The question of the law of value

The following short essay represents a comrade's contribution to discussions we are having about value, abstract labor, and basic Marxist economics. Does this seem complicated or over your head? It isn't! Start with Rius' Marx For Beginners, as we're doing, and think through your own work experience with others.)

A central problem of socialist development is the question of the law of value. Stalin famously argued in his last work, Economic Problems of Socialism in the USSR that commodity production and the law of value continue to operate under socialism and that this is "not a bad thing", that it leads enterprises to become more efficient, managers to be more cost conscious, and generally improves the performance of the socialist economy. In taking this position, Stalin argued against those in the Communist Party of the Soviet Uunion who believed that the development of the socialist economy could be accomplished by decree alone, that prices could be set without regard to the cost of production, and generally that Marx's correct observation that economic law is social in character meant that therefore economic law must not exist at all.

In the context of the struggle against bureaucratic revisionism in USSR of the 1950s, a struggle that was subsequently lost to Khrushchev, Stalin was no doubt correct. However, the history of the application of the law of value in the USSR can only lead us to conclude that it led to the development of a nascent capitalist class that eventually grew to the point that it could abolish socialism. This was not merely a 'managerial' or 'technocratic' class as some idealist critics would have it, nor simply a clique of corrupt 'Khrushchevite revisionists' or second economy bandits (though no doubt these existed), but a class with real, material interests whose chief concern was the efficient operation of the law of value and the profitability of its enterprises; its origin lay in the very foundation of the postwar Soviet economy.

Shall we, then, simply stop there and declare that true socialism must abolish the law of value instantly and completely? By no menas. We must instead, as any competent scientist might, go back to first principles and reexamine the law of value and its potential application under socialism.

The law of value states that the value of a commodity is twofold, containing both a use value and an exchange value. Use value, based on specific labor, determines a commodity's usefulness in itself; exchange value determines its value relative to other commodities. The magnitude of the exchange value is dependent upon the average, or abstract, socially necessary labor time needed to produce that particular commodity. Note that value is distinct from price.

Particularly under monopoly conditions, capitalists seek always to get 'something for nothing', to 'cheat' the system of exchange so to speak and thereby receive a greater sum of value than they give in their transactions. In doing so, they do not create value from thin air; they extract it from the other party in the transaction. Modern bourgeois economics attempt to cover this up by conflating price with value: Pubilius Syrus' old saw, "everything is worth what its purchaser will pay for it", is elevated to divine writ in the annals of marginal utility theory (the subjective theory of value which states that the purchaser determines a commodity’s value via the ‘margin of utility’ gained by purchasing it).

At any given moment, there exists some number n of like commodities c that will satisfy the need for their particular use values. This is the demand. However, capitalism obscures the actual demand as the production of these commodities is determined not by the use value, but the exchange value; commodities under capitalism do not have value in themselves but only insofar as they can be exchanged for other commodities. Thus, the capitalists' natural response to the inevitable fall in price as demand is met is to produce more while selling for less, and when these measures fail, to cut staff, raise quotas, and resort to all the various tricks and gyrations that the bourgeoisie uses in its vain attempts to preserve the exchange value of its products. The use value of these products is immaterial in all this. Under capitalism, use value is subordinated to exchange value.

Under socialism, on the other hand, commodities ought to have value in themselves; they should exist primarily as use values. In other words, rather than abolishing the law of value, its application under socialism should be inverted: exchange value should be subordinate to use value. This means that all exchange must be conducted on the basis of value for value, never value for value+ or value for nothing (as we see in the markets for real estate and certain digital goods, for instance). The goal of production, meanwhile, must be to maximize the number of use values produced per unit of average labor time, allowing exchange value per commodity to fall and thus indicate a potential need to reallocate or restructure the means of production. This does not preclude the existence of market mechanisms per se, though the operation of these would be along lines very different from markets under capitalism.