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.

[LBird]

LBird wrote: “Where that leaves ‘value’, I’m not sure.”

Perhaps to clarify, I think Marx’s theories, including ‘value’, have an inescapable ethical dimension.

Furthermore, I think that many of the discussions about ‘value’ are an erroneous attempt to prove the ‘objectivity’ (or, ‘material reality’) of Marx’s ‘value’.

To me, ‘value’ is a human, social, historical, changeable, product, and we can choose not to produce it, if we want to.

We make our own laws, whether ethical or physical. And we can change them.

[Roberto]

When LBird writes, “Where that leaves ‘value’, I’m not sure,” the uncertainty may arise from treating value as something that must either be objectively “out there” in the world or else merely subjective opinion. But Marx’s concept of value does not fit comfortably into that dichotomy.
I agree that Marx’s theories, including value, have an inescapable ethical dimension — though perhaps not in the sense of a moral prescription built into the concept itself. Rather, the critique of value exposes a historically specific form of social domination. That exposure has ethical implications because it reveals that what appears natural and inevitable is in fact a human product.
Many discussions of value go astray, in my view, when they attempt to prove its “objectivity” as if it were a physical substance, measurable like weight or temperature. Marx was not discovering a hidden natural property of commodities. He was analyzing a social relation that takes on an objective form in societies based on generalized commodity production. Value is “objective” only in the sense that it confronts individuals as a real social force — prices fluctuate, firms go bankrupt, workers lose jobs — but its objectivity is socially constituted, not natural.
In that sense, value is indeed human, social, historical, and changeable. It exists only because we collectively reproduce a system in which labor takes the form of abstract labor and products take the form of commodities. If we were to organize production directly for use rather than exchange, the value-form would cease to exist. We can choose not to reproduce it.
However, the claim that “we make our own laws, whether ethical or physical” needs some qualification. We certainly make our social laws — institutions, norms, economic structures — and therefore we can change them. But physical laws are not of the same order. Gravity does not disappear because we vote against it. What we can change is how we understand and apply physical laws through science and technology.
Marx’s value theory, then, sits at the intersection of structure and agency. It describes a social law that we ourselves produce but which, under capitalism, operates behind our backs and beyond our conscious control. The ethical impulse arises precisely from recognizing that this “law” is neither eternal nor natural, but a historically specific way of organizing social life — one that can, in principle, be superseded.
The real question is not whether value is objective or subjective, but whether we wish to continue reproducing the social relations that give rise to it.

[LBird]

Roberto wrote: “When LBird writes, “Where that leaves ‘value’, I’m not sure,” the uncertainty may arise from treating value as something that must either be objectively “out there” in the world or else merely subjective opinion. But Marx’s concept of value does not fit comfortably into that dichotomy.”

Yeah, Marx is very clear in Capital that ‘value’ does not contain ‘matter’. Marx, as you say, does not use the supposed opposition of ‘material’ versus ‘ideal’, but focusses upon ‘social production’ which requires both objects and ideas, both of which are our own products. There is no ‘matter’ out there which we can’t know, and there is no ‘conscious creator’ of our natural world.

As I’ve argued before, Marx is an ‘idealist-materialist’, to use those terms, which is better expressed as a ‘social productionist’. All of his key theoretical concepts involve ‘production’, not ‘matter’: mode of production, means of production, forces of production. We are the active producing agent in our world, both natural and social.

I suspect this next is our main bone of contention.

Roberto wrote “However, the claim that “we make our own laws, whether ethical or physical” needs some qualification. We certainly make our social laws — institutions, norms, economic structures — and therefore we can change them. But physical laws are not of the same order. Gravity does not disappear because we vote against it. What we can change is how we understand and apply physical laws through science and technology.”

No, our ‘physical laws’ are just the same as our ‘social laws’: we socially produce both, historically have changed both, and in the future, in a democratic communist society, need to be able to democratically change all of our socially produced laws. Any study of ‘science’ shows that it has a history, often changes, and has always been controlled by a self-selecting elite (who serve the ruling class, whatever their own supposed individual intentions).

As often happens, opponents of Marx’s democratic social productionism revert to a ‘materialism’ that Marx opposed, and which Marx warned, in his Theses on Feuerbach, would lead to an elite in control of this ‘materialism’, as society was separated into two halves, those who have to remain passive in the face of ‘The Physical’ (the majority), and those, a small elite, who have a special consciousness which allows them to change the laws of science.

In your example, ‘gravity’ compels all – so why do we need ‘science’ to understand ‘gravity’? The vast majority would vote to agree that jumping off a ten storey building would prove to be painful for the jumper. So much for the ‘physical’, which any individual can understand.

But our problem is that ‘gravity’ (ie, the idea, the concept) is a social product, which can be changed. The explanation of why a body falls on Earth could be changed (and the history of science suggests that it probably will in the future), and the name that we give to our experience of falling could change, too. It might not always be called ‘gravity’, with the underlying explanation of ‘why’ we fall.

