<chapter id="fetkm_03">
<title> From Rejection to Acceptance of the Labor Theory of Value </title>
<para> The best way to understand something is to begin by not
understanding it. This time-honored popular saying is reflected
in the attitude the young Marx adopted toward the labor theory
of value, which had been worked out by the British classical
school of political economy and which was later to be brought to
perfection by Marx himself.
</para>
<para> In the critical notes which accompany his first systematic
study of political economy, <footnote> <simpara>
<emphasis>MEGA,</emphasis> I, 3, pp. 409-583.
</simpara>
</footnote>
Marx explicitly rejects labor as the basis of value. In
<emphasis>The Poverty of Philosophy,</emphasis> he no less
explicitly accepts it. A period of three years elapsed between
these two works, from the beginning of 1844 to the beginning of
1847. How did Marx’s thinking on economic questions evolve
during this period? Can one define more precisely, if not the
exact moment then at least the approximate period when Marx
accepted the labor theory of value? These are the two questions
which we shall endeavor to answer.
</para>
<para> The starting point for this analysis is found in Marx’s
reading notes taken during his exile in Paris, notes which
extend over an entire year (from the beginning of 1844 to the
beginning of 1845). The common assumption that these notes are
in chronological order is more than plausible and has been
accepted by all the commentators known to me. <footnote>
<simpara>
See in particular, D.I. Rosenberg, <emphasis>Die
Entwicklung,</emphasis> p. 95.
</simpara>
</footnote>
Attentive study of these notes thus enables us to observe a
definite evolution of Marx’s attitude to the labor theory of
value.
</para>
<para> The economists on whom Marx comments appear in his notes
<superscript>~41~</superscript> in the following order:
Jean-Baptiste Say, Adam Smith, Ricardo (in the French edition,
with critical notes by Say), James Mill, John Ramsay,
MacCulloch, and Pierre Boisguillebert. It was in Adam Smith’s
work that Marx first encountered the classical definition of
value. He transcribed the following passage from <emphasis>The
Wealth of Nations:</emphasis> “It was not by gold or by
silver, but by labor, that all the wealth of the world was
originally purchased; and its value, to those who possess it,
and who want to exchange it for some new productions, is
precisely equal to the quantity of labor which it can enable
them to purchase or command.” <footnote> <simpara>Adam
Smith, <emphasis>The Wealth of Nations,</emphasis> Book I,
pp. 30-31; quoted by Marx in <emphasis>MEGA,</emphasis> I, 3,
p. 460.</simpara>
</footnote>
But he adds no comment, reserving his criticism for another
passage, in which Smith deduced the division of labor from a
need for exchange, the existence of exchange depending in its
turn on the previous existence of the division of
labor. <footnote>
<simpara><emphasis>MEGA,</emphasis> I, 3, p. 458.</simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para> It is when Marx tackles Ricardo that he develops his
polemic against the labor theory of value. He does this by
following step by step the polemic Engels had already developed
on the same subject in his <emphasis>Outlines of a Critique of
Political Economy.</emphasis> The value of commodities is still
conceived as identical with their price. It is made up of an
element contributed by labor and another element supplied by the
materials on which labor works. Marx approves of Proudhon’s
remark that rent and profit are “super-added” and
thus are a factor in bringing about increases in price. <footnote>
<simpara>Ibid., p. 501.</simpara>
</footnote>
He agrees when Say reproaches Ricardo with leaving out the role
of demand in determining value. He reduces the law of supply and
demand to two phenomena of competition: competition between
manufacturers, which determines supply, and competition between
consumers, which determines demand. But he concludes,
criticizing Say, that this latter breaks down in practice into
considerations of fashion, caprice, and chance. <footnote>
<simpara>Ibid., p. 493.</simpara>
</footnote>
And he does not at all accept the “law of markets,”
which postulates an ultimate identity between supply and demand,
making incomprehensible the phenomenon of periodical crises.
