Criticism of value-form theory

Especially during the last half century, there have been many critical appraisals of Karl Marx’s ideas about the form of value in capitalist society. Marx himself provided a starting point for the 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." 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..." Nowadays there are many scholars who feel that Marx’s theory of the value-form was badly misinterpreted for more than a hundred years. This allegedly had the effect that the radical, revolutionary meaning of Marx’s critique of capitalism as a whole was misunderstood or diminished, so that it became just another version of academic economics - heterodox economics in the West, and socialist economics in the East.

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 (but Eastern Marxian scholars have also contributed to the international discussion and influenced it). The interpretation and criticism of Marx’s concept of the form of value was a part of these new foundational studies.

Several different schools of academic "value-form theory" have appeared in different countries, and 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.

• 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 product-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 concluding section of the article describes how Marxists and socialists responded to such criticisms by defending various theories of "market socialism" with multiple co-existing methods of resource allocation (both market allocation and non-market allocation), in advance of direct allocation within the communist economy.