Debates over how Marx is really, correctly, or properly to be understood—in which one is regularly told that the answer is crystal clear, plainly evident, and so on—show no sign of abating even 130 years after the publication of the third volume of Capital. This is not good. On the one hand, this is because such debates generally fail to distinguish clearly between the question of what Marx meant (and how many textual passages one knows that can be cited in support) and the question of what in Marx’s theory is correct and what is not (the latter being the decisive question). On the other hand, these debates increasingly take on the character of a political diversion. The author now faces the problem that the attempt to help bring such debates to a politically productive conclusion is naturally in the greatest danger of becoming merely the next contribution to them. One can only hope.

In this magazine, responding to Ian Wright’s article on the “causal-powers thesis,” Gil Schaeffer argued that, given limited time, resources, and energy, it is a mistake to keep chewing over Marx’s flawed theory. That is correct, and his objections to Wright also hit essential points.^[1]

So as not to become guilty of chewing it over yet again, this article deliberately does not seek to revisit everything that has already been said (except where absolutely necessary), but instead approaches Marx’s theory from a different and much simpler angle. The following, at times polemical, critique of several basic categories of Marxian economics is motivated solely by the author’s conviction that it is necessary to dispel the mysticism surrounding Marx’s labor theory of value. This, in turn, is a necessary precondition for gaining a clear view of the correct arguments in Marx that should be retained; all of them—the claim goes—amount to the simple but weighty political consequence of “political economy of the working class,”^[2] understood as the restriction, wherever possible, of the despotism of private interests empowered by property rights through collective organization—that is, in the first instance, trade unions. This does not require defending labor as the “substance of value” or defending other elements of the theory that are repeatedly upheld with great pathos. Rationally, Marxism can only mean identifying the antagonism between capital and labor as the central one, and taking the side of labor within it. Now, to the matter at hand…

1. The Inference to Labor

Labor is not a proven or discovered common substance, but simply the object of the theory. Yet in Volume 1 of Capital Marx claims to infer labor as the tertium comparationis of commodities. This has rightly been criticized by, among others, Böhm-Bawerk.^[3] One must even take the argument a step further: However many properties one excludes as candidates for what commodities have in common in this “proof,” one never thereby furnishes the positive proof that this one other property must therefore be the common third.

Hilferding did not refute Böhm-Bawerk on this point, but really only kept insisting that Marx’s theory is about social labor,^[4] without, however, reproaching Marx for the imprecision or dishonesty of his procedure for inferring labor. Labor is not inferred; it is the subject matter.

The objection commonly raised by Marxists against utility theory—that commodities differ precisely in their utilities and are therefore comparable only with respect to the labor times embodied in them^[5]—is likewise unhelpful. Expenditure (labor) and return (utility) are simply the two sides of every economy. Abstraction is therefore possible in both directions. As is well known, labors as such—that is, concrete labors—also differ and are not comparable. They are alike in being expenditure as such, an expenditure of brain, muscle, and nerve. Concrete utilities are likewise genuinely incomparable. They are alike in being utility as such. This dispute is therefore as necessarily endless as it is pointless.

If one pushes aside the fog produced by Marx himself, it becomes clear that he simply considers the economy as a whole in terms of how total social labor is performed and distributed across society—which always also implies asking how, by whom, for what purpose, and thus ultimately for whose benefit that labor is put to productive use. Only for this reason does it make sense to regard machines as embodied labor.^[6] One can therefore, like Schaeffer,^[7] certainly accuse the theory of keeping two sets of books. But in the interests of a sensible interpretation, it would be better to say that because the theory is a theory of total social labor and its distribution, it keeps accounts only of human labor. Marx’s claim, quoted by Schaeffer, concerning the distinctive character of labor-power—that, unlike machines, only it can produce more value than it has—thus has its truth in the banality that “value,” by definition (a definition Marx initially inherits from the economic tradition), consists in expended labor-power, hence labor.

