An Incontestable Argument for the Law of Value

[ALB]

Perhaps “suggests” was a bit too strong; “doesn’t rule out” might have been better.
Cohen’s theory doesn’t rule out socialism either but, by abandoning the concept of “value” (which only exists when there is buying and selling), it leaves open — and provides a justification for — that what could be envisaged is workers control in a market economy; what might be called “workers control of value”. The contradiction in terms that is “market socialism”.

[Roberto]

Perhaps “suggests” was indeed too strong; “doesn’t rule out” is more precise. In the case of G.A. Cohen’s reconstruction of historical materialism, there is no explicit defense of market socialism, but neither is it theoretically excluded. And that is where an important conceptual issue emerges.
By abandoning or sidelining Marx’s theory of value — which understands “value” as a category specific to societies based on generalized commodity production, that is, societies where buying and selling mediate social labor — a crucial distinction becomes blurred. For Marx, value is not simply a technical measure of labor time. It is a historically specific social form. It exists only where products take the commodity form and where human labor is expressed as “abstract labor” through exchange.
If this categorical foundation is removed, it becomes easier to imagine that the essence of socialism lies merely in who controls enterprises — for example, workers rather than private capitalists — without questioning the market framework itself. One can then envisage an economy of worker-managed firms competing with one another, a system in which workers “control” their workplaces while still operating within market exchange.
But here a structural tension arises. In a market economy, even if firms are formally owned and managed by their workers, they remain subject to the law of value. They must reduce costs, increase productivity, compete for market share, respond to price signals, and accumulate in order to survive. The market imposes systemic imperatives that do not disappear simply because ownership is collective. Competition reproduces pressures analogous to those of capitalism, even if the internal distribution of surplus is altered.
This is why many Marxists have regarded “market socialism” as a contradiction in terms. If value is inseparable from generalized commodity production, and if socialism implies the transcendence of that social form — meaning production oriented directly toward human need rather than mediated by exchange — then retaining the market means retaining the value-form.
In that sense, “workers’ control of value” becomes an ambiguous formulation. Does it mean abolishing the impersonal domination of value as a social form, or merely redistributing its outcomes? The distinction is decisive. The first implies a structural transformation of economic logic; the second leaves the fundamental mechanism intact.
The debate, therefore, is not merely normative (what is more just), but categorical: is the market a neutral tool that can simply be democratized, or is it a social form that structures behavior and relations independently of who formally owns productive units?
That is where the core disagreement lies.

[LBird]

Roberto wrote: “The debate, therefore, is not merely normative (what is more just), but categorical: is the market a neutral tool that can simply be democratized, or is it a social form that structures behavior and relations independently of who formally owns productive units?
That is where the core disagreement lies.”

But if production is democratised, why would distribution remain by a market? Who argues for this, and why?

If distribution is also democratised, doesn’t that remove ‘individual choice’, which is what I suspect is behind the argument in favour of ‘market socialism’. That is, the belief that ‘individual choice’ is the highest ethical/normative/moral/political standard.

It seems to me that democracy does imply the weakening of ‘individual choice’, and I’m in favour of ‘democratic production’.

That is, ‘social choice’, not ‘individual choice’. Collective consumption, not ‘individual consumption’.

Where that leaves ‘value’, I’m not sure.

[Author]

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