4 Value

4.1 Value Theory and Value Form

4.1.1 Critique of Michael Heinrich

Roberts

At the Historical Materialism conference in London in November, there was a book launch for Fred Moseley’s new book Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital: A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation. Michael Heinrich and Winfried Schwarz (a German Marxist who is also critical of Heinrich’s interpretation) participated in the book launch.

Heinrich is a well-known German Marxist who has published widely on his value-form interpretation of Marx’s theory of value, and his work is influential not only in Germany, but also in the UK and other countries in Europe and around the world. He criticises the traditional interpretation of the labour theory of value, according to which the value of commodities is determined solely in production, and he argues that value is created only when it is converted into money through the sale of commodities on the market.

It is important to get the details of Marx’s theory of value straight, because it is the foundation for Marx’s theory of surplus-value as a theory of exploitation in Volume 1. And the theory of value is also the foundation of his theory of the falling rate of profit and crises.

Marx’s theory of value cannot be reasonably be interpreted as a value-form theory.

Moseley

I worry about Heinrich’s influence on the understanding of Marx’s theory. His interpretation is very influential in Germany and elsewhere in the world, especially among young people. And I am convinced that it is a fundamental misinterpretation of Marx’s theory. So I think it is important to engage with his popular but mistaken interpretation. I hope that my book will be read especially by young people and it will encourage them to make a deeper study of Marx’s theory of value in Chapter 1 of Capital and beyond.

Roberts

Marx put it this way: “As the commodity is immediate unity of use value and exchange-value, so the process of production, which is the process of the production of a commodity, is the immediate unity of process of labour and process of valorisation.” So, for Marx, it’s the process of production, the exertion of human labour that creates value. As Marx once put it: “Every child knows that any nation that stopped working, not for a year, but let us say, just for a few weeks, would perish. And every child knows, too, that the amounts of products corresponding to the differing amounts of needs demand differing and quantitatively determined amounts of society’s aggregate labour.”

The value-form approach of Heinrich is implicitly a simultaneist approach. Its characteristic feature is the belief that value comes into existence only at the moment of realisation on the market. Consequently, production and realisation are collapsed into each other and time is wiped out. But the process of production and circulation (exchange) is not simultaneous, but temporal. At the start of production there are inputs of raw materials and fixed assets from a previous production period. So there is already (constant or ‘dead labour’) value in the commodity before exchange. Then production takes place to make a new commodity using human labour. This creates ‘potential’ new value, which is realised later (in a modified quantity) when sold.

But why does all this matter? For me, Marx’s value theory is about showing the fundamental contradiction in capitalism between production for social need (use-value) and production for profit (exchange value). Under capitalism, units of production are commodities that have a dual character which epitomises this contradiction.

For Marx, money is a representative of value, not value itself. If we think that value is only created when selling the commodity for money and not before, then the labour theory of value is devalued into a theory of money. Then, as mainstream neoclassical economics argues, we don’t need a labour theory of value at all because the money price will do. Money prices are what mainstream economics looks at, ignoring or dismissing value by human labour power – and therefore the exploitation of labour by capital for profit. It removes the basic contradiction of capitalist production.

Also, it leads to a failure to understand the causes of crises in capitalist production. It is no accident that Heinrich dismisses Marx law of profitability as illogical, ‘indeterminate’ and irrelevant to explaining crises and instead looks to excessive credit and financial instability as the causes. Heinrich even claims that in later years, Marx dropped his law of profitability although the evidence for that is non-existent.

If profits (surplus value) from human labour disappear from any analysis to be replaced by money, then we no longer have a Marxist theory of crisis or any theory of crisis at all.

Roberts (2023) Marx’s value theory and the value form interpretation