Wright’s “causal-powers thesis” therefore attempts, yet again, to answer a pointless question, one that Marx raised through his spurious procedure of inference. Driven by the felt need to provide a foundation, Wright turns precisely to the human capacity for innovation—that is, precisely what is typically not exercised by the labor-power employed on a mass scale in the industrial production process—and makes it the argument for labor’s character as the substance of value. This reflects the embarrassment of trying to infer as a necessary conclusion what is in fact the theory’s chosen subject matter.^[8]

2. The Obvious

The question of the tertium comparationis in the market economy would actually be easy to answer: money. This is immediately apparent in ordinary exchange. Of course, such a banal, everyday observation cannot replace scientific analysis, but it provides a sensible point of departure. The immediate question, then, is: What is money? Where and how can such a thing exist—“the animal, the individual incarnation of the entire animal kingdom”?^[9] Precisely where private property prevails. Only when the whole of society’s wealth exists as the property of private owners is it exchanged—or rather, only then does exchange exist as a permanent mode of reproduction. Goods are then necessarily equated with one another in exchange. They are thereby commodities.

Private property establishes the absurdity that the reproduction of society takes place as a struggle over the wealth produced. For the private owner, the question is how much they receive for what they give, or how little they must give for what they want. The question of how this was supposed to work never arose for the acting subjects. In the beginning was the deed: “They do this without being aware of it.”^[10] How much someone must give of their own property, or receives for it, is quantified in prices. Money is therefore precisely this: property—indeed, property as such, detached from every determinate object. Property is the common third —not a regulating substance hidden behind prices, but what is quantified in them.

What does all this still have to do with labor? A great deal. Understood rationally, the question Marx addresses is simply this: What does the regime of private property, and thus the principle of exchange, mean for social labor?

Against all attempts to prove labor positively as a common substance, the passive-voice constructions in Marx’s text—which state only that different kinds of labor are equated in exchange—are entirely appropriate. The best known is probably the following:

Men do not therefore bring the products of their labour into relation with each other as values because they see these objects merely as the material integuments of homogeneous human labour. The reverse is true: by equating their different products to each other in exchange as values, they equate their different kinds of labour as human labour.^[11]

The subject matter is social labor. What is distinctive about the market economy is that this labor is performed privately and its products are exchanged—that is, equated in determinate proportions. Through the exchange of products, the labors are thus also equated.

3. Abstract Labor

We now come to another decisive point. What is abstract labor? From the foregoing, the obvious answer would be that it is the equal validity of labors in exchange, hence in money. This would certainly be a correct statement, and one that can also be found in many passages in Marx. Marx, however, by no means uses the term so unambiguously. He uses it in an equivocal way. On the one hand, he wants it to designate the form of social validity just described; on the other hand, he uses it for a kind of expenditure of labor, in which case the term is synonymous with simple average labor. Ultimately, however, this means embracing the contradiction of making “abstract” a quality of concrete labor. One may regard this as a punchy and/or dialectical formulation, but it remains an error, because it means using the same term for different things—things whose distinction, moreover, matters greatly. However simple, monotonous, or interchangeable the labors performed in the production process may be, strictly speaking they never thereby become abstract. Heinrich therefore observes quite correctly in the chapter “Abstract Labor” of Die Wissenschaft vom Wert:

Here Marx identifies two entirely different abstractions with one another: on the one hand, the abstraction from workers’ qualifications that takes place in an increasingly mechanized production process, the replacement of skilled labor by simple labor, hence a particular kind of expenditure of labor; and, on the other hand, value-forming ‘abstract labor,’ which nowhere exists as a particular kind of expenditure of labor.^[12]

A clean distinction should therefore be drawn between abstract labor as the reduction of all labors in exchange to pure monetary magnitudes, quanta of property, on the one hand, and simple average labor on the other.

