Value. Frederick Harry Pitts

Introduction

      This book introduces how the idea of value has been understood within political economy, and the social and political implications of its different interpretations. The book traverses Aristotle, mercantilism, the classical political economy of Smith and Ricardo, Marxism, marginal utility theory and its neoclassical descendants, institutionalist economics and the sociology of valuation. Surveying the most important conceptualizations of value, the book considers issues such as what makes one thing exchangeable with another, the relationship between value and price, and the ascription of value creation to some activities over others. The book transcends economic explanations alone, exploring the social and political significance of decisions made about what things are worth, and the people and processes involved in their creation.

A closed case for much of mainstream economic thinking, the issue of value is a pressing one because it exposes the tension at the heart of the social and political processes that render all things equivalent and comparable under the single measure of price. These processes are increasingly at stake politically. National populists content to sacrifice economic rationality for an emotional politics of belonging; anti-‘globalist’ protectionisms fencing value back within borders; anti-austerity social movements protesting the hunger for gold of high finance; the establishment of so-called ‘real’ economies centred on alternative currencies and business models that purport to keep wealth within localities – all lay claim to a critique of the social and political processes through which capital, states and other actors value and price the world around us. But only further populist discontent and frustration will follow the failure of this constellation of political tendencies to grasp what really underpins a society that knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

      Value theory, the book shows, provides a better footing to grasp the social forms and relations with which the present political moment fumbles. In navigating value, the book is indebted to Marx’s critique of political economy, which, rather than as an alternative economics or political economy, is treated here as a critical theory of society itself.¹ As opposed to critical theory, traditional or mainstream theory does not go beyond the way things appear – the forms in which human social relations are mediated, such as labour, capital, money and the state.² It takes these things for granted, and presents them as natural or static. In some cases, it purports to solve practical problems pertaining to them; in others, it makes moral arguments about the justice or ethics of a given social formation. Archetypal of this tradition is the classical political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo – which broke new ground by understanding labour, capital, value and the relationship between them. Well before the rise of pure economics, classical political economy highlighted the idiosyncrasies of a system where a surplus accrues from the transaction of apparently equivalent commodities. Tracing this surplus back to the labour process, political economy embedded economic phenomena within social relations of power and domination. But it did not adequately enquire as to the conditions of possibility and reproduction of historically peculiar products of human practice such as commodities and money.

      It was left to Marx, with his critique of political economy, to explore how the forms of economic objectivity assumed by classical political economy were grounded in a set of antagonistic social relations and systemic structures that compel individuals to act in certain ways. Critical