</para>
<para> <superscript>~42~</superscript> Marx’s fundamental complaint
about the labor theory of value, however, is that political
economy is obliged not to take account of competition. Yet
competition is a reality. In order that its laws may have
greater cohesion, political economy is thus forced to regard
reality as accidental and abstraction alone as real. <footnote>
<simpara> Ibid., p. 502. </simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para> This objection is all the more valid in Marx’s eyes because
he blames political economy precisely for <emphasis>concealing a
relationship of exploitation,</emphasis> contained in the
institution of private property, behind abstract juridical
considerations. If in the case of private property it is
necessary to come down from abstract principles to tangible
reality in order to grasp the nature of “civil
society,” why should the same procedure not be appropriate
in the sphere of value? There also the world of abstract
conceptions must be abandoned in favor of
“phenomenological reality,” that is, the world of
prices. <footnote>
<simpara> See also Rosenberg, <emphasis>Die
Entwicklung,</emphasis> pp. 92-93.</simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para> Marx adds to this criticism of the labor theory of value a
very shrewd remark about “labor value” in Ricardo’s
theory. “At the beginning of this chapter the
philanthropic Ricardo presents the means of subsistence as the
natural price of the worker, and so equally as the sole aim of
his labor, since he works in order to get wages. What then
becomes of his intellectual faculties? But Ricardo seeks only
[to confirm] the distinctions between different classes. This is
the usual circular argument of political economy. The aim is
spiritual freedom. Therefore it is necessary [to impose]
spiritual slavery on the majority. Physical needs are not only
the aim [of life]. They therefore become the only aim for the
majority.” <footnote>
<simpara> <emphasis>MEGA,</emphasis> I, 3, p. 504. Joachim
Bischoff, in a review of this book published in
<emphasis>Das Argument</emphasis> in October 1969, says that
it is at least “questionable” to present the
development of Marx’s economic thinking as proceeding from
rejection to acceptance of the labor theory of value. He
justifies his doubts by analyzing a mere two passages from
Marx and not by analyzing Marx’s manuscripts of 1844 as a
whole, which put my conclusion beyond doubt. After my book
appeared I received the interesting and thorough study made
by Walter Tuchscheere, a young scholar in the German
Democratic Republic who died prematurely, an analysis which
confirms in all respects my own analysis of this period of
Marx’s economic thought. (<emphasis>Bevor “Das
Kapital” entstand,</emphasis> pp. 94-96, 115,
<emphasis>et seq.</emphasis>) The same is true for a work by
a Soviet author which appeared after mine, Witali
Solomonowitsch Wygodski’s <emphasis>Die Geschichte einer
grossen Entdeckung: Über die Entstehung des Werkes
“Das Kapital” von Karl Marx.</emphasis></simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para> <superscript>~43~</superscript> In the same context, Marx
later bursts out at Ricardo’s declaration that only the net
income (presented as the sum of profit and rent) of a country
matters, and not its gross income. “In the fact that
political economy denies any importance to gross income, that
is, to the amount of production and consumption, leaving aside
what is superfluous, and that it thereby denies any importance
to life itself, its abstraction reaches the peak of infamy. Here
we perceive (1) that political economy is not in the least
concerned with the national interest, with many, but solely with
a net income made up of profit and rent, that it regards
<emphasis>that</emphasis> as the ultimate aim of the nation; (2)
that man’s life has no value in itself; (3) that more
particularly the value of the working class reduces to its
essential cost of production, and it is there merely to
[produce] profit for the capitalists and rent for the
landowners.” <footnote> <simpara>
<emphasis>MEGA,</emphasis> I, 3, p. 514 </simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para> However, as soon as he examines the criticisms of Ricardo’s
thesis made by Say and Sismondi, Marx takes a step forward. What
these two economists deny, he says, is the cynical expression of
an economic truth. <footnote>
<simpara> Marx was to use the same expression regarding the
“cynical Ricardo” in an article published in
<emphasis>Vorwärts</emphasis> of August 7 and 10,
1844. (“Kritische Randglossen zum Artikel: ‘Der
König von Preussen und die Sozialreform,’”
in Mehring, ed., <emphasis>Aus dem literarischen
Nachlass,</emphasis> Vol. II, p. 45.)</simpara>
</footnote>
In order to fight against the inhuman consequences of political
economy, Say and Sismondi must go beyond its limits. Humanism
is, therefore, something outside the science of political
economy, which is thus not a human science. Despite the vigor of
polemical expression, Marx is here beginning to
<emphasis>defend</emphasis> Ricardo against his critics, to
grasp that what seems cynicism is really a frank recognition of
the realities of the capitalist mode of production, which other
writers seek to conceal.