Simple average labor is the kind of labor Marx is mostly concerned with; he defines so-called complex labor as a multiple of it. (In doing so, he creates the so-called reduction problem, a much more fundamental problem than the famous transformation (non-)problem; neither can or need be discussed here in detail.) Simple average labor is the kind of labor that industrial capital, especially in Marx’s time, typically sets in motion, and it is defined by the way it is configured for industrial mass production. It is increasingly simplified and standardized, making it more interchangeable and thereby reducing the worker to the function of an appendage to the machine, required to perform tasks that have been simplified as far as possible and can therefore be carried out by virtually anyone (real subsumption). These are also the criteria by which one can grasp what wage labor typically is, if one does not wish to dissolve the concept entirely, as happens when every paid activity is subsumed under it. In the concrete (!) performance of wage labor, the purpose for which it takes place becomes tangible. Here the process is arranged so that the calculation of advance versus surplus becomes visible (and palpable): the process is organized according to the maxim “as much output (in monetary terms) as possible for as little input (in monetary terms) as possible,” hence labor that is performed as extensively and intensively as possible for a given wage. Simplification and standardization ensure interchangeability, and thus the workers’ susceptibility to “blackmail,” thereby securing a profitable price for the commodity labor-power.^[13] If abstract labor is understood not as the form in which concrete labor is performed (as already noted, the invitation to think these “together” in a “Marxist”, “dialectical” way should be resisted; they are and remain two different things), but as labor’s validity in terms of value, and hence ultimately in monetary terms, we immediately arrive at another problematic point in the theory. For this “labor as such,” as is well known, is supposed to count only to the extent that it fulfills a particular criterion. That criterion is…

4. “Socially Necessary”

A perennial feature of debates over Marxian value theory is the rejoinder—to every kind of critical question about where value exists, how it is to be determined, and so on—that, after all, only “socially necessary labor time” counts. We emphatically do not intend to retrace the twists and turns of such debates here. Instead, let us ask: What can the concept of “socially necessary” reasonably be about at all?

There is, obviously, labor, labor time, and prices. And there is the assertion that a substance of value exists, namely abstract labor, and that its magnitude can be measured in time—though not as concretely expended labor time, but only insofar as it is “socially necessary,” and this, in turn, in a twofold sense: socially necessary in the sense that there is a corresponding demand for it, and socially necessary in the sense that production took place under average conditions of production.^[14]

The first question that must spring to mind is: What meaning does the concept of “time” actually retain here if it cannot be measured in seconds, minutes, or hours? Heinrich therefore infers a “so-to-speak (!) abstract labor time.”^[15] Nothing then remains of time as time except its name.

Let us turn to the two meanings of “socially necessary” in Marx’s text. In one case the matter is clear: there must be solvent—that is, effective—demand, otherwise no value (price) is realized. (If one now wishes once again to distinguish value from its realization, then it must also be stated clearly once again: What is the point of all the mysticism? Value can then only be the labor time expended—as opposed to the price obtained. But in that case one should simply speak of labor time.)

In the other case, the matter is far less clear: What is “socially necessary” actually supposed to mean here? What is the mechanism at work? Someone produces under conditions regarded as “socially necessary,” that is, average conditions, and thereby obtains a price corresponding to value? Here, too, it helps to step back from the misty world of value: the truth is competition by means of prices. Within it, methods of production prevail that permit firms to withstand competition. It is therefore trivial that commodities that can be sold were produced under competitive conditions—provided we set aside special market situations, monopolies, and so on, as Marx’s model does. Under perfect competition, costs determine prices.

This identifies two different social mechanisms: the validation of private production through effective demand and competition over conditions of production that permit reproduction. The concept of “socially necessary labor time” does not provide any additional explanation of these mechanisms (although, incidentally, the concept itself is again intelligible only against the background of the question of the distribution of total social labor); but it continually enables the grand “But …” by means of which discussions of Marx’s theory are purposefully led nowhere.

