Value and Naturalism in Marx

Marco Lippi

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781786632371
• eBook ISBN: 9781788732000
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Communism, Post-Communism & Socialism
• Index: Politics & International Relations

When Value and Naturalism in Marx was first published in English in 1979, recent controversies in socialist economic theory had been concentrated on the tenability or untenability of Marx's labour theory of value. Marco Lippi's provocative book accepts the Sraffian correction of Marx's account of profits and prices, but goes on to ask the central question: why did Marx identify value with embodied labour-time? The answer, Lippi argues, lies in a strong-though little-discussed-naturalistic strain in Marx's thought. Through a novel analysis of the discussion of circulation costs in Volume Two of Capital, he contends that Marx operated with a concept of 'production in general', as a relationship of man to nature common to all forms of society, in which labour-time appears as the sole real cost. It was this general conception of production, he suggests, that underlay Marx's insistence that profits, interest, rent and faux frais represent no more than a redistribution of a pre-given total-the mass of surplus value, in a system in which total profit equalled total surplus value and total price total value. While Lippi rejects Marx's naturalistic identification of value with embodied labour-time, he claims that the account developed from it of the anarchy of the market, of commodity fetishism, and of the laws of motion of capitalism is in fact logically independent and retains all its empirical validity. Value and Naturalism in Marx, the work of one of the most outstanding younger economists in Italy, reveals the classic economic theory of historical materialism in a quite new light.

III

Real Cost and Exchange-Value

The analysis of Marx’s theory of prices of production presented in this chapter will emphasize that Marx considered this theory an extension and confirmation of the labour theory of value. As we shall see, Marx was explicit that this is his line of investigation, and he assumed that it could be realized. The labour embodied in commodities is thought of as a ‘substance’ (or ‘energy’ or ‘fluid’) with which they are imbued during production. It is from this image that the key idea that dominates Marx’s method of determining prices is derived: the conservation of given quantities of this substance. The analysis that follows here is devoted to examining the presence and articulation of this ‘measurable permanent substance’ in Capital Volume 3.

As we shall see shortly, the discussion of the problem of profit throughout the first twelve chapters of Capital Volume 3 is closely connected to the critique of the idea that capital is the source of profit. In the next chapter this critical objective will be separated from the particular form in which it is pursued in Capital; this will enable us to draw some conclusions about the reconstruction of Marx’s thought and the current direction of research on Capital.

1.Marx and the Origin of Profit

In chapter 9 of Capital Volume 3, having determined prices of production on the basis of a redistribution of total surplus-value, Marx synthesizes his argument up to this point as follows: ‘The actual difference of magnitude between profit and surplus-value – not merely between the rate of profit and the rate of surplus value – in the various spheres of production now completely conceals the true nature and origin of profit…. The transformation of values into prices of production serves to obscure the basis for determining value itself.’ But this concealment occurs regardless of the uniformity of the rate of profit: ‘since the mere transformation of surplus-value into profit distinguishes the portion of the value of a commodity forming the profit from the portion forming its cost-price, it is natural that the conception of value should elude the capitalist at this juncture, for he does not see the total labour put into the commodity, but only that portion of the total labour for which he has paid in the shape of means of production, be they living or not, so that his profit appears to him as something outside the immanent value of the commodity.’ Moreover: ‘This idea is fully confirmed, fortified and ossified’, because of the uniformity of the rate of profit, which results in a quantitative difference between profit and surplus-value in the various spheres of production.¹

The very first chapter of Capital Volume 3 opens with the assertion that the apparent derivation of profit from total capital results not only from the uniformity of the rate of profit, but also from the ‘grouping of the various value portions of a commodity which only replace the value of the capital expended in its production under the head of cost price’.² Here profit is still quantitatively equal to surplus-value, but there is a change in its form: it is now surplus-value as it appears to those engaged in production. Value itself also undergoes a change in form: it is no longer c + v + s, but k + p, where k = c + v and p = s. This means that the various elements of capital are unified and are, without distinction, advances of capital. Surplus-value thus appears to arise from advances as such: ‘In its assumed capacity of offspring of the aggregate advanced capital, surplus-value takes the converted form of profit.’³

Marx also presents the mistaken idea that profit arises from capital advanced as an instance of confusion in the minds of those engaged in production between ‘cost price’ (constant plus variable capital) and ‘real cost’ (total value). Since the commodity seems to cost less than it does in reality, profit appears as an autonomous addition to what seems to be the real cost.⁴

If values determined prices directly (that is, if commodities were exchanged on the basis of quantities of embodied labour), it would be easy to dispose of the idea that advances of capital are the source of the value over and above the cost price. Profit would be determined the moment wages were given in terms of commodities. The ratio of its magnitude to the amount of capital advanced for wages would be exactly equal to the ratio of surplus labour to necessary labour (the latter being the portion of the working day equal to the labour embodied in wage-goods). The rate of profit – the ratio of profit to total capital advanced – would then ‘express nothing but what it actually is, namely a different way of measuring surplus-value, its measurement according to the value of the total capital instead of the value of the portion of capital from which surplus-value directly originates by way of its exchange for labour’.⁵

In other words, if we start from the profit contained in the price of a commodity, it is completely determined by the surplus-value contained in the value of that commodity, which is, in turn, quantitatively identical to the ‘unpaid’ labour over and above that required to reconstitute variable capital. The immediate determination of profits once wages are set demolishes any notion that there is an autonomous source of value other than labour.⁶

The chain of reasoning that begins with the fixing of wages and arrives at profits through the determination of the surplus labour – and therefore surplus-value – contained in commodities must be re-examined the moment prices of production (i.e., the equalization of the rate of profit) are introduced.⁷ Marx introduces one further mediating factor, composed of magnitudes obtained from values through the transfer of quantities of surplus-value from some capitals to others; the determination of the share of profit that goes to each capital does not conflict with the production of value and surplus-value, but simply amounts to a redistribution of total surplus-value. Once wages are set, profits are determined, because prices are merely values adjusted by the transfer of surplus-value from some capitals to others.

This is the point that must not be forgotten. The confutation of any impressions born of superficial observation of prices of production stems from the proposition that labour is the sole source of value, which Marx claims to have proved. This proposition, as we have seen, springs from another, valid for any mode of production: that labour constitutes the real social cost of products. Meanwhile, the task of scientific investigation is explicitly defined as the discovery of the forms in which the quantities o...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Preface to the English Edition
• Preface
• Introduction
• I. Productive Labour and Pure Circulation Costs
• II. The Taw of Nature’
• III. Real Cost and Exchange-Value
• IV. Marx and Prices of Production: the Subsequent Debate
• V. ‘Capital’ without the Labour Theory of Value
• Postscript
• Notes
• Index