</para>
<para> When he comments on the writings of James Mill, Marx
resumes his complaints against “Ricardo and his
school.” They leave out of the picture
“reality,” which shows a disparity between costs of
production and exchange value, and confine themselves to an
“abstract law.” These notes, however, already mark a
second step <superscript>~44~</superscript> forward: Marx does
not entirely reject the “abstract law,” but regards
it as merely “a moment of the real movement.” When
supply and demand balance each other, it is indeed cost of
production that determines price. But supply and demand balance
each other only by way of exception, owing to their oscillations
and disequilibrium. Political economy ought therefore to explain
the real movement, which represents a dialectical unity of
correspondence and noncorrespondence between cost of production
and exchange value. <footnote> <simpara>
<emphasis>MEGA,</emphasis> I, 3, pp. 530-531.</simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para> Marx’s comments on the classical economists in his Parisian
reading notes determine his attitude to the labor theory of
value in his writings of 1844 and 1845—specifically in the
<emphasis>Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts</emphasis> and
<emphasis>The Holy Family.</emphasis> Labor value and price
continue to be separated from each other: the former is declared
“abstract” while only the latter is
“concrete.” In addition, as we pointed out earlier,
in <emphasis>The Holy Family</emphasis> the labor time that the
production of a commodity has cost is regarded as “forming
part” of its “cost of production”; the latter
is not reduced by the former.
</para>
<para> By the time he had finished writing <emphasis>The Holy
Family,</emphasis> Marx had already drawn up a plan for
another work, a “Critique of politics and political
economy.” On February 1, 1845, he signed a contract for
this book with the publisher C. W. Leske, and the
<emphasis>Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of
1844</emphasis> were doubtless a first draft. As early as
January 20, 1845, Engels was urging him to finish his book on
political economy, <footnote>
<simpara> Ibid., III, 1, p. 10.</simpara>
</footnote>
which shows that Marx already had a book of this kind on his
workbench. The manuscript seems to have been lost; <footnote>
<simpara> Rosenberg, <emphasis>Die Entwicklung,</emphasis>
p. 527.</simpara>
</footnote>
it still existed in 1847, since in his letter to Annenkov of
December 28, 1846, Marx wrote: “I wish I could send you my
book on political economy with this letter, but it has so far
been impossible for me to get this work … printed.”
<footnote>
<simpara> <emphasis>Selected Works,</emphasis> Vol. 1,
p. 527.</simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para>
In order to write it, Marx left his exile in Brussels for a
six-week visit to Britain with Engels, and there studied all the
books on political economy he was able to find in Manchester,
<footnote>
<simpara> <emphasis>Aus dem literarischen Nachlass,</emphasis>
Vol. II, p. 332.</simpara>
</footnote>
both at his <superscript>~45~</superscript> friend’s house and in
public and private libraries. It was during this second
systematic confrontation with political economy that he
discovered the social-revolutionary use that British socialist
writers had been able to make of the labor theory of value, and
of the contradictions it contains as expounded by Ricardo. Among
the writers he studied in Manchester in July and August 1845
were T. R. Edmonds and William Thompson, <footnote> <simpara>
<emphasis>MEGA,</emphasis> I, 6, pp. 597-622.</simpara>
</footnote>
who had used Ricardo’s propositions in just that way. (After
August he read John Bray, another writer in the same
category). Marx was later to criticize the analysis of labor
value as creating a “right of the worker to the whole
product of his labor,” but it is more than likely that
studying these authors made him realize the reasons, belonging
to the realm of apologetics, why bourgeois political economy in
Britain had turned away from Ricardo.
