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’s one giant exception. And it comes right at the beginning. As far as I can tell, the main reason so many people who show up to Capital reading groups don’t make it to the end of the book is that the first three chapters (“Part One: Commodities and Money”) are the most difficult to parse. In particular, Ch. 1 is the place where Marx digs the most deeply into his theory of value, and opinions vary pretty wildly about (i) how to understand the content of that theory, and (ii) how to understand the role the theory plays in the argument he makes through the rest of the book.
One problem is that, on the one hand, most of what Marx explicitly says about value makes it sound like his account in Capital is something like a tightened-up version of David Ricardo’s view, and on the other hand, there are various places where he makes grandiose claims about his “discoveries” about value. Interpreters who lean hard into what’s implied by these passages tend to read all sorts of things into “Marxian value theory” that often don’t exactly jump out at me from the text. But if you just go with the straightforward reading that Marx thinks the value of any commodity is the average amount of socially necessary labor time it takes to produce it, and that’s that, you have to accept that some of his claims on behalf of this analysis were excessive. There are also passages that feel like they’re going to help clear all this up but just don’t, like footnote 32, where he praises Ricardo for having “by far the best” analysis of value of any bourgeois economist, but also promises to examine the “insufficiency” of that analysis in later work.
In a previous essay, I gave my own best gloss on what Marx is up to in those first three chapters. The core of that take is that Marx is interested in critiquing both defenders of the capitalist status quo (who deny that capitalism is a system of exploitation) and critics of capitalism who misunderstand the sense in which workers are exploited. The latter think the problem is that capitalists use money trickery or the power of the state (often understood as a relic of feudalism) to force or defraud workers into making an unequal exchange, selling their labor for less than its value. And of course, the defenders think that really existing capitalist markets are, in Marx’s scornful formulation at the end of Ch. 6, “the exclusive realm of Freedom, Equality, Property, and Bentham.”
He responds to both by adopting the generous (and, he knows, often untrue) assumption that everything, including proletarians’ labor-power, is always sold at its full value. And he argues that even if this were the case, capitalism would still be, like feudalism before it, a class society in which the “direct producers” are exploited by a ruling class.
Why?
Well, since the value of any commodity is the average amount of socially necessary labor time it takes to produce it, the value of a day’s labor-power is the average amount of socially necessary labor time it takes to produce that. This is equivalent to the value of the package of commodities workers need to reproduce their existence as whatever counts as a reasonable standard of subsistence in the time and place in which they live. Marx grants that this is a fuzzy standard—it has a “historical and moral” element—but presumably he thinks that we have at least a good-enough working grasp on what that standard of subsistence looks like at any given point in history. (We know what making a minimally decent living looks like.) And—this is the crucial step—what exploitation means for Marx, at least in the first instance, is extracting hours of unpaid labor from the immediate producers. In any system of exploitation, the immediate producers (serfs, slaves, or proletarians) work a certain number of hours of “necessary labor” every day or month or year or whatever and a certain number of hours of “surplus labor.” The former is the labor they’re doing to maintain themselves at that standard of subsistence. The latter is the hours of labor they’re doing to enrich the ruling class.
Under feudalism, this happens right out in the open. Serfs are allowed to work their own little plot of land for a given number of weeks of the year and they have to work the lord’s fields for a given number of weeks. One of Marx’s core arguments in Capital is that this is, in effect, also what happens in capitalism, underneath the legal form of workers being paid for every hour. A certain number of hours are spent reproducing their wages, and a certain number of hours are spent generating the capitalists’ profits.
Workers spending some of their time producing for the benefit of nonworkers isn’t necessarily exploitation. In fact, in his Critique of the Gotha Program, Marx gives several examples of categories of nonworkers who’d need to be supported in the future communist society he hoped for—most obviously, children, the elderly, and those too disabled to work. But these are reasonable claims on workers’ labor that, crucially, the workers themselves could be persuaded to endorse in a democratic process. The claims of feudal lords, slave owners, and capitalists are very different. They take those hours of surplus labor without the immediate producers having a meaningful say in the matter. And Marx argues that this doesn’t require fraud or unequal market exchanges. Instead, even if workers sell their labor-power at its full value, the key fact is that they’re forced to sell it by the “mute compulsion” of economic circumstances. The only two conditions you need for this to happen are (i) a division of property that gives you a class of “doubly free” proletarians (legally free to make contracts with any employer who will have them and “free” of any alternative method of supporting themselves) and (ii) some very basic features of how markets-in-general work, explored in the first three chapters, before he gets to the specific features of capitalism per se.
