Value

Polity ‘What is Political Economy?’ series, November 2020

***Read a blogpost about the book at the Polity blog HERE***

Endorsements

‘Clear, comprehensive and critical, Value is a gem of a book for both students and scholars who grapple with the problem of value in economic thought. Harry Pitts's introduction offers well-argued and detailed engagement with central approaches and debates that should not be missed.’ Paul Mason, author of Postcapitalism

‘Harry Pitts has written an essential primer on that “thing” that is central to economics, political economy and the social system they purport to explain – capitalism. Debunking all notions that there is anything scientific or objective about value, Harry teaches why we should understand it as a category of struggle, as “something” that both emerges out of struggles and operates to fragment and suppress struggles.’ David Harvie, co-author of Moments of Excess: Movements, Protest and Everyday Life

Reviews

Capital & Class

Chapter Synopses

Chapter 1: Value as Substance

This chapter considers theories of value that posit a conserved substance in the commodity itself, typically put there by labour. This idea develops through so-called ‘balance of trade’ mercantilism based on trade and competition between nations, which vied with physiocratic accounts of the productive centrality of agriculture to nascent capitalist economies. It blossoms in classical political economy and its focus on the surplus, before reaching its climax in the critique of political economy of Marx, who moved beyond market exchange to confront the classed dynamics of the workplace in determining the production and distribution of value.

Chapter 2: Value as Relation

This chapter considers the development of so-called ‘field’ theories of value that situate value not in any thing or activity but rather in the money-mediated relationship between them. First we survey the contribution of ‘free trade’ mercantilists and the work of Samuel Bailey, before using the so-called ‘new reading’ of Marx to demonstrate how the full development of the latter’s value theory breaks with substantialist account of the production of value, stressing instead the sphere of circulation and the moment of monetary exchange in ascribing value to products of labour. This places Marx on the path to a proto-marginalist ‘subjective’ theory of value – a historically decisive break with the ‘objective’ theories of value associated with prior political economy.

Chapter 3: Value as Utility

This chapter examines the development of the relational ‘field’ theory of value marginalist utility theory. We first explore its foundations and political imperatives through the work of Bernoulli and Bentham, before a discussion of its central unit of analysis, the ‘util’. Drawing on critical reconstructions in the work of institutionalists like Mirowski, we identify utility theory’s incomplete break with a concept of substance. Finally, we explore, through a consideration of the so-called ‘Weber-Fechner’ debate, issues in the marginalist tradition around the measurability of marginal utility. Whilst utility theory has some advantages, moving from a production-based standpoint to include other moments of consumption and exchange within the determination of value, its individualised and asocial view of capitalist society leaves significant conceptual gaps with problematic real-life consequences.

Chapter 4: Value and Institutions

This chapter surveys how ‘social’ and ‘normative’ theories of value plug gaps inherent in other approaches to value. We first explore the ‘normative’ theory of value inaugurated with Aristotle, before charting the development of the ‘social’ theory associated with institutionalists like Thorstein Veblen and John Commons, before moving on to the more recent ‘power’ theory of value promoted in the work of Nitzan and Bichler. We then discuss the increasingly significant ‘Sociology of Valuation and Evaluation’, specifically how social and political processes of valuation are theorised in the work of Arjun Appadurai and the ‘valuation studies’ that develop from his work an analysis of the ‘regimes of value’ enacted in so-called market devices, as well the ‘cultural economy’ approach influenced by Michel Callon and Pierre Bourdieu. Continuing a focus on the ‘performativity’ of both value and theories of it, we use the work of Mariana Mazzucato to explore the past and present politics of productiveness and unproductiveness that both influence the development of different theories of value and represent their real-world outcome.

Chapter 5: Value as Struggle

This chapter revisits aspects of both the ‘substantialist’ and the ‘relational’ Marx introduced in the first and second chapter, using open Marxism and autonomist Marxism to delving deeper to unfold the historical constitution of value in a set of classed social relations based on the separation of individuals from the independent means to reproduce the conditions of living, and how the dual character of labour as concrete and abstract within the production process itself represents the terrain for class struggle over the form and content of work and value in capitalist society.

Chapter 6: Value in Crisis

This chapter closes the book by considering the possible futures of value in a financialised economy based on modes of ‘immaterial’ production. The ‘postoperaist’ school of Italian post-Marxism proposes a crisis in the law of value wherein the value produced by contemporary digital labour exceeds the capacity of capital to capture it through means such as financialisation. We conclude by insisting on the persistence of value in spite of its purported ‘crisis’ - if not as an economic category, then as a subject of social and political struggle that will rage into a new decade of populism and technological change.