26 - Value as alienated labor

Summary

If alienated labor is at the center of Marx's economics, value is not one whit closer to the perimeter – for the two are ‘identical’, different facets of the same whole, contrasting expressions for the same social relations. According to Marx, ‘Value is labor’; it is ‘materialized labor in its general social form’. Or again, he claims, ‘Value as such has no other “material” than labor itself’. There are other such forthright statements of the equation of labor and value, but they seem equally to have missed their mark. For most readers of Capital, ‘value’ remains an economic expression synonymous with ‘worth’, a judgement strictly measurable in monetary terms. Its tie with labor is believed to be capable of conclusive empirical demonstration; this applies to most defenders of the labor theory of value as well as its critics. However, Marx's conception of value is of an altogether different nature. Its unity with labor is assumed, and the rich assortment of facts brought forward on this subject are for purposes of illustration and not proof. For Marx, value, or as he sometimes says, ‘value in general’, is transfigured labor, and no manner of evidence could serve him as a counter argument.

Thus, while Marx frequently declaims what value is, he never sets out to discover it, nor is he interested in proving it. Indeed, he treats the ‘necessity of proving the concept of value’ as ‘nonsense’.