So, as I’d read Capital, Marx’s core claim about capitalism-as-a-system-of-exploitation is that, under capitalism, as under previous systems of exploitation, immediate producers are forced to work extra hours of unpaid labor on top of the hours they work for their own benefit. And his claim about “surplus value” is downstream of this more basic conclusion, when combined with his assumptions about value. Since workers under capitalism are producing commodities (as opposed to, say, producing for the immediate use-value of a feudal lord and his retainers), those commodities have value. Given the definition of value as the average amount of socially necessary labor time it takes to produce a commodity, it’s impossible for commodities not to have value! And, given this definition, the average number of hours proletarians spend doing surplus labor time (in which they’re doing socially necessary labor) trivially gives you the amount of “surplus value” extracted from the proletariat.
If you reject the premise about what value is, perhaps due to standard twenty-first century economists’ worries about standard nineteenth-century theorizing about value, you might have to reject his conclusion about “surplus value” but not the more basic one about “surplus labor time.” The value claim isn’t the heart of the exploitation claim. It’s primary function is polemical—to show that the defenders and the bad critics are both missing the point.2
A lot of Marxologists would strongly disagree with this reconstruction of Marx’s argument. In some cases, that’s just because they think the extraction of surplus value is the more basic thing. But in the case I want to focus on for the remainder here, it’s because they think that capitalist exploitation for Marx just is the production of value, that even if workers controlled the means of production in e.g. the sort of market-socialist scenario I discussed here a couple weeks ago, the workers would therefore still be exploited (by themselves, or perhaps by the innermost essence of The Commodity Form). Rather than “value” operating in Marx’s argument in the polemical way I suggest above, value is the heart of Marx’s point about capitalist exploitation.
Here’s an obvious problem for this view:
If value is something that exists in any society in which things are produced for exchange (i.e. “in which there are commodities”), this thing that’s supposed to be the heart of Marx’s critique of capitalism turns out to be very very not-unique-to-capitalism!
So, what’s to be done if you’re a value-is-the-heart-of-Marxism person?
One option is to split the difference and grant that value has existed for as long as any sort of market exchange has existed, which is to say for an awful lot of human history, but to point out (not unreasonably) that market exchange is a vastly bigger part of capitalism than it was of pre-capitalist societies. This is the “capitalism as generalized commodity production” view. I disagree with it. I think commodity production is a necessary but not sufficient condition for “capitalism” as Marx uses that word (condition (ii) above). But at least I understand how that answer works.
Another option is to grant that Marx thinks value predates capitalism, but to think—perhaps even to think on grounds derived from some of Marx’s own insights—that he was wrong about this point. This too is perfectly respectable. Marx was wrong sometimes! It could be that this was one of those times.
But the third choice, which seems increasingly widespread among your fancier Marxologists but which I cannot for the life of me reconcile with what Marx actually writes in Capital, is biting the bullet and denying that value pre-exists capitalism. So, for example, in his book Marx’s Inferno: The Political Theory of Capital, much of the rest of which I find useful and insightful, William Clare Roberts flatly asserts that “Marx is committed to the claim that products of human labor did not have values” in, for example, “ancient Athens” or “Carolingian Europe” or “the Gupta dynasty.”3
I see this claim a lot but I’ve never understood how the people who make it explain the textual evidence to the contrary. Specifically:
(I) If you flip open any translation of Capital, after a scholarly introduction and probably a note on translation and etc., the very first thing you come to that’s actually written by Marx is his preface to the first edition, and one of the first things he says there is:
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, while on the other hand there has been at least an approximation to a successful analysis of forms which are much richer in content and more complex.