</para>
<para> There is no proof that Marx had yet read Thomas Hodgskin
and Piercy Ravenstone, Ricardo’s two best proletarian
disciples. But Engels, who had studied working-class agitation
in Britain in great detail in order to write his
<emphasis>Condition of the Working Class in England,</emphasis>
at least knew of the effect these writers had had on the working
class and on the bourgeoisie.
</para>
<para> Ronald L. Meek writes: “Thomas Hodgskin was a name to
frighten little children with in the days following the repeal
of the Combination Laws in 1824. It was probably inevitable,
therefore, that many of the more conservative economists should
come to regard Ricardo’s theory of value not only as logically
incorrect but also as socially dangerous. ‘That labor is
the sole source of wealth,’ wrote John Cazenove in 1832,
‘seems to be a doctrine as dangerous as it is false, as it
unhappily afford a handle to those who would represent all
property as belonging to the working classes, and the share
which is received by others as robbery or fraud upon
<emphasis>them</emphasis>.’” <footnote>
<simpara> Ronald L. Meek, <emphasis>Studies in the Labor
Theory of Value,</emphasis> p. 124.</simpara>
</footnote>
Marx, who had begun by regarding Ricardo as
“cynical,” could not but be struck by this
abandonment of Ricardo’s theory of value—cynical in a
different way—for the sake of preserving the social
order. I am convinced that he returned from Manchester to
Brussels with much more favorable views on the labor theory of
value.
</para>
<para> <superscript>~46~</superscript> A brief remark added by Marx
to his notes on reading the economist Charles Babbage, written
in June or at the beginning of July 1845, on the eve of his
departure for Manchester, shows that he still at that time
maintained a certain neutrality toward the theory in
question. <footnote> <simpara> <emphasis>MEGA,</emphasis> I, 6,
p. 601.</simpara>
</footnote>
But <emphasis>The German Ideology,</emphasis> written in spring
1846, contains two definite passages which mark the acceptance
of the labor theory of value. There we read, on the one hand:
“He [Stirner] has not even learned from competition the
fact … that within the framework of competition
<emphasis>the price of bread is determined by the cost of
production and not by the whim</emphasis> of the
bakers.” <footnote>
<simpara> <emphasis>The German Ideology,</emphasis>
p. 404. (Emphasis mine.—E.M.)</simpara>
</footnote>
And on the other hand, Marx and Engels write even more clearly:
“And even as regards coin, it is determined exclusively
<emphasis>by the costs of production,</emphasis> i.e.,
<emphasis>labor.</emphasis>” <footnote>
<simpara> Ibid., p. 437. (Emphasis mine.—E.M.)</simpara>
</footnote>
The conclusion seems inescapable: it was after July 1845 and
before finishing <emphasis>The German Ideology</emphasis> in the
spring of 1846 that Marx and Engels were decisively won over to
the labor theory of value.
</para>
<para> It would obviously be unjust to the two friends to suspect
them of changing their stand on the Ricardian theory merely on
account of the <emphasis>agitational value</emphasis> of this
theory which Marx’s visit to Manchester had revealed to him. If
they were able, in the course of half a year, to advance from
the eclectic conception Engels had held in his
<emphasis>Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy</emphasis>
to a more precise conception of the labor theory of
value—indeed, to a conception which already starts to
correct certain intrinsic weaknesses in Ricardo’s
theory—this was above all due to the more thorough
economic studies Marx had undertaken and to his transcending
analytically the contradictions he had previously thought he had
discovered in the labor theory of value.