Roberto wrote: “Marx’s value theory, then, sits at the intersection of structure and agency. It describes a social law that we ourselves produce but which, under capitalism, operates behind our backs and beyond our conscious control. The ethical impulse arises precisely from recognizing that this “law” is neither eternal nor natural, but a historically specific way of organizing social life — one that can, in principle, be superseded.”

I’ll finish on a point of complete agreement, regarding ‘value’. But we don’t need the concept of ‘material’ to have this agreement.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 2 days ago by LBird.

[Roberto]

Your reflection raises a deep philosophical issue that has existed inside Marxist debates for more than a century: whether concepts like value, nature, and even science should be understood primarily as discoveries about an independent reality or as products of human social activity. A balanced comment could read something like this:
What this discussion reveals is less a disagreement about Marx than about the limits of social construction. It is correct to stress that Marx moves away from the crude opposition between “material” and “ideal.” His focus is indeed on social production: humans actively transform nature and, in doing so, produce concepts, institutions and forms of understanding. Value, law, morality and economic structures clearly belong to this historically produced sphere. They exist only because human beings reproduce them socially.
However, extending this argument to physical laws risks collapsing an important distinction. Scientific concepts are certainly historical and socially mediated — theories change, terminology evolves, and knowledge develops within social institutions shaped by power and class relations. Yet this does not mean that the underlying regularities of nature are themselves socially created. Gravity as a theory is socially produced; the tendency of bodies to fall is not dependent on collective agreement.
Marx’s strength lies precisely in maintaining this tension. Humans are active producers of their social world, but they do so within natural conditions they did not create. Social laws can be abolished through conscious collective action; natural constraints can only be understood and worked with. Confusing the two risks either scientism (rule by experts) or voluntarism (the belief reality bends to democratic will).
Where there is strong agreement is on value: it is neither eternal nor natural, but a historically specific social relation that persists only so long as commodity production persists — and therefore can disappear when society organizes production directly for human need.

[LBird]

Roberto wrote: “Your reflection raises a deep philosophical issue that has existed inside Marxist debates for more than a century: whether concepts like value, nature, and even science should be understood primarily as discoveries about an independent reality or as products of human social activity. ” [my bold]

Yeah, and the fact that Marx focussed upon ‘production’, which produces “products of human social activity”, suggests he was of the latter persuasion.
Marx’s politics and philosophy was focussed on human creative activity, and he rejected both ‘idealism’ (which focussed on ‘divine creative activity’) and ‘materialism’ (which focussed on ‘human passive experience’). Marx unified the two into ‘idealism-materialism’ (rejecting both divine creativity and human passivity). That’s why his method is ‘theory and practice’ (and not ‘practice and theory’, as some would have it).

But the key here is understanding what ‘an independent reality’ actually means. I’m inclined to think that ‘materialists’ think it means ‘outside of an individual’s head/mind/brain’. But no Marxist would argue that that is untrue: obviously, ‘external’ to its producer is exactly what a product is.

But if ‘an independent reality’ means an externality that has no relationship to an active subject, how would the subject know this ‘independent reality’?

Clearly, any ‘external world’, ‘natural world’, ‘material reality’ that we humans know, is a unified product of our theory and practice, our active engagement with our own reality. That’s why WE CAN CHANGE ‘it’.

Anything ‘independent’ of humans can’t be known. So, our ‘material reality’ is our active product, and has a social and historical dimension.

Roberto wrote: “Confusing the two risks either scientism (rule by experts) or voluntarism (the belief reality bends to democratic will).”

But this is exactly what Marx predicted that ‘materialists’ would argue. If neither ‘experts’ nor ‘the social producers’ will control ‘science’, who will? It will lead back to an unelected ‘special elite’, as Marx predicted. ‘Materialists’ have a hidden distain for the majority, if the ‘materialists’ believe that most humans in a democratic socialist society would ‘vote for carpets to fly’.

Marxists don’t argue that democratic control of our science means a belief in ‘anything goes, if it’s voted for’, but that the social producers must democratically control their production of their own world, and democratically control its own experts, universities, research, funding, and methods.

The reason that this ‘deep philosophical issue’ continues to ‘exist inside Marxist debates’ is that it reveals the true nature of its competing adherents’ views about ‘democracy’, and views about the potential for a wider humanity.

‘Materialism’ requires a special elite, and that ‘the common masses’ keep their sticky little fingers off the ‘pristine bourgeois science’ of an elite who claim that they know better.

That’s why Lenin was a ‘materialist’, who didn’t understand ‘value’, which is an ‘ideal-material’ concept and power.

• This reply was modified 1 week, 1 day ago by LBird.

[LBird]

BTW, the materialist notion of ‘underlying’ regularities has been around since the Ancient Greeks, with their concept of ‘hupokeimenon’, which literally means ‘underlying’.

But neither any Greek nor modern ever explained how we ordinary people could access this ‘underlying’. It clearly remained a task for a ‘special minority’, like Plato.

[Author]

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