How exactly is it that people were trying and failing to “get to the bottom” of something that didn’t exist as recently as “Carolingian Europe” for 2,000 years—a period of time that started several centuries before the Carolingian period? And by the way, we have Marx here claiming, as he does in several other places, that the “money-form” of products of labor is just the developed version of their “value-form.” It’s very easy to understand what that means if you think the existence of “value” is trivially entailed by the existence of “commodities” (i.e. goods produced for exchange) but it’s confusing as hell if you think Marx was committed to money predating whatever the “value form” turns out to be by a truly staggering amount of human history.
(II) That previous essay was all about Marx’s critique of Aristotle. The very short version is that Marx credits Aristotle for coming so close to figuring out what value was, but he says Aristotle “falters” at the last step of the argument. And Marx’s explicit explanation for why Aristotle “falters” contains not the slightest shadow of a hint that Aristotle was right-for-his-era because value didn’t exist in ancient Athens.
What he says instead is that the idea that the value of commodities is the labor time embodied in them, in abstraction from all questions of whose labor time (or what specifically they were doing) is something it’s far easier to wrap your head around if you take for granted a certain basic sameness of all humans and their capacities, but Aristotle had ideological blinders because of his society’s mode of production.
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.
If Aristotle was right for his time, what is there to decipher? Saying there was a “secret” Aristotle couldn’t “decipher” because human equality hadn’t become a “fixed popular opinion” makes zero sense if you think Marx is committed to value not existing in Aristotle’s society. As with (I), I don’t see any way out of this that doesn’t require us to stretch the obvious meaning of clear passages to make room for readings derived from far more ambiguous passages.
(III) As I’ve already mentioned, Marx’s only extended discussion of value per se in Capital is in Ch. 1. “Value” continues to be mentioned throughout. Various claims are made about it—about ratios of surplus value to value, about the composition of value, and so on—but what Marx has to say in that book about what value is is concentrated in Pt. 1, and in particular in Ch. 1. But, as I also already mentioned, in those first three chapters, Marx is exploring “some very basic features of how markets-in-general work…before he gets to the specific features of capitalism per se.”
In fact, the first three chapters explicitly assume a non-capitalist society of “simple commodity production.” In other words, for his exploration of markets-in-general, Marx is assuming that everyone is producing and selling their own products. To be clear, this isn’t some phase of really existing economic history. (When would that have been?) It’s a hypothetical assumption made for the sake of analytical clarity, like this assumption throughout that all products, including labor-power, are sold at their full value.4 But Marx is very clear about what he’s assuming in these chapters:
He often uses “wage labor” as a synonym for “capitalist production relations”—see, for example, the footnote on Bastiat quoted here, or his Inaugural Address to the First International—but in footnote 15 in Ch. 1, he explicitly says, “At this stage of our presentation, the category of wages does not exist at all.” And in Ch. 11, he tells us that “small masters” who employ wage laborers don’t become capitalists properly speaking until they employ enough that the master himself no longer has to do productive labor. And if you read all the way to Vol. 3, you’ll find Marx says that means of production only become capital when they’re “monopolized” by a “section of society.”
So, if you want to insist that Marx doesn’t think value predates capitalism, it seems to me that you have to believe either that:
He doesn’t think value exists under hypothetical conditions of simple commodity production despite the fact that his main discussion of what value is takes place in a chapter where he explicitly says that such conditions are being assumed, or
He thinks capitalism can exist without wage labor, capital, or capitalists.
Neither looks promising.
Perhaps there’s a way out of this dilemma. And perhaps there are convincing explanations of (I) and (II) above.
All I can say is that I look forward to hearing what they are.
To be clear, Capital for the purposes of this essay means Vol. 1. It’s entirely possible that the later volumes, posthumously edited and published by Engels, would have gotten a lot more transparent if Marx himself had been able to finalize them.
To be clear, that’s the primary function I think Marx’s analysis of value plays in this particular argument. In other contexts he uses it to do other things.
