal for a proletarian revolution in the West” and revolutionary Russia could thus help itself to the industrial base of western Europe.
Component (a) in turn breaks down into:
A theory of how feudalism worked
A theory of how capitalism works
…and so on. But Marx expended the vast majority of his intellectual energy on his theory of the capitalist phase of history for the simple reason that it’s the phase we’re stuck in, and he hoped that understanding it better would make it easier to see the way out.
One of the two references to Aristotle in Ch. 1 comes in footnote 35—which is essentially a short essay on Marx’s overall theory of history. Quoting his formulation of that theory several years earlier, he says “the economic structure of society” is “the real foundation, on which arises the legal and political superstructure to which correspond definite forms of social consciousness” and that “the mode of production of material life conditions the general process of social, political, and intellectual life.” He then “seize[s] the opportunity” to respond to an objection to this theory put forward by a German-American publication, which claims that “this is all very true for our own times, in which material interests are preponderant, but not for the Middle Ages, dominated by Catholicism, nor for Athens and Rome, dominated by politics.”
Marx argues that the objection misses the point:
One thing is clear: the Middle Ages could not live on Catholicism, nor could the ancient world on politics. On the contrary, it is the manner in which they gained their livelihood which explains why in one case politics, in the other case Catholicism, played the chief part.
Similarly, he derides the French politician and economist Bastiat, “who imagined the ancient Greeks and Romans lived on plunder alone.” Taken seriously, this doesn’t make much sense:
[I]f people live by plunder for centuries there must, after all, be something to plunder; in other words, the objects of plunder must be continuously reproduced. It seems, therefore, that even the Greeks and the Romans had a process of production, hence an economy, which constituted the material basis of their world as much as the bourgeois economy constitutes that of the present-day world.
But maybe this is too literal. Perhaps Bastiat just means that “a mode of production based on the labour of slaves” is therefore “based on a system of plunder.”
In that case he is on dangerous ground. If a giant like Aristotle could err in his evaluation of slave-labour, why should a dwarf economist like Bastiat be right about wage-labour?
Marx argues in later chapters that wage-labor, slave-labor, and serf-labor all involve versions of exploitation—in the sense that in each of these systems the “immediate producers” are forced to work a certain number of hours to enrich the ruling class of their society in addition to the hours they work to meet their own needs. But in Chapter One he isn’t there yet. Outside of passing instances like footnote 35, he doesn’t really start talking about class until the end of Ch. 6. Instead, the early chapters are spent laying the conceptual building blocks—the workings of use-value, exchange-value, money, and various kinds of markets—that are going to be necessary to explain the form exploitation takes in the capitalist phase of history.1
The use-value of a commodity is whatever it does for its possessor. My battered old copy of Capital can be used to look up footnotes when I’m trying to remember exactly what Marx says when he’s dunking on Bastiat. It can also be used to prop up the computer from which I’m reading lecture notes at the Palestine encampment at Princeton:
..and I suppose in a pinch I could sell it to a used bookstore, and thus use it as a means to get money. (Given its physical condition, I imagine I could get me a dime or perhaps even a quarter.) Or maybe I could trade it to someone with an equally battered copy of something I hadn’t read yet.2 These last two purposes are examples of exchange-value.
And money is a commodity whose use-value is (almost) entirely limited to its exchange-value. (Marx knows that it’s only “almost.” In Ch. 2 he gives the example of gold, which, despite being “the money commodity” in many societies, is still used by dentists in those societies to fill hollow teeth.) A big part of Marx’s point in those early chapters is that money isn’t anything special. It’s just a commodity that lubricates the exchange of other commodities through its role as a universal equivalent. So various proposals that were floating around at the time to fix the ills of commercial society as it actually existed by doing away with money and replacing it with e.g. chits representing hours of labor time missed the point. A moneyless market would be a vastly less efficient market but it would still be a market in every way that mattered.
As far as I can tell Marx thinks the existence of market mechanisms is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for the existence of capitalism as a class structure. You also need a particular distribution of property, creating a “doubly free” labor force—legally free to move around and make contracts with any employers who will have them, and “free” from any means of supporting themselves other than selling their working hours to a capitalist. The final section of the book is about how these conditions came to be in actual history—though a big part of his point in first seven sections is that given such a property distribution plus market mechanisms, capitalist class structures can reproduce themselves just fine going forward however this all came about in the first place.
While it’s difficult to imagine any market society not adopting the expedience of a universal equivalent, in theory you could have capitalist class relations on the foundation of a moneyless market. Employment contracts would stipulate payment in housing, clothes, food, and so on—all lost if you lost your job. In fact, the actual history of capitalism gives us examples of at least localized pockets of something very close to this—nineteenth century company towns where workers were paid wages not in dollars but in company scrip only redeemable at the company store.
Exchange-value is expressed in ratios. One coast is worth such-and-such many yards of linen. Or it’s worth such-and-such many dollars or euros—same difference.
