HIMA 13,2_f4_41-59 5/13/05 8:38 AM Page 41

Alex Callinicos Against the New Dialectic

Rethinking the labour theory of value The neo-Ricardian assault on the labour theory of value (LTV) had many negative consequences whose effects are still felt today. But it did have the benefit of forcing those theorists who resisted the enormous ideological pressures to supplant Marx with Sraffa (or, even worse, with neoclassical orthodoxy) to articulate a more sophisticated understanding of the theoretical structure of Capital. There were other impulses to do so, of course: it was not just the Althusserians, but all the different schools of Marxist theory who homed in on Capital, each developing a distinctive interpretation of Marx’s economic writings in order to formulate and legitimise more substantive explanatory and strategic claims. But, irrespective of their theoretical allegiances, defenders of the LTV tended to converge on a range of interpretations that have come to bear the name ‘value-form theory’. Negatively, these approaches had in common a rejection of the interpretation of the LTV common to the Sraffian and neoclassical critics (but, also, to many earlier Marxist interpretations of Capital) as an empirical and quantitative proposition asserting that commodities exchange (or, sometimes, that they

Historical Materialism, volume 13:2 (41–59) © Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2005 Also available online – www.brill.nl HIMA 13,2_f4_41-59 5/13/05 8:38 AM Page 42

42 • Alex Callinicos

would exchange, were simple commodity production to prevail) in proportion to the amounts of socially necessary labour embodied in them. More positively, they conceived the LTV as a theory of abstract social labour: this, on the one hand, emphasised that Marx was seeking to theorise the specificity of the capitalist mode of production, and, more particularly, seeking to analyse the distinctive mechanisms for allocating social labour to different branches and units of production in an economy of interdependent but autonomous producers; on the other hand, thus highlighting the specificity of value as a social form tended to privilege the role of money. I.I. Rubin’s rediscovered classic, Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value, enjoyed an enormous influence on the defenders of the LTV precisely because it so powerfully thematised these issues.1 But reformulating the LTV as a theory of abstract social labour posed an epistemological problem. For all its faults, the traditional interpretation of the theory offered an epistemic anchor. If the LTV was an empirical proposition, then the conditions under which it held true – for example, on the so-called ‘historical interpretation’, those of simple commodity production – could, in principle at least, be used to test the theory’s validity. The neo-Ricardian assault relied on this interpretation, deducing the LTV’s falsehood or irrelevance from proofs designed to show that it was not required to determine a consistent set of relative prices. One element in the defenders’ response was to argue that the LTV was not vulnerable to such attacks because, rather than being a directly testable empirical claim, it represented the starting point of a larger theoretical analysis of the capitalist mode of production. Althusser and his collaborators in Reading ‘Capital’ had already offered one interpretation of Marx’s text as a complex theoretical structure, but other takes on the same idea were also available from theorists who did not share Althusser’s hostility to Hegel, notably Ilyenkov and Rosdolsky. In other words, one crucial dimension of the intellectual heritage common to those who reacted, broadly speaking, in the direction of value-form theory as a reaction to the Sraffian assault on Marxist economic theory was a focus on the construction and ordering of concepts in Capital. But this, then, poses a set of new problems.

1 A good presentation of the differing interpretations of the LTV will be found in Chapter Two of Saad-Filho 2002. Value-form theory here is understood broadly so as to include writers who, while critical of particular arguments made, for example, by Rubin, nevertheless share the same overall understanding of the LTV: for a striking early instance, see the first two chapters of Weeks 1981.