Law of value

[wpc@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx (Paul Cockshott)]

Jim Devine makes reference to Marx's Law of Value.

I am not sure that Marx had a Law of Value. It is certainly part of
the language of Orthodox Marxism, one finds reference to it in
Stalin's Economic Problems of Socialism, and in some passages by
Engels, but it seems to be missing from from Capital I, though
I suspect that the phrase is used once or twice in Capital III.

But what does it mean. A scientific law expresses some unvarying
relationship or regularity 'The pressure of a gas at constant
temperature is inversely proportional to its volume' for example.
Since Marx was familiar with the terminology of the sciences,
if he had wished to claim that there was a law of value he would
have clearly defined it as such. But he never did, so I do not
think that he intended to claim that any such law existed.

This of course does not mean that one could not formulate a law
of value. Bordiga in his reply to Stalin's Economic Problems,
Dialogue avec Staline (Paris 1956, Partie Communiste Internationale),
ridiculed Stalin's use of the phrase. What could the law of value
mean other than the exchange of equivalents, he asked? To test
whether the law of value applied to the USSR one had only to see
if there were any commodity exchanges, there would thus be
exchange of equivalents and thus a law of value. But that would
be just a banal observation.

I strongly suspect that the use of the phrase Law of Value by
Marxists rarely even rises to the level of banality ridiculed
by Bordiga.

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