</para>
<para> This transcendence can be easily appreciated in the
following terms. What had shocked Marx when he first encountered
Ricardo and the whole classical school was the apparent conflict
between the effects of competition—the price fluctuations
resulting from the operation of the law of supply and
demand—and the comparative stability of “exchange
value,” determined by the amount of labor needed for
production. On reflection, however, his mind,
<superscript>~47~</superscript> solidly grounded in dialectics,
was bound to ask whether what was apparent was really the most
direct expression of reality—and whether an
“abstraction” might not contain a truth that was in
the last analysis much more “concrete” than the
appearance.
</para>
<para> Market prices constantly vary. If, however, one looks no
further than these fluctuations, one runs the risk of quickly
dissolving all economic movements in mere chance. <footnote>
<simpara> <emphasis>MEGA,</emphasis> II, 3, p.531: “The
true law of political economy is
<emphasis>chance,</emphasis> a few moments of the movement
of which we scholars arbitrarily fix under the name of
laws.”</simpara>
</footnote>
But a moment’s thought, together with the empirical study of
economic reality, show that these fluctuations do not occur at
random but around a definite axis. If the selling price of a
product falls below its cost of production, its manufacturer is
pushed out of competition. If the selling price of the same
product rises too much above the cost of production, the
manufacturer makes a super-profit which attracts additional
competitors to this branch of production and causes a temporary
overproduction which brings prices down again. The cost of
production is found empirically to be the axis around which
prices fluctuate.
</para>
<para> It is interesting to refer in this connection to a critical
comment which Marx was moved to make when re-reading Ricardo in
1851: “Here he admits, then, that it is not a matter of
producing ‘wealth’ in his sense of the word but of
producing ‘values.’ The ‘natural price’
imposes itself as against the <emphasis>market price,</emphasis>
but this takes place though [<emphasis>sic</emphasis>] a
struggle which is nothing like the simple equalization process
described by R[icardo]. When industry began, when demand usually
corresponded to supply, when competition was limited and
monopoly prices were normal in all industries, landed property
was constantly being ousted by industrial property. This led to
enrichment on the one hand and impoverishment on the other. The
struggle between the market price and the real price thus did
not result in the same phenomenon, and did not take place to the
same extent, as in modern society. There was a permanent excess
in the market price over the real price.” <footnote>
<simpara> <emphasis>Grundrisse,</emphasis> Vol. II, p. 806.</simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para> In my view, this comment enables us to get closer to the
actual way in which Marx advanced from rejecting the labor
theory of <superscript>~48~</superscript> value to accepting
it—namely, by analyzing the <emphasis>tendencies of the
historical evolution</emphasis> of the relations between supply
and demand in the capitalist mode of production and their
connections with Ricardo’s “natural price,” that is,
with labor value. This analysis was to bring him to conclude
that, because of the enormous increase in industrial production,
this “natural price” increasingly becomes the rule,
while the monopoly price that differs widely from the
“natural price” increasingly becomes the
exception. As soon as this is accepted, one is obliged to accept
the labor theory of value, since it is then established that
value is determined not by “the laws of the market,”
but by factors immanent in production itself.