5. No Hidden World of Value

The tiresome question of where value exists (and how it operates)—a question that necessarily keeps resurfacing in every debate over value theory (since value is supposed to be neither identical with price nor identical with the labor time expended)—is unnecessary. Heinrich and Moseley, for example, debated it several times;^[16] and—merely in passing and in the spirit of internationalism—the debate reached, and continues to reach, no conclusion in the German Marxist quarterly Z.—Zeitschrift Marxistische Erneuerung.^[17] Marx wrote in volume 1, chapter 4, section 2: “His emergence as a butterfly must, and yet must not, take place in the sphere of circulation.”^[18]

If surplus-value arises in the sphere of circulation and does not arise in it, then the same is true of value in general. Put plainly: money is only made through sale. Who would have thought? But only if a product that can be assigned a price has first been created. Another astonishing discovery. Consequently, “their character as values has already to be taken into consideration during production.”^[19] What is at issue is clear, but nothing more: material production for sale in exchange for money, and the renewed use of that money to acquire material products for the next period.

To take a prominent example: in Moseley’s most recent book, this problem assumes the form of an explicit opposition between hidden value and observable price.^[20] In this work, explicitly directed against Heinrich’s claims, Moseley insists that value belongs to the commodity independently of exchange and that it—somehow, apparently—determines its price. We are dealing, he argues, with the “hidden” (value), on the one hand, and the “observable” (price), on the other, between which there is nevertheless most certainly an unambiguous determining connection.^[21] Unfortunately, this really must be called a mystifying substantialism. The problem becomes clear in the basic equation of Moseley’s macro-monetary theory, N = mL: the money new-value N is said to be determined by the monetary expression of labor-time m and the total current socially necessary labor-time L.^[22] Yet the equation does not solve the problem, since it simply presupposes L as a homogeneous quantity of abstract (!) labor-hours. Unless L can be specified independently of N, N = mL does not explain N; if L is inferred from N, the equation is circular. But any attempt to specify L independently confronts the reduction problem (which would have to be discussed separately). Without such an independent determination, invoking L as the phantom-like determinant of N merely asserts the existence of such a magnitude instead of establishing it.

Wright’s determination of labor-value as a “field property,” as presented in this magazine, is somewhat different. Wright defines a “technology field” as the network of present conditions of production and calculates a commodity’s labor-value by vertically integrating direct and indirect labor times. In this sense, the magnitude is determinable. But its calculability does not yet establish the causal role attributed to it: Wright simultaneously declares the labor-value to be the hidden regulator—namely, the attractor—of the market price. It is precisely the transition from calculated reproduction labor time to price regulation that would have to be proven. The field analogy does not substitute for this proof.^[23]

The core of the problem is nevertheless the same: a magnitude can be defined or calculated as a labor coefficient. That alone does not yet show that it is a magnitude of value acting upon prices.

And to say it at once: of course a connection can always be found between labor times and prices, or sums of prices. What else? Labor is necessary for production and enters commodity prices through wage costs. Who would want to dispute that? But no law of value is to be found here.

6. The So-Called “Surface”—As Real as the Hidden Abode of Production

It is worth taking a brief look at what Sraffa’s model does and does not tell us in terms of political economy, in order to sharpen our view of what remains of Marx; which is, after all, our concern here.^[24]

First: real competition is, of course, not a Sraffian system. The actors impose prices on one another and proceed with the prices imposed on them in such a way that society can reproduce itself (on an expanded scale); and where this does not work, it does not work—a fact that becomes glaringly apparent in crises, but also in every failed sale and every individual bankruptcy. This follows no plan and is not undertaken from a standpoint “above” the economy, as it is by someone solving a system of equations. Prices arise because they can be demanded where they can be paid, which is possible because the buyers, in turn, can demand prices that can be paid, and so on and so forth. In doing so, they proceed simply on the basis of experience.^[25] As Ganßmann puts it:

