[Translated version of »Wie unwissenschaftlich ist die Arbeitswerttheorie?«, originally published by Viewpoint Magazine – thanks a lot!]
In any Capital course, the question of whether the labor theory of value is still valid is a much discussed issue, one that extends to the third volume, as the transformation problem (which I won’t go into at all) shows. The point of departure for my elaboration is a podcast that is currently popular in Germany that deals with Marx’s Capital, and the reaction by listeners in a Twitter thread. I wanted to keep my response short, but my two observations are too long for Twitter.
In my opinion, Marx does not formulate a substance theory, [1] because that which is referred to as substance, value, is purely social. He also does not intend to prove that labor underlies value (see his letter to Kugelmann); rather, he poses the question of why labor, under the reign of the capitalist mode of production, takes on the forms of value. In the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (an earlier work from 1859), he makes it more explicit by writing that he only examines commodities that are products of labor (and not those that aren’t products of labor – which means conversely that he must be able to explain how something that is not a product of labor obtains a price, such as untilled soil).
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