</para>
<para> While concurrently carrying on his economic studies
(preparing for the “Critique of politics and political
economy,” the manuscript which has been lost) and his
studies of history and philosophy (preparing for the
<emphasis>The German Ideology</emphasis>), Marx formulated, at
about the same period, his theory of historical materialism,
which is essentially a socioeconomic determinism. <footnote>
<simpara> Paul Kaegi (<emphasis>Genesis des historischen
Materialismus,</emphasis> pp. 311-327) examines in great
detail the origins of the theory of economic determinism and
that of ideology, which in his view are the two essential
elements of the theory of historical materialism.</simpara>
</footnote>
The history of mankind should always be studied in connection
with the history of industry and exchange. Mankind starts to
differentiate itself from the animal kingdom by
<emphasis>producing</emphasis> its means of life. What men are
depends in the last analysis on the material conditions of their
productive activity, and this presupposes social relations among
them. The level of development of the productive forces is
reflected most obviously in the development of the division of
labor. <footnote>
<simpara> <emphasis>The German Ideology,</emphasis> p. 32.</simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para> In other words, the conclusion of their historical and
philosophical studies had brought Marx and Engels to exactly the
starting point of the classical labor theory of value, which
Marx was to reformulate in quite a special way: (abstract) labor
is the essence of exchange value, because in a society founded
on the division of labor it is the only connecting web that
makes possible comparison and commensurability between the
products of the <superscript>~49~</superscript> labor of
individuals who are separated from each other. There is a
striking parallel between the way in which Marx went back from
fluctuating “market prices” to a rediscovery of
exchange value and the way in which an economist of our own day,
Piero Sraffa, has evolved from marginalism to a theory which
ultimately reduces all the “inputs” of production to
“dated quantities of labor.” <footnote>
<simpara> Piero Sraffa, <emphasis>Production of Commodities by
Means of Commodities,</emphasis> pp. v-vi, 34-40, 93-95,
etc.</simpara>
</footnote>
Marx and Sraffa proceeded in the same way, <emphasis>by leaving
aside minor, short-term fluctuations,</emphasis> which are just
what marginalism starts from.
</para>
<para> When he wrote <emphasis>The Poverty of
Philosophy,</emphasis> Marx was already a “Ricardian,”
to the extent that he quotes Ricardo immediately after
formulating the determination of the value of a commodity by
the amount of labor needed for its production. He quotes the
weakest part of Ricardo’s theory, that dealing with the
determination of the “value” or the “natural
price” of “labor” by the costs of
“maintenance” of working men. <footnote>
<simpara> <emphasis>The Poverty of Philosophy,</emphasis>
p. 522.</simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para> But at the same time, Marx is already separating himself
from Ricardo on an essential point. Writing to Annenkov on
December 28, 1846, he speaks of “the error of the
bourgeois economists, who regard these economic categories as
eternal and not as historical laws which are only laws for a
particular historical development, for a definite development of
the productive forces.” <footnote>
<simpara> <emphasis>Selected Works,</emphasis> Vol. I,
p. 522.</simpara>
</footnote>
Working out his theory of historical materialism had at one and
the same time enabled him to grasp the “rational
kernel” of the labor theory of value and its
<emphasis>historically limited character.</emphasis> This
conception of the historically limited character of economic
laws became a no less integral part of Marxist economic theory
than the labor theory of value. <footnote>
<simpara> Professor Emile James sees in this a lasting and
valid contribution to economic science. (See Emile James,
<emphasis>Histoire sommaire de la pensée
économique,</emphasis> pp. 168, 177.)</simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para> In Marx’s view this historically limited and precise
character applies to all the “economic categories”;
he sees in them, in the last analysis, only a “certain
social relationship.” This is clear as regards
<superscript>~50~</superscript> the category “exchange
value” as early as <emphasis>The German
Ideology</emphasis> and <emphasis>The Poverty of
Philosophy.</emphasis> In his later writings Marx constantly
returns to this same principle. <footnote>
<simpara> “… articles of utility become
commodities, only because they are products of the labor of
private individuals or groups of individuals who carry on
their work independently of each other.”
(<emphasis>Capital,</emphasis> Vol. I, pp. 72-73.)</simpara>
</footnote>
It is therefore impossible to agree with the attempt recently
made by Milentije Popović to proclaim commodity relations
valid for all human history, right down to the total
disappearance of living labor, and along with them the
phenomenon of abstract labor, which Marx sees as the ultimate
secret of exchange value. <footnote>
<simpara> Milentije Popović, “For the Re-Evaluation
of Marx’s Teachings on Production and Relations of
Production,” in <emphasis>Socialist Thought and
Practice</emphasis> (Yugoslavia), July-September
1965.</simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para> Marx himself stated his opinion on this question very
clearly. He categorically refused to identify the need for an
accounting in terms of labor time (which applies to every human
society, except perhaps the most advanced stage of communist
society) with the <emphasis>indirect</emphasis> expression of
this accounting in the form of exchange value. <footnote>
<simpara> Cf. Marx’s letter to Kugelman of July 11, 1868:
“The form in which this proportional division of labor
asserts itself, in a state of society where the
interconnection of social labor is manifested in the
<emphasis>private exchange</emphasis> of the individual
products of labor, is precisely the <emphasis>exchange
value</emphasis> of these products.”