[Prices] can tend toward consistency because individual actors, in pursuing their interests, respond to price signals in such a way that inconsistencies are reduced as a side effect. On the one hand, inconsistencies block certain transactions; on the other, they open up opportunities for pure gains from exchange, whose realization through arbitrage operations—that is, by taking indirect routes of exchange—causes the opportunities for profit to disappear.^[26]

This is how relative prices arise—banally enough. Explaining relative prices requires no hidden world of value. Marx’s question of value comes into view only when one turns to the hidden sphere of production. Production—labor as a process, rather than as an input—simply does not appear in Sraffa’s and similar systems. Yet this—the hidden abode—was a central concern of Marx: how labor is made productive, who appropriates its productive power, the struggle over the working day: the material reality of production. None of this was Sraffa’s main subject; it was Marx’s.

Sraffa shows that a system of prices capable of reproduction (on an expanded scale) can be determined without a prior system of labor-value prices. This does not, however, explain the social content of this price system. Labor appears there only as an input.

Value—if one absolutely insisted on rescuing the concept—could at most serve as the ever-present reminder that the quanta of property denominated in money are all results of social labor, and that this labor must be expended privately if it is to result in this form of abstract wealth and thus, in turn, represent access to commodities—that is, products of labor (indirectly, labor)—and to the commodity labor-power. There is no deep current of value. The surface is the thing itself. The “world of value” can be nothing more than this reminder. Or, in Henryk Grossman’s words:

In short, the values and surplus values that figure in the reproduction schema are, from a quantitative perspective, not categories of reality; they are not immediately given in the world of capitalist reality. They are, rather, assumptions which initially contradict reality, that are chosen arbitrarily for the methodological purpose of simplification.^[27]

Incidentally, Marx himself, once again without stating it plainly, ultimately made an inference from prices to values to prices in Volume 3 of Capital when he identified v as an index of the labor applied.^[28] Prices (of the products of the various spheres) then move with wage costs, and wage costs are an index of the labor expended (assuming simple average labor). Strictly speaking, however, we see nothing here of a law of value according to which the expenditure of labor regulates prices, even if the connection is of course entirely plausible—just as all manner of market mechanisms can be explained quite plausibly at the level of prices while a connection can always be found to the volumes of labor expended in the process. What else?

7. Division of Labor, Cooperation, the Collective Worker—Insight and Breaking Point of Marx’s Theory

What, then, is the point of identifying labor time—which, strictly speaking, must be conceived as expenditure rather than mere duration, in order to account for differences in intensity—with value in Marx’s work?

As an economist, Marx seeks to prove exploitation quantitatively. To do so, he must construct a homogeneous space in which calculation is possible. He must therefore standardize. In his model he must homogenize expenditure per unit of time—recall the point made above: simple average labor. This is a daring assumption. Marx himself is, in fact, aware of this, which is why he introduces complex labor as a multiple of simple labor,^[29] though without being able to explain the mechanism by which it acts as a multiple. We therefore get: the reduction problem.^[30] The nature of the capitalist production process, which he himself describes extensively and spectacularly as gigantic cooperation around machinery,^[31] makes it still less possible to attribute expenditure in the manner his calculation requires.^[32] In a society based on cooperation and the division of labor, the product or products can be attributed only by attributing the entire social product to the collective social worker. That is trivial, but it is also true.

Marx constructs his model in order to make a point: the reversal of the laws of property.^[33] To enable calculation, Marx constructs a homogeneous space.^[34] But this is not required to prove exploitation and therefore the reversal in question. For that purpose, the obvious fact is enough: labor produces material wealth (including services), and the sale of this wealth brings in more money than the working class (as a whole: the collective worker) receives. Contrary to the liberal claim that labor creates property,^[35] capital can therefore appropriate material wealth (including labor-power) without payment—namely, by means of the power of property embodied in money—and thus maintain and expand its power over social production.

