2 - How (Not) to Think about Value

Summary

The concept of value is deeply embedded in debates about the economy, yet it is also deeply problematic. There are many different ways of understanding value, including many that are not directly concerned with economic questions, and we must begin by establishing some clarity over which versions we are engaging with. This chapter will argue, however, that even the best-established economic understandings of value are radically unsatisfactory. It is therefore essential, before outlining a more coherent understanding of value, to clear some ground by explaining what is wrong with the established approaches. This chapter criticises three in turn: the theory of value implicit in the marginalist tradition in economics, Marx’s labour theory of value, and the notion of value at work in more popular discourses of value creation and value extraction such as the recent work of Mariana Mazzucato. This discussion, however, is not intended as a comprehensive critique of these traditions, but rather as a means to mark out the space that the argument of this book aims to occupy.