Widening the Concept of Value

[Chris Burford <cburford@xxxxxxxxxx>]

I agree with Jim Devine that the Marxian theory of value is relevant at a
high level of abstraction. I also agree with his approach to analysing the
shifts in wages and salaries that have occurred in recent decades.

It is heartening that people are contemplating introducing value theory
into the curriculum. The challenge as Brad implies, how to avoid being
attacked as using it in a dogmatic and reductionist way.

The problem with talking about the labour theory of value is that it may be
taken as limited to an arithmetical explanation of how capitalists extract
surplus value.

A mechanical LTV interpretation of Marx leaves us open to being bogged down
in the terms of the debate of the "transformation problem", whereas one of
the Marxian breakthroughs in recent years has been the importance of
emphasising non-equilibrium dynamics.

Up to a point people are relatively open to the perception that capitalist
produce for profit, but they accept the justification of risk and can see
certain sectors of capital contract, as in steel or coal mining, and fail
to see the mobility of capital and that it is an impersonal force that
keeps on growing in its domination of production.

My desire is to open to concept of value to a wider concept of *social value*.

In detailed exchanges with Andrew Kliman I accepted that Marx does not use
"value" in a wider sense than exchange value. The wider sense in which I
which to use it, and for which I propose we use the term social value, is
that of all the human energy in a society that is put into the products of
labour, including those use values that are not commodities.

Certainly Marx talks about products of labour, under different forms of
social organisation. Certainly too he indicates that under capitalism extra
surplus value may be squeezed by intensifying the exploitation of the
environment of labour power, and of human reproduction itself.

Social value I suggest includes in capitalist society not only labour for
the production of surplus value, but also labour and any expenditure of
energy for the reproduction of society, including those activities outside
commodity exchange, like the care of children by parents and the mutual
nuturing without which society becomes a desert.

Just as the law of value determines how society divides its productive
labour between different types of commodities, so does the wider concept of
social value determine how society distributes all its energy for its total
reproduction.

Does such a shift in emphasis detract from the exposure of the accumulation
of surplus value by capital?
No, because among other things it gives a theoretical voice to the
widespread alarm about how capitalist-led production eats into the
environment in an extraordinarily destructive and unsustainable way.

Secondly, it provides a framework for analysing the destruction of all the
subtleties of organic human society that accompanies the onward march of
capitalist commodity exchange. This onward march has left remaining "no
other nexus between man and man than naked self-interest"; it has "reduced
the family relation to a mere money relation". As each person searches more
feverishly for their own identity, as mental illness rises, the commodity
solutions to these problems become more and more plentiful at the hands of
the generous capitalists.

A wider concept of social value is, I submit, fully compatible with
marxism, and gives us that wider perspective that can make the critique of
the capitalist mode of production more immediately relevant to the wide
variety of confused popular perceptions. By going up one step of
abstraction further, we actually have a greater opportunity of coming back
to link up with the concrete experience of the great majority of the
population. This does not have to be at the expense of those most exploited
by the system. But as they are largely in the third world, we need a global
critique of capitalism that can be seen to be coherent from many angles,
including to the more questioning sections of society in the privileged west.

Thus I propose we describe exchange value as the exchange form of value
which is a subset of a wider concept of *social value* relevant for all
forms of human reproduction. It is a paradox, but this extreme abstraction
may in the end be easier to explain concretely.

Chris Burford

London