In a certain sense, exploitation is therefore of an even more fundamental kind: the propertied classes appropriate the productive power of the entire social division of labor, including the achievements of science. This, then, is not an unnecessary complex economic theory of the kind Schaeffer dismisses:^[36] it means knowing and saying that the whole of material wealth—every house, every toothbrush, every road network, every luxury yacht, every police station, and every haircut—is the result of total social labor, of the productive power of human cooperation; and that the system of property has no (!) immediate relation to the world of socially performed expenditure, but instead means the use of social labor for the benefit of a few, while conveniently producing the appearance of an allocation of effort and reward that, though continually criticized as unjust, is nevertheless always assumed to be somehow just in principle. Knowing that all material wealth arises from the society-wide division of labor, and that this division yields no allocation of returns, which is instead exclusively the result of the ongoing struggle in the form of mutual coercion by means of the power contained in state-guaranteed private property; this is the fundamental truth that calls for its opposite: socialism, the conscious, collective, i.e. democratic, regulation of social production.

For reasons of space, it is not possible to elaborate further here on how and to what extent the social character of production—which has long been necessarily present even under capitalism—causes Marx’s theory to fail as a quantitative theory of exploitation. Such an elaboration would have to show that this failure of the theory itself serves as a socialist argument.

8. Conclusion

For the mass of people under capitalism, work is strenuous and yields little, while being accompanied by constant insecurity about their own economic existence. This is so because the working class collectively confronts the demand that Marx expressed pithily as m/v, but which cannot in fact be captured numerically—unless one resorts to proxies such as labor share versus wage share. This immediately raises the question of what, exactly, is still being approximated here, and whether the magnitude in question does not simply stand on its own, just as labor times can be measured in their own right and jobs assessed in terms of the burdens they impose (although measurement necessarily remains an ideal here), and so on and so forth.^[37] To borrow Schaeffer’s phrase, “Our time, resources, and energy are limited.”^[38] It is a theoretical and political dead end to believe that chasing the rescue of such “magnitudes” as m/v with ever-new ideas for constructing a theory of value would prove anything definitive about the world and place in one’s hands the ultimately decisive argument against capitalism, one stronger than anything that can be found and explained on the supposed surface. Anyone who thinks, for example, that they could move the world by proving to neoclassical economics that it is labor after all, and not utility, that constitutes value has not only set themselves an impossible task, but has long since become lost in the sport of gotcha takes, best left to debating-club students.^[39] A “labor theory of value” can reasonably mean only this: “Look around. Yes, of course all this is the product of labor. What else?”

A sober look at the world of the market economy reveals no law of value, but a permanent struggle among private parties over the social product, decreed and secured by the state and modified at a thousand points by historical and moral elements—often won by a combative labor movement and constantly under attack from the opposing side. This struggle must be waged and is in no way dependent on a theory of a deep current of value in social production. An understanding of the economy and of one’s class position—thus, of friend and enemy—is obviously necessary, but it should be able to do without something that by now might better be called folklore.

As noted, Schaeffer is right:^[40] if the labor theory of value is turned over and over again merely for the sake of rescuing it, theoretical debate becomes a political waste of time. But the consequence cannot be to leave the theory’s claims unclarified. Criticizing the theory can and should bring the debate to an end and at the same time clarify what remains of Marxism (whether one still wishes to call it that or not). This article has attempted to make a contribution to that end.

1. Ian Wright, “Why Machines Don’t Create Value,” Cosmonaut, October 16, 2021, https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/10/why-machines-dont-create-value/; Gil Schaeffer, “Letter: Comment on ‘Why Machines Don’t Create Value,’” Cosmonaut, October 19, 2021, https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/10/letter-comment-on-why-machines-dont-create-value/.

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2. Karl Marx, “Inaugural Address of the Working Men’s International Association,” in Marx-Engels Collected Works, vol. 20 (Lawrence & Wishart, 1985), 11.

