This article is about scholarly criticism of Karl Marx’s idea about the form of value in capitalist society. Marx himself provided a first starting point for this scholarly controversy when he claimed that Capital, Volume I was not difficult to understand, "with the exception of the section on the form of value."[1]Friedrich Engels argued in his Anti-Dühring polemic of 1878 (when Marx was still alive) that "The value form of products... already contains in embryo the whole capitalist form of production, the antagonism between capitalists and wage-workers, the industrial reserve army, crises..."[2] Nowadays there are many scholars who feel that Marx’s theory of the value-form was misinterpreted for a hundred years. This allegedly had effect that the radical meaning of Marx’s critique of capitalism as a whole was misunderstood or diminished, so that it became just another version of economics.
Since the mid-1960s and after the collapse of state socialism and Marxism-Leninism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, there has emerged a new critical literature by Western Marxist and non-Marxist scholars about the conceptual foundations of Marx’s theory of value[3] (but Eastern scholars have also contributed to the international discussion and influenced it[4]). The interpretation and criticism of Marx’s concept of the form of value was a part of these new foundational studies.[5] Several different schools of academic “value-form theory” have appeared in different countries.[6]
The critical value-form discourse has been to a considerable extent international. It emerged in many different contexts in different countries at different points in time. This article contains only a brief description of five main themes of criticism of Marx’s theory of the form of value, referencing some of the key thinkers and some of the important arguments made.[7] The first theme concerns the accusation of some scholars that Marx’s concept of the form of value is obscure, otiose or makes no sense. The second theme is the criticism of Marx’s definition of the substance of value as social labour (abstract labour). The third theme is the neo-Ricardian critique of Marx, which claims to make Marx’s theory of the form of value redundant. The fourth theme is the Chartalist criticism of Marx’s theory of the money-form of value. The fifth theme is the libertarian critique of Marx’s theory of the form of value, which defends the price system and free markets as progressive and as the foundation of a free society. The last section of the article describes how Marxists and socialists responded to such criticisms by defending various theories of “market socialism” and multiple co-existing methods of resource allocation (both market allocation and non-market allocation).
^Friedrich Engels, Anti-Dühring – Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science (1878), Part III, chapter 4. In: Marx Engels Collected Works, Vol. 25, p. 295.
^Michael Heinrich, Die Wissenschaft vom Wert: die Marxsche Kritik der politischen Ökonomie zwischen wissenschaftlicher Revolution und klassischer Tradition. Münster: Verlag Westfälisches Dampfboot, 2001; Ingo Elbe, Marx Im Westen: Die neue Marx-Lektüre in der Bundesrepublik seit 1965, (2nd edition). Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2010; Jan Hoff, Marx Worldwide: on the development of the international discourse on Marx since 1965. Leiden: Brill, 2017.
^Kozo Uno, Principles of Political Economy. Theory of a Purely Capitalist Society. Translated from the Japanese by Thomas T. Sekine. Brighton, Atlantic Highlands/New Jersey: Harvester Press, 1980; Thomas T. Sekine, An outline of the dialectic of capital, Vol. 1. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Macmillan Press Ltd, 1997; Samezō Kuruma, Marx’s Theory of the Genesis of Money. Leiden: Brill, 2018.
^Desmond McNeill, Fetishism and the Theory of Value. Reassessing Marx in the 21st Century. Cham: Palgrave Macmillan/Springer, 2021.
^ Pichit Likitkijsomboon, "Marxian Theories of Value-Form". Review of Radical Political Economics, vol. 27 no. 2, June 1995, pp. 73-105.
^This Criticism of value-form theory article is a split-off from the original value-form article. It was felt that the original article had become too large and that the criticisms of the theory were better placed in a separate article.
