Marx 200: The Abiding Relevance of the Labour Theory of Value

ABSTRACT

Marxist political economy is alive and well, and not just because of the habitual turn to Marx in response to any crisis of capitalism. Both through Capital and through the continuing evolution of Marxism, Marxist political economy offers valuable insights that can illuminate the modalities of social and economic reproduction and the relationships between (different aspects of) the economic and the non-economic. Marxism’s presence has been felt through its own internal debates and debates with other approaches to political economy, and even through its influence on those reacting against Marxism. The key to the continuing relevance and analytical strengths of Marxist political economy lies in its capacity to provide a framework of analysis for unifying disparate insights into and critiques of the contradictions of capitalism across the social sciences. The instrument for forging that unity is Marx’s theory of value, the potential of which is examined and illustrated with reference to the Sraffian critique and two key concepts in Marxian political economy: the value of labour power and financialisation. They are explored in the light of the processes of commodification, commodity form and commodity calculation.

KEYWORDS:

• Marx’s theory of value
• value of labour power
• financialisation
• commodity
• commodity form
• commodity calculation

JEL CODE:

• B14

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to two anonymous referees and the editors for their helpful comments and suggestions. The usual disclaimers apply.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 For details, see Fine (2012a), Fine and Saad-Filho (2017), Fine et al. (2018) and Saad-Filho (2017).

2 See the surveys in the Socialist Register in 2012 and 2017, and the relevant entries in Fine and Saad-Filho (2013) and Brennan et al. (2017). Note, also, the parallel decline in the labour process literature.

3 See Fine (1986), Fine and Harris (1979), Howard and King (1989, 1991) and Saad-Filho (2002). It is significant that more recent such surveys are few and far between, primarily because MPE has become more fragmented and spread across positions and subject matter.

4 Most recently, Moseley (2015) and Shaikh (2016).

5 For an exposition, see Fine and Saad-Filho (2016).

6 Although, of course, the Sraffian system had profound implications for one-sector neoclassical economics and the eponymous production function, as accepted by Samuelson (1966) if not his successors; see Fine (2016).

7 For a detailed analysis, see Fine (2008, 2013a).

8 See Fine (2012b, 2014b, 2017b) for (neglect of) the relationship between social policy and financialisation.

9 For its rejection as a buzzword/fuzzword, see Christophers (2015) and Michell and Toporowski (2013).

10 See Christophers (2017) and Dymski (2015). Of course, analysis of finance has a strong presence within the orthodoxy, not least with the efficient market hypothesis as a critical point of departure for either what might be termed inefficient market hypothesis (informational asymmetries) or, especially in the wake of the GFC, the deployment of behavioural economics.

11 Debate has been fierce over domestic labour in this respect (and productive and unproductive labour) and concerns what does and does not count as (surplus) value as opposed to (surplus) labour in general.

12 Even as their alter ego, for example in denying the presence of monetary considerations—as in a wedding at whatever cost or what money cannot buy.

13 There is a false presumption that C expands absolutely at the expense of CF and CC, while they tend to expand together; see, for example, Fine (2012c).

14 Itself financialised under contemporary capitalism; see the special issue of New Political Economy, 22(4), 2017, edited by Bayliss, Fine and Robertson.