Value-Form

Why does the "form" matter?

What is value? The usual answer is "the labour it took to make the commodity". That is the labour theory of value of the classical economists Adam Smith and David Ricardo, and Marx agreed that labour is the substance of value. But he went a step further and asked: labour exists in every society, so why in some societies does labour appear as the "value" of products, and why does that value in turn take the form of money? That question is the analysis of the value-form. The labour theory of value in general is covered in its own entry; this entry deals with the point at which Marx distinguished himself from it.

Marx opens Capital, volume I, chapter 1, section 3, "The Value-Form, or Exchange-Value", like this: "Everyone knows, if they know nothing else, that commodities possess a common value-form which contrasts in the most striking manner with the motley natural forms of their use-values, namely the money-form." What he set out to do was "what bourgeois economics never even attempted: to demonstrate the genesis of this money-form". Once that is done, "the riddle of money disappears at the same time".

Hier gilt es jedoch zu leisten, was von der bürgerlichen Ökonomie nicht einmal versucht ward, nämlich die Genesis dieser Geldform nachzuweisen

Why is this a riddle? For Marx value is not a property you can touch. Take away the wood and the shape from a table and what remains is a "ghostly objectivity", a mere "congealed mass" of undifferentiated human labour. Turn the table over and over and you will not see its value. Value shows itself only in the relation in which the table is exchanged for other things.

At the end of section 4 Marx criticised the classics: political economy had analysed value and its magnitude, however incompletely, and uncovered the content hidden in them, labour. "But it has never once asked why this content takes that form, why labour is expressed in value and the measure of labour by its duration in the magnitude of the value of the product." In a footnote he added that even Smith and Ricardo treated the value-form "as something quite indifferent or external to the nature of the commodity itself". The reason lay deep: "The value-form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most general form of the bourgeois mode of production, which is thereby characterised as a particular kind of social production and thus at the same time historically." Mistake this form for the eternal natural form of production, and its specific character disappears from view.

Die Wertform des Arbeitsprodukts ist die abstrakteste, aber auch allgemeinste Form der bürgerlichen Produktionsweise, die hierdurch als eine besondere Art gesellschaftlicher Produktion und damit zugleich historisch charakterisiert wird.

How do the four forms follow on from each other?

The starting point is the simplest relation between two commodities: "x commodity A = y commodity B", in Marx's example "20 yards of linen = 1 coat" (the German Elle is an old unit of length). Marx wrote that "the secret of every form of value lies hidden in this simple form of value". In the equation the two commodities play different roles. The linen actively expresses its value in the coat (the relative form of value); the coat passively serves as the material of that expression (the equivalent form). The two positions are inseparable moments that presuppose each other and at the same time opposed poles of one expression of value. Linen cannot express its value in itself: "20 yards of linen = 20 yards of linen" says nothing.

Das Geheimnis aller Wertform steckt in dieser einfachen Wertform.

Second comes the total or expanded form. Twenty yards of linen are one coat, but also 10 lb of tea, 40 lb of coffee, a quarter of wheat, 2 ounces of gold. The linen's value now relates to the whole world of commodities, but its expression is an endless, unfinished list. Third, in the general form, the equation is reversed: coat, tea, coffee and wheat all express their values in a single commodity, linen, which becomes the common equivalent of all commodities, the universal equivalent. Fourth, in the money form, one commodity historically conquered that position: gold. For Marx the step from the third to the fourth form is not a further conceptual development but the fixing by social custom of the place of universal equivalent on one commodity.

A strong current of interpretation holds that this account is not a historical story of how money actually arose but a conceptual reconstruction of connections within present-day capitalism. Marx himself found the section difficult. He analysed the value-form in the main text of the first edition of Capital (1867) and, when his friend Ludwig Kugelmann and Engels urged a more accessible version, added a simplified appendix, "The Value-Form", to that edition. The main text of the second edition (1872–73) was rewritten along the lines of the appendix. Counting A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859), there are four presentations of the analysis, and the differences between them are still studied.

Marx named Aristotle as the first to analyse the value-form. Aristotle saw in the exchange "5 beds = 1 house" that the two things must be qualitatively equal to be commensurable, but stopped, declaring it "in truth impossible" that such different things should be equal. Marx's explanation: Greek society rested on slave labour and took the inequality of people and their labour-powers as its natural basis. The secret of the expression of value, the equality of all labours because and insofar as they are human labour in general, "can only be deciphered once the concept of human equality has acquired the fixity of a popular prejudice". The value-form goes together with a society in which commodity owners treat each other as equal exchangers.

Das Geheimnis des Wertausdrucks, die Gleichheit und gleiche Gültigkeit aller Arbeiten, weil und insofern sie menschliche Arbeit überhaupt sind, kann nur entziffert werden, sobald der Begriff der menschlichen Gleichheit bereits die Festigkeit eines Volksvorurteils besitzt.