Being worth such-and-such many yards of linen is a relational property of a coat—a property that relates the coat to some yards of linen. But Marx thought there must be a common monadic property possessed by both—a property of the coat by itself, and of the yards of linen by themselves, which grounded this equivalence. That’s plain “value.”
In our own century, most academically trained economists—even ones who are politically sympathetic to Marxism—reject this premise. They think exchange ratios can be explained just fine by supply-and-demand schedules without having to bring a separate notion of “underlying value” into the picture. There’s a complicated argument to be had about that, but I have other fish to fry today, so all I’ll say about it is that (i) as I argued here a few weeks ago, Marx’s most important arguments later in Capital go through even if we remain agnostic about the “exchange-value must represent differing quantities of underlying value” premise, and (ii) Marx’s claims about what value is, and his related critique of Aristotle, are extremely interesting whatever you make of this technical economic debate.
Like historical materialism, Marx’s theory of value can be usefully broken down into two components3:
The theory that the value of a commodity is the average amount of socially necessary labor time it takes under given conditions to produce it.4
The theory that “value” in this sense plays an important role in explaining or predicting important phenomena—e.g. how commodities are priced when various other factors are in equilibrium, or “the falling rate of profit.”
Only the first of these matters for Marx’s dispute with Aristotle. And at first glance, it might look like a trivial claim. If the question is just how Marx is using the word, we can let the man define his terms however he likes!
But he doesn’t treat this as a matter of stipulative definition in Capital. He treats it as an important discovery—though not one entirely unique to him.5 We can think of it like this:
Many previous thinkers shared Marx’s assumption that exchange ratios represented the underlying “values” of different commodities. He thinks they were noticing the same phenomenon he was. They just didn’t understand what value was.
And hey, lots of facts about identity are like this. Aristotle, for example, certainly knew about the existence of water. But he didn’t know that water was H20. In the DC Universe, most of the inhabitants of Gotham City know that Batman exists but hardly any of them know that he’s Bruce Wayne. Etc.
If you want to get fancy with this, taking a page from the late philosopher of language Saul Kripke, you can say that “Batman is Bruce Wayne” (in the DC universe), “water is H20” (in our universe) and “value is average socially necessary labor time” (if Capital Ch. 1 is a correct description of our universe) are examples of necessary but a posteriori truths. In other words, if they’re true, they’re all things that are true in every possible world—in a world where H20 didn’t exist, water wouldn’t exist, for example, even if there was some other wet transparent substance everyone in that universe referred to as “water”—but they’re discovered not by pure thought but by empirical observation.
Marx certainly thinks that’s what he’s doing in Capital. His arguments in Ch. 1 for “value = average socially necessary labor time” are relatively simple deductive arguments, but they’re still a posteriori—in other words, they’re still based on facts drawn from observations of exchange ratios as they appear in the world around us. One coat can be worth not only such-and-such many yards of linen or such-and-such many dollars but such-and-such many cigarettes or shares in a joint stock company or Substack subscriptions or copies of Capital or gallons of gasoline.
The thing these commodities all have in common can’t have anything to do with their physical properties or use-values, because these are too heterogenous. Marx thinks the most plausible alternative candidate for what they have in common is “being products of human labor.” And that can’t mean the concrete labor that produced any particular commodity. That’s also too homogenous. It can’t even be the concrete number of hours of labor time it took in any particular case, because it’s implausible to think commodities are more valuable because they were produced by lazier or less efficient workers. So it must be what’s left over when we abstract away from all of these particulars.
Whether or not you’re ultimately convinced by this argument, one thing that’s striking about it is that the empirical premises are very minimal. So Marx finds it striking that a towering thinker like Aristotle didn’t quite find his way to the conclusion—though he got very close.
Marx quotes Aristotle, in the Nicomachean Ethics, “stat[ing] quite clearly that the money-form of the commodity is only a more developed form” of the simpler form of exchange-ratios, giving an example of such a ratio (one house is worth five beds), and asking himself the same question Marx himself would ask thousands of years later in Capital. Mustn’t there be some underlying monadic property the house and the beds have in common?
Here, however, he falters, and abandons the further analysis of the form of value. ‘It is, however, in reality, impossible (τῇ μὲν οὖν ἀληθείᾳ ἀδύνατον) that such unlike things can be commeasurable’, i.e. qualitatively equal.
So what went wrong?
Marx’s answer to this question is fascinating. And it’s worth taking the scenic route to get there, and noticing how it connects to sentiments he expresses throughout the chapter.
At several points, in the course of making relatively dry points about use-value, exchange-value, the money-form, and value, Marx drops in analogies like this one:
And just as, in civil society, a general or a banker plays a great part but man as such plays a very mean part, so, here too, the same is true of human labour.
…and:
This proves only that, within its value-relation to the linen, the coat signifies more than it does outside of it, just as some men count for more within a gold-braided uniform than they do otherwise.
…and:
Nevertheless, the coat cannot represent value towards the linen, unless value, for the latter, simultaneously assumes the form of the coat. An individual, ‘A’ for instance, cannot be ‘your majesty’ to another individual, B, unless majesty in B’s eyes assumes the physical shape of A, and, moreover, changes facial features, hair, and many other things, with every new ‘father of his people.’