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3. Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk, “Karl Marx and the Close of His System,” in Karl Marx and the Close of His System and Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx, ed. Paul M. Sweezy (Augustus M. Kelley, 1949), 68–80.

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4. Rudolf Hilferding, “Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx,” in Karl Marx and the Close of His System and Böhm-Bawerk’s Criticism of Marx, ed. Paul M. Sweezy (Augustus M. Kelley, 1949), 123–48; see also 130: “The object of political economy is the social aspect of the commodity, of the good, in so far as it is a symbol of social interconnection.”

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5. Peter Ross, “The Relevance of Marx’s Value Theory in the Age of Artificial Intelligence,” Cosmonaut, October 4, 2023, https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/10/the-relevance-of-marxs-value-theory-in-the-age-of-artificial-intelligence/. Ross, for example, repeats this specious argument: “The equation is made on the market, and this implies that the equality of the commodities cannot be based on their use values, but only on the process of exchange, which in turn leads Marx to posit that their common social ‘substance’ (i.e., what causes them to be regarded as equals on the market) can only be the commodity common to their production, namely abstract labor.” The fact that commodities are equated in exchange does not in any way imply that they are equal only in their character as products of labor and hence—or, strictly speaking, for that reason—comparable.

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6. This does not mean that this perspective has been chosen without justification. Machines are, of course, embodied labor. As Joan Robinson once remarked: “[…] the idea that constant capital is an embodiment of labour power expended in the past. To you this is something that has to be proved with a lot of Hegelian stuff and nonsense. Whereas I say (though I do not use such pompous terminology): ‘Naturally—what else did you think it could be?’” Joan Robinson, On Re-Reading Marx (Students’ Bookshop, 1953), 20.

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7. Schaeffer, “Comment on ‘Why Machines Don’t Create Value.’”

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8. Wright, “Why Machines Don’t Create Value.”

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9. Karl Marx, Value: Studies by Karl Marx, trans. and ed. Albert Dragstedt (New Park Publications, 1976), 27.

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10. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1976), 166.

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11. Marx, Capital, 1:166; emphasis added.

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12. Michael Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert: Die Marxsche Kritik der politischen Ökonomie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Revolution und klassischer Tradition, 5th ed. (Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2011), 211; my translation.

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13. This, in turn, is a fiction of Marx’s theory insofar as the value of the commodity labor-power is determined in labor-value terms, as the theory itself readily shows. Between the acquisition of the means of subsistence (whose value is supposed to determine the value of the commodity labor-power) and the result—the restored labor-power (as a class)—there still lies (re)production, namely life itself, sustained by those means of subsistence. The act of living in the realm of freedom, in the private household, is the reproduction of the commodity labor-power, into which the acquired means of subsistence enter. The private is political-economic. Or, to agree once more with Heinrich: “Labor-power is not produced as a commodity from the outset, but it is sold as a commodity.” Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert, 261; my translation.

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14. Marx, Capital, 1:129; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 3, trans. David Fernbach (Penguin Books in association with New Left Review, 1981), 288–89.

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15. Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert, 219; my translation: “‘Labor time’ as the measure of the magnitude of value is no more immediate labor time than abstract labor as the substance of value is immediate, i.e., concrete labor. Abstract labor can therefore not simply be measured by labor time, but only by a so-to-speak ‘abstract labor time.’ This measurement, however, is not one that can be performed with a clock; it can only be made through exchange, since abstract labor does not exist in isolation: ‘abstract labor time’ is that share of the concrete labor time privately expended by the individual producer that is recognized in exchange as a component of total social labor.”

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16. “Marx’s Abstract Theory of Value and Money in Volume 1 of Capital,” discussion featuring Michael Heinrich and Fred Moseley, YouTube video, accessed August 16, 2026, https://youtu.be/9OuQtocg81c; Fred Moseley, “Fred Moseley: Marx’s Abstract Theory of Value and Money in Chapter 1 of Capital,” presentation and discussion, YouTube video, accessed August 16, 2026, https://youtu.be/2ON-Q_Qwy3A.

