The Labor Theory of Value Revisited

Marx’s view of capitalism is essentially historic, always on guard against temptations to depict the system in abstract terms that have no historical concreteness. Capitalism in his eyes is a stage and a staging ground in a long historic journey. Yet, to our surprise, his socioanalysis of the system does not begin with a description of its historic origins, a matter that does not receive direct attention until the very end of Volume I of Capital. Instead, the examination begins with what appears to be an unremarkable aspect of the system, indeed its simplest and seemingly most understandable element. This is the everyday commodity, the individual good in which the wealth of the system is incorporated. As the first sentence of Capital reads: “The wealth of those soci...