(<emphasis>Selected Works,</emphasis> Vol. II,
p. 419). Cf. also <emphasis>Capital,</emphasis> Vol I, p. 79
(the famous passage on the fetistic nature of value), where
Marx declares explicitly that labor time will be the
criterion of distribution of products in a socialist
society, in contrast to distribution through exchange based
on private labor and private property.</simpara>
</footnote>
And he explicitly declared that when private ownership of the
means of production has been replaced by that of the associated
producers, commodity production will cease, giving place to
direct accounting in hours of labor. <footnote>
<simpara> “Within the cooperative society based on
common ownership of the means of production, the producers
do not exchange their products; just as little does the
labor employed on the product appear here <emphasis>as the
value</emphasis> of these products, as a material quality
possessed by them, since now, in contrast to capitalist
society, individual labor no longer exists in an indirect
fashion but directly as a component part of the total
labor.” (<emphasis>Critique of the Gotha
Programme,</emphasis> in <emphasis>Selected
Works,</emphasis> Vol. III, p. 17.)</simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
<para> One may think Marx was right or one may try to show that he
<superscript>~51~</superscript> was wrong, but one ought not to
ascribe to him the paternity of conceptions that were contrary
to his own. One ought not to assert that for Marx all living
social labor must necessarily take the form of abstract labor
creating value <footnote>
<simpara> Milentije Popović (“For the
Re-Evaluation of Marx’s Teachings on Production,”
p. 79): “Men ‘produce their life’ by
working and producing commodities, use values. By producing
they embody, build into commodities their labor, with
concrete labor they produce—create—a definite
useful object (use value), with abstract labor they produce
value.” Here and in the rest of this article
Popović suggests that for Marx “production
relations” and “production of material
life” always imply production of exchange value,
independent of social conditions and social
relations. “In this sense we can say that in society
[<emphasis>sic</emphasis>] men ‘produce their
life’ not only because they produce useful objects,
but also because at the same time they produce values”
(p. 83). “Furthermore, relations in production are
independent of people’s will inasmuch as they are
established ‘behind the backs of the producers,’
outside the conscious activity of producers <emphasis>or
associated producers</emphasis> …” (p. 93;
emphasis mine—E.M.). “However, as a result of
this the very nature of labor in the abstract—the
creator of value—is being changed, and thereby also
the nature of living labor. Labor, this creator of value, is
no longer a mere [!] consumption of the physical strength of
the producers… In this way labor itself, as the
creator of value, assumes for man an even fuller human
meaning, in short, it becomes humanized”
(p. 104). This is not the place to analyze these
propositions, which seem to me highly dubious. But it is
plainly false to attribute them to Marx.</simpara>
<simpara> “For, proceeding from the fact that the
relations [?] of the price of production are objectively
given in our conditions of self-management, one arrives at
the conclusion that market prices, too, are objectively
[<emphasis>sic</emphasis>] given in our socioeconomic
conditions” (p. 110).</simpara>
</footnote>
and that socialism will mean not the abolition of commodity
production but its “humanization.” These ideas of
Popović’s are opposed to Marx’s entire
teaching. <footnote>
<simpara> Here is a particularly clear-cut passage in Marx,
relating to Prodhoun but also applicable to Milentije
Popović: “The determination of value by labor
time—the formula M. Prodhoun gives us as the
regenerating formula of the future—is therefore merely
the scientific expression of the economic relations of
present-day society …” (<emphasis>The Poverty
of Philosophy,</emphasis> p. 69).</simpara>
</footnote>
</para>
</chapter>