Currents Within Thevalue Controversy

chapter 5 Currents within the Value Controversy This chapter provides an overview and critical assessment of the controversy among Marxist and neo-Marxist theorists concerning the content, probity and implications of Marx’s theory of value beyond its ‘first phase’, as reviewed in the last chapter. As with many other controversies that developed following the revival of Marxism in the 1960s and 1970s, the ‘second-phase’ of the value controversy has testified to the willingness of Marxist intellectuals to entertain a variety of interpretations of Marx’s theoretical legacy and to part company with him on issues of the utmost importance. Unfortunately it has also testified to their ability to debate such issues in a fashion that renders them relatively inaccessible to the non-specialist. In consideration of this problem, I shall try to ‘interpret’ Marx’s value theory and the ongoing debates surrounding it in such a way as to highlight what I take to be the key postulates of the capitalist law of labour value. This will, I hope, contribute not only to a better understanding of some of the contested issues, but also to a clarification of what is at stake in this controversy, something which is too rarely discussed by its participants. The principal idea developed here as well as in the next chapter is that Marx’s theory of value constitutes the unity of a qualitative treatment of the value-form (exchange-value/money-price) and a quantitative concern with the ‘substance of value’. Its conceptual nexus is considered to be ‘abstract labour’ – a category that bridges the divide between value’s ‘particular’ and ‘universal’ aspects. Key to this interpretation is an extension of the ontological reversals described by Marx in his discussion of the value-form to include the relation between abstract labour, understood as a real social structure, and commod- ities, as sensuously concrete particulars. Such a conceptualisation furnishes a much-needed ontological and methodological basis for sustaining the key postulates of what I call the ‘fundamentalist’ approach to Marxian value theory as against a ‘neo-orthodox’ approach that strips Marx’s value theory of much of its ‘operational’ significance. These fundamentalist postulates, I argue, pertain to the laws of motion of the capitalist economy as a whole, and it is there- fore a mistake for those who defend them to pursue a theoretical agenda that tilts Marx’s value theory in the direction of accounting for ‘relative equilibrium prices’, a project having little to do with disclosing the historical-structural lim- its of capitalism. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004312203_006 98 chapter 5 1 The Second Phase of the Value Controversy The origins of the second phase of controversy surrounding Marx’s theory of value, a phase now a half-century old, is easily specified. First, by the 1960s, the critique of neoclassical economic theory undertaken by the Cambridge School of Piero Sraffa, Joan Robinson, Nicholas Kaldor et al. had constituted itself as a major ‘neo-Ricardian’ challenge to some central tenets of marginalism and was doing much to encourage the rehabilitation of some characteristic con- cerns of classical and Marxian political economy: in particular, the problem of the source, measurement and distribution of an economic surplus. Second, the renewed interest in Marx’s thought resulting from the New Left/student radicalisation of the 1960s focused increasingly upon Marx’s ‘economics’ as the world capitalist economy experienced worsening dislocation and malaise after 1970 (the collapse of the Bretton Woods monetary agreement, falling rates of profit in several of the advanced capitalist countries, and the worldwide reces- sion of 1974–75). Third, interest in Marx’s theory of capitalist crisis was spurred during the 1970s by the apparent exhaustion of Keynesian macro-economic policy, which had manifestly failed to anticipate the specific features of the emerging economic crisis of Western capitalism as popularly encapsulated in the notion of ‘stagflation’. These economic, political and intellectual developments provide the socio- historical backdrop to our discussion. By way of introduction to the latter’s principal themes, a brief characterisation of each of its main ‘camps’ or ‘currents’ will help to further specify the context and significance of this second major phase of debate surrounding Marx’s theory of value. 1.1 Neo-Ricardianism and the Ricardian-Marxist Orthodoxy The neo-Ricardianism that initially came to the fore in the 1970s encompasses both a ‘left wing’ that considers itself Marxist in some circumscribed sense and a right wing that has been primarily concerned with what Latouche aptly called the ‘reswitching of dominant ideologies’ within the economics profes- sion.1 Our concern here is strictly with ‘left neo-Ricardianism’, that is, with the varied attempts of Marxist or neo-Marxist economists to either reconcile Piero Sraffa’s critique of neoclassicism with Marxian political economy or to substantially revise the latter in light of the former. 1 Latouche 1976. By the twenty-first century, this more conservative wing of neo-Ricardianism had substantially merged with post-Keynesian and ‘institutionalist’ schools of thought on the boundaries of ‘mainstream’ and ‘heterodox’ economics..

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