Sorry But It Does Seem Pretty Clear to Me That Marx Thinks Value Predates Capitalism
Some thoughts on the relationship between Marx's theory of value and his theory of exploitation--and why an increasingly popular alternate reading of what he's up to in Capital doesn't quite add up.
Believe it or not, most of Marx’s Capital1 is pretty transparent. Interpretive questions come up when you ask how the whole argument fits together, or when you zoom in to ask sufficiently fine-grained questions about particular claims, but for the most part, if you pick a chapter at random, there’s no great mystery about what Marx is saying.
Sadly, there’…