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17. Z. Zeitschrift Marxistische Erneuerung, “Diskussion Werttheorie,” accessed August 16, 2026, https://www.zeitschrift-marxistische-erneuerung.de/de/topic/163.diskussion-werttheorie.html.

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18. Marx, Capital, 1:269.

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19. Marx, Capital, 1:166.

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20. Fred Moseley, Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital: A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation (Palgrave Macmillan, 2023), 22–24, 44–46, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-13210-0.

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21. This is something Moseley, who attaches great importance to Hegel’s logic, might well notice: “It is often said that the nature of Force itself is unknown and only its manifestation apprehended. But, in the first place, it may be replied, every article in the import of Force is the same as what is specified in the Expression: and the explanation of a phenomenon by a Force is a mere tautology. What is supposed to remain unknown, therefore, is really nothing but the empty form of reflection-into-self, by which alone the Force is distinguished from the Expression—and that form too is something familiar. It is a form that does not make the slightest addition to the content and to the law, which have to be discovered from the phenomenon alone.” G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace (Clarendon Press, 1975), §136, https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/sl/slappear.htm.

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22. Fred Moseley, Money and Totality: A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in Capital and the End of the “Transformation Problem” (Brill, 2016), 31–32. This criticism is not easy for the author to make, since he otherwise finds Moseley’s macro-monetary interpretation highly compelling.

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23. Ian Wright, “Marx, Faraday, and the Spectral Objectivity of Value,” Cosmonaut, February 7, 2024, https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/02/marx-faraday-and-the-spectral-objectivity-of-value/.

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24. Piero Sraffa, Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities: Prelude to a Critique of Economic Theory (Cambridge University Press, 1960).

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25. Joseph A. Schumpeter, The Theory of Economic Development: An Inquiry into Profits, Capital, Credit, Interest, and the Business Cycle, trans. Redvers Opie (Harvard University Press, 1934), chap. 1.

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26. Heiner Ganßmann, Geld und Arbeit: Wirtschaftssoziologische Grundlagen einer Theorie der modernen Gesellschaft (Campus, 1996), 242; see also 88; my translation.

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27. Henryk Grossman, “The Value-Price Transformation in Marx and the Problem of Crisis,” in Henryk Grossman Works, vol. 1, Essays and Letters on Economic Theory, ed. Rick Kuhn, trans. David Meienreis (Brill, 2018), 307.

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28. Marx, Capital, 3:144.

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29. Marx, Capital, 1:135.

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30. Closely connected with this, though a distinct aspect, is the equalization of the rate of exploitation as a condition for “measuring” the surplus-value that is produced in the competition among capitals and subsequently distributed.

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31. Marx, Capital, 1:chaps. 13–15.

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32. We cannot and need not describe this in detail within the scope of this article.

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33. Marx, Capital, 1:729–30.

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34. Jacques Bidet, Exploring Marx’s Capital: Philosophical, Economic and Political Dimensions, trans. David Fernbach (Brill, 2007), 11.

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35. John Locke, Second Treatise of Government, ed. Public Domain Core Collection Team (Toronto Metropolitan University Libraries, 2022), chap. 5, sec. 27, https://pressbooks.library.torontomu.ca/secondtreatiseofgovernment/.

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36. Schaeffer, “Comment on ‘Why Machines Don’t Create Value.’”

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37. It is clear that this claim upon the collective worker always encompasses a range of very different fates or careers, but this cannot and need not be differentiated at this fundamental point.

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38. Schaeffer, “Comment on ‘Why Machines Don’t Create Value.’”

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39. If there are neoclassical ideologies with real influence in the world, they are more likely to include, for example, the view that trade unions are improper cartels that impede the proper functioning of markets—that is, theories that ground political positions in the real world.

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40. Schaeffer, “Comment on ‘Why Machines Don’t Create Value.’”

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