The conclusion of the analysis is that money is not a tool someone invented to overcome the inconvenience of barter but a social relation that arises necessarily from the nature of commodity exchange. Since value can be adequately expressed only in the money form, Marx's theory is also called a "monetary theory of value". And the opposition between commodity (relative form) and money (equivalent form) already contains the possibility that goods will not sell, the abstract possibility of crisis when sale and purchase come apart.

What place did it have for Rubin and in the Soviet debates of the 1920s?

The first theorist to raise the value-form to the centre of Marx's theory of value was the Soviet economist Isaak Rubin (1886–1937). Chapter 12 of his Essays on Marx's Theory of Value, "The Content and Form of Value", starts from the English economist Samuel Bailey, who attacked Ricardo by arguing that value is merely the ratio in which commodities happen to exchange and that the concept of value is superfluous. Rubin read Marx's movement at the opening of Capital, from exchange-value to value and from value to labour, as the answer to this challenge. But Marx did not stop there: "whereas Ricardo confined himself to reducing the form (value) to the content (labour) by analysis, Marx wants to show us why this content takes precisely this social form." Marx went "not only from form to content but also from content to form".

Но в то время как Рикардо ограничивался тем, что при помощи анализа свел форму (стоимость) к содержанию (труду), Маркс хочет показать нам, почему это содержание принимает именно данную общественную форму.

Rubin criticised popular expositions for treating value simply as labour, which spread "the false notion of the complete identity of labour and value". He viewed value in three aspects: the magnitude of value, regulating the quantitative distribution of social labour; the form of value, the expression of social production relations; and the substance of value, the expression of abstract labour. He stressed that abstract labour and money are necessarily connected, because private labour is recognised as social labour only when its product is exchanged for money on the market.

This reading was contested by Sergei Bessonov and others in the 1927–29 debate on the "dialectic of categories", and critics charged Rubin with separating form from content and pulling value towards exchange. The scholarly debate soon became the campaign against "Rubinshchina", and Rubin was executed in 1937 (see the entry on commodity fetishism).

Half a century later the Soviet philosopher Evald Ilyenkov, in his 1979 essay "The Problem of the Ideal", took the value-form as the clearest example of "the ideal". In his words, "the value-form is ideal, although it exists outside human consciousness, independently of it, in the space outside the human head, in things, that is, in commodities themselves." From this analysis Ilyenkov drew his concept of the ideal as a form that human social activity imprints on things.

Иными словами, форма стоимости идеальна, хотя существует вне сознания человека, независимо от него, в пространстве вне головы человека, в вещах, то есть в самих товарах

What did the New Reading of Marx see anew?

In the mid-1960s a new interpretation of Marx's economic theory arose in West Germany, chiefly interested in the theoretical exposition of the value-form: the "New Reading of Marx" (Neue Marx-Lektüre). The name has been used since about 1997 and derives from a work by Hans-Georg Backhaus. The current set out from the 1920s work of Pashukanis and Rubin and continued with Helmut Reichelt and Backhaus in the 1970s and 1980s and Michael Heinrich in the 1990s. Its authors distanced themselves both from the historicising reading going back to Engels and from Marxism-Leninism and social democracy.

As a student in the 1960s Backhaus (1929–2026) happened upon a copy of the first edition of Capital (1867), an edition Marx's interpreters had largely ignored. In the winter semester of 1964/65 he gave a paper on the value-form analysis in Theodor Adorno's seminar, and the essay he built on it, "On the Dialectic of the Value-Form" (1969), became the starting point of the current.

Diese ist die Basis seines bekanntesten Aufsatzes Zur Dialektik der Wertform (1969).

What they rejected was "pre-monetary theories of value": the idea that individual concrete labour creates value by itself and that the magnitude of value follows directly from the labour time spent. Heinrich, in The Science of Value (1991), read Marx's theory as a monetary theory of value and a paradigm shift away from the labour theory of the classics; he also judged Marx's assumption that money must be a commodity such as gold to be unfounded.

Interpretations still diverge. One view holds that value arises only in exchange (first put forward by Bailey and criticised by Marx), another that value is fully determined in production, and the New Reading that value is co-constituted in production and circulation. Whether the value-form analysis is an abstract sketch of money's real history or a purely conceptual development is also disputed. Some doubt Marx's dialectical exposition altogether; the Austrian economist Böhm-Bawerk called it "dialectical hocus-pocus". Value-form studies have been particularly lively in Japan, where by one 1984 report some 200 books and articles had been written on the value-form analysis alone.

Why read it today?

The analysis of the value-form makes money visible as a social relation rather than a technical convenience. For the labour of private producers to count as part of society's labour, their products must be sold and become money; if they do not sell, that labour socially never happened. This structure also underlies commodity fetishism, in which people's relations appear as relations between things and money. Pashukanis's commodity exchange theory of law carried the same method over to law. This entry is best read with those on commodity fetishism, the labour theory of value and Capital.