…and, making a similar point in a footnote while riffing on something Hegel says in Science of Logic:
Determinations of reflection of this kind are altogether very curious. For instance, one man is king only because other men stand in the relation of subjects to him. They, on the other hand, imagine they are subjects because he is the king.
Marx keeps hitting the same rhetorical note here—a very simple kind of egalitarian universalism. There’s no natural order elevating anyone over anyone else. Take away the gold-braided uniforms, take off the crowns, take away the position at the bank, and everyone—general, banker, king, whatever—is just a regular person like everyone else.
And he thinks that sameness, of human beings who all have the same sorts of brains and bodies that can be expended in the same number of hours of work, is exactly what Aristotle was missing, and he diagnoses that fact as a symptom Aristotle’s historically determined ideological blinders.
Aristotle, he says, was unable to reason his way to human-labor-in-the-most-general-sense as the source of value because:
Greek society was founded on the labour of slaves, hence had as its natural basis the inequality of men and of their labour-powers. The secret of the expression of value, namely the equality and equivalence of all kinds of labour because and in so far as they are labour in general, could not be deciphered until the concept of human equality had already acquired the permanence of a fixed popular opinion.
The point isn’t, I think, that the absolute twaddle Aristotle himself espoused about some people being “natural slaves” (his view being that it was only wrong to enslave people who weren’t natural slaves) was logically incompatible with the Labor Theory of Value. It’s not. It’s that stretching your mind to think in terms of human labor in general, as a function performed by creatures like us—where that “us” is absolutely universal—is a lot harder if you live in a society whose basic institutions would be utterly intolerable to people who hadn’t internalized exactly that kind of twaddle.
And that observation, to me, is a whole lot more interesting than the technical point about value.
Much of my treatment of these terms below is drawn from Appendix II (“Some Definitions”) in G.A. Cohen’s excellent Karl Marx’s Theory of History.
Of course I wouldn’t do either of these things. You can pry that book from my cold, dead hands.
Note that I’m assuming a pretty conventional reading of Marx’s relationship to the Labor Theory of Value here, but as discussed here that’s a contested point.
A number of things Marx says in Ch. 1 and elsewhere suggest he thinks the more precise way of putting this is that value is average socially necessary labor time in conditions where that manifests itself through exchange-value ratios, but just as “water is H20” is in most contexts a good-enough shortening of “water is H20 in its liquid form,” I take “value is average socially necessary labor time” as a good-enough shortening here.
He explicitly credits Ricardo with being the bourgeois economist who comes closest to his conception.
One interesting thing about the version of historical materialism set out in footnote 45 is that Marx *agrees* that in non-capitalist societies something other than economics plays “the chief part”. His argument is that (1) every society must produce, in interaction with nature, its necessities for its own reproduction. (2) While this necessity is “natural”, no way of meeting it is more “natural” than any other, although that tends to be the assumption of conservative ideologues in each system.
A sound implication is that the official self-understanding of a society with antagonistic interests within it will tend to be vulnerable precisely where the naturalness of its way of generating the social product is assumed. An unsound implication would be that the most important thing in a society is its “economy” (especially since the separation of the economy from the state or religion is something that only makes sense where commodity production prevails). You can’t deduce that something is most important from the fact it is a pre-requisite.
Lots of amazing things in that footnote, including a theory of the comic novel (Don Quixote is funny because he takes the ideology of feudalism seriously in a post-feudal society).
It is interesting to read Aristotle’s account in the Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, ch. 5. Aristotle explicitly has a demand (“chreia”) theory of the magnitude of value. He doesn’t discuss slavery here, but he does explicitly say that the value of each type of craftsman (presumably for unit of time) varies in proportion to how much they contribute to chreia. (Chreia can also be translated as “usefulness”).
Bukharin, in his polemic against Austrian economics, argued that demand/utility theories of value make sense from the perspective of a leisure class since it is primarily a consumer class.
Smith took the opposite position, and this could be seen as part of the anti-Aristotelian perspective of Scottish Calvinism that the Scottish Enlightenment inherited but also for the more egalitarian kind of literate commercial society that Lowlands Scotland represented at the time. For Smith, there is no difference between a porter and a philosopher except for training - training which in principle everyone could get. This reflects Scotland’s experience of being the first fully literate society and one in which people who worked with their hands were making significant scientific and engineering discoveries.
Marx, I believe, was claiming that “abstract labour” is simultaneously what Smith believed and Aristotle denied (the ultimate equivalence of human beings’ productive capacities) and a social-historical development that hadn’t happened when Aristotle wrote. So for Aristotle, differences among humans must (except in pathological cases) represent a telos because he hasn’t experienced the bourgeois revolution.
Interesting that contemporary ideology is closer to Aristotle than Smith (except for the slavery thing). Differences in usefulness of labour are attributed to “merit” which is an intrinsic feature of the human beings. The left version is that this natural division is pathologically distorted by sexism or racism, but if these were removed than the true nature of all workers would be properly rewarded.