In support of this, he cites footnote 34 in Ch. 1, where Marx says that several interesting but not particularly transparent things that could but certainly don’t have to be read the way WCR wants to here. Marx says that the “value-form of the products of labor” is the “most universal” form of the bourgeois mode of production, which strikes me as more than compatible with the necessary-but-not-sufficient reading of the relationship between commodity- (and hence value-) production and capitalism. He also says that the value-form “stamps” the historical specificity of capitalism. That’s a rich and suggestive turn of phrase that could mean a lot of things, which one reason to be weary of using it as a primary piece of evidence for such an important and otherwise not-obvious claim. And immediately afterwards, in a part of the footnote WCR doesn’t quote, Marx talks about the value-form of products generating “further developments” like “the money-form, the capital-form, etc.” If anything, it seems easier to parse the “further developments” line on the necessary-but-not-sufficient reading.
In fact, it’s a thought experiment, which many people who think of themselves as super-Marxists think of as a silly logical device incompatible with serious material analysis. But thought experiments are all over Capital. Deal with it.
Marx clearly thinks that labour time used in the production of commodities for the market either is or creates value and he clearly thinks that this was true before capitalism (a system dominated by the employment of legally-free wage labourers for a profit). Indeed, under capitalism, there is a systematic divergence between value and price because capital is allocated to where it seeks the most profit, which for Marx is only the same as surplus value if the organic composition of capital is constant across industries.
In fairness to Roberts, Marx may not think that labour expended in production for immediate use (whether in the family or in a medieval manor) is or creates value. That is a subject of reasonable exegetical controversy. Caroligininan France had production for exchange, but a lot of production was for immediate consumption within the manor.
A society characterized entirely by simple commodity production (or by worker-owned firms interacting in a market) wouldn’t have exploitation. But it would have commodity festishism. Marx clearly thinks that a society of the associated producers would involve conscious deliberation over production and so he wouldn’t be happy with market forces even if there were no exploiting class. The root of the problem isn’t the consumption of the capitalist but the domination of social life by the M-C-M’ cycle.
For an analytical Marxist I think there should also be some kind of meta-question about whether "value" represents some sort of natural kind with an objective essence, and we're just trying to figure out the properties of this objective thing, or if its more like a category that's a human convention defined the way it is for pragmatic reasons, like being part of a useful simplified model (akin to those used in neoclassical economics, like 'perfect competition') or defined with the intent to direct our attention to conceptual distinctions we find significant (like how astronomers recently redefined the term 'planet' to distinguish between bodies that were just in the upper size range of 'belts' of objects like the asteroid belt and Kuiper belt vs. more isolated large bodies). Marx sometimes seems to talk in an essentialist way that suggests the former kind of interpretation, but in places he seems to equate value with the "natural price" things would have in a hypothetical scenario where supply and demand had reached a perfect equilibrium, which could be compatible with the latter interpretation.
My hunch is that this ambiguity has something to do with the kind of archaic state of philosophy of science in the 19th century. Nowadays everyone basically takes for granted some kind of "hypothetico-deductive" picture where scientists can use any methods they like to come up with candidate hypotheses which they then have to use to deduce predictions which can be compared to reality. But from Francis Bacon up until the early 20th century most everyone had a different picture where reality contains various objective essences and the human mind has a special ability called "induction" which in some straightforward way can figure out the essential features of some phenomenon based on empirical data and conceptual reasoning, without forming any conjectural hypotheses in advance (this model of science is why Newton claimed in the Principia that 'I frame no hypotheses'). Marx at times seems to be thinking in terms of a Baconian model when arguing for equating "value" with labor, like chapter 1 of Capital vol. 1 where he just assumes this thing called "value" must have some common denominator and labor is the only reasonable candidate, or in his 1868 letter to Ludwig Kugelmann at https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1868/letters/68_07_11.htm where he writes:
"The chatter about the need to prove the concept of value arises only from complete ignorance both of the subject under discussion and of the method of science. Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. ... What is reasonable and necessary by nature asserts itself only as a blindly operating average. The vulgar economist thinks he has made a great discovery when, faced with the disclosure of the intrinsic interconnection, he insists that things look different in appearance. In fact, he prides himself in his clinging to appearances and believing them to be the ultimate. Why then have science at all?"