Chapter 6, ‘Value in Crisis’, closes the book by considering the possible futures of value in a financialized 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 financialization. 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, technological change and, now, at the time of writing this introduction, pandemic.
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Finally, some acknowledgements. This book brings together threads from a decade-long empirical and theoretical interest in value, but the initial spark for much of the work represented here was a project led by Lee Marshall of the University of Bristol on ‘The Value of Music in the Digital Age’, funded by the Faculty of Social Sciences and Law. My thanks go to Lee for his input and support with the original mapping of, and early work on, the book that followed. I have also learnt a great deal from conversation and collaboration on the topic of value with other colleagues and friends over the past years – in particular, Matt Bolton, Jon Cruddas, Ana Dinerstein and Patrizia Zanoni. Sincere thanks are also due to George Owers at Polity for suggesting that I write the book in the first place, and the excellent editorial support received thereafter from him and his team. In particular, I would like to thank two anonymous reviewers for their incredibly generous and helpful comments on the manuscript at an earlier stage. All the usual disclaimers apply, especially seeing as I did not have the space to respond to their recommendations in full. The book is dedicated to my youngest daughter Nico – funnily enough, not the first baby in recent family history to be born in the breathing space between submission and revision of a book I was writing. With that in mind, I would like to thank my partner and children for bearing with me in the final throes of writing and revising the book amidst the strange and slightly crazed lockdown days of the first half of 2020. The book was written before the pandemic hit, but the debates raging in its wake – about the value of previously undervalued forms of work, or the value of human life and health versus the value of continuing economic activity – will only intensify in the inevitable crisis to come, sharpening the political and material significance of the issues discussed in the pages that follow.
Notes
1 1 W. Bonefeld, 2014. Critical Theory and the Critique of Political Economy: On Subversion and Negative Reason. London: Bloomsbury; R. Bellofiore and T. R. Riva, 2015. The Neue Marx-Lekture: Putting the Critique of Political Economy Back into the Critique of Society. Radical Philosophy, 189, pp. 24–36; F. H. Pitts, 2015. The Critique of Political Economy as a Critical Social Theory. Capital & Class, 39(3), pp. 537–45.
2 2 M. Horkheimer, 1976 [1937]. Traditional and Critical Theory. In P. Connerton (ed.), Critical Sociology. London: Penguin, pp. 206–24.
3 3 P. Mirowski, 1991. Postmodernism and the Social Theory of Value. Journal of Post Keynesian Economics, 13(4), pp. 565–82 (p. 578); P. Mirowski, 1989. More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature’s Economics. Cambridge University Press, p. 265.
4 4 M. Mazzucato, 2019. The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy. London: Penguin, p. 7.
5 5 Mazzucato 2019, p. 8.
6 6 Mazzucato 2019, pp. 7, 22.
7 7 R. L. Heilbroner, 1983. The Problem of Value in the Constitution of Economic Thought. Social Research, 50(2), pp. 253–77 (pp. 253–6).
8 8 Aristotle, 2000. The Politics. Trans. T. A. Sinclair. London: Penguin; Aristotle, 2004. Nicomachean Ethics. Trans. J. A. K. Thompson. London: Penguin; Mirowski 1989, p. 145; A. Monroe, ed., 1924. Early Economic Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, p. 27.
9 9 A. Dinerstein and M. Neary, 2002. From Here to Utopia: Finding Inspiration for the Labour Debate. In A. Dinerstein and M. Neary (eds.), The Labour Debate: An Investigation into the Theory and Reality of Capitalist Work. Aldershot: Ashgate, pp. 1–26 (p. 13).
10 10 Heilbroner 1983, pp. 253–6; Mirowski 1989.
1Value as Substance
Substantialist approaches to value posit the labour content of a good or service as ‘an order-bestowing force’, as opposed to anything external to it.1 Substantialist theories of value see value as carried and conserved within things, either inhering within the things themselves or inserted there by the labour that created them. They rest on a series of defining positions: the ascription of a natural basis to economic value; the suggestion that value is conserved from the production through to the exchange of products; the ‘reification’ of the economy as an orderly ‘law-governed structure’ akin to nature; the proposal of an ‘invariant standard’ of value; the policing of a boundary between activities productive and unproductive of value; the conviction that the sphere of production is where value is determined; and the resulting ‘relegation’ of money to a purely ‘epiphenomenal status’ expressive of embodied labour.2 As with so much else in value theory, we can trace this line of interpretation to Aristotle, who located in labour a common element underlying the mystery of the equivalent exchange of diverse goods.3
In the modern age, theories of value mimicked the development of Western physics.4 When the physics of energy conservation was the only science available, the first stirrings of substantialism in ‘balance of trade’ mercantilism took on the Cartesian insight that motion is an ‘embodied substance … passed about from body to body by means of collision’, reifying value as a substance ‘conserved in the activity of trade to provide structural stability to prices and differentially specified in the process of production’.5 Taking this analogy forwards, where the substantialist approach really comes alive is in the work of the physiocrats and, later, the classical political economists. In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith suggests that ‘It is natural that what is usually the produce of two days’ or two hours’ labour, should be worth double of what is usually the produce of one day’s or one hour’s labour’, a position later taken up by David Ricardo and, to some extent, Karl Marx.6
From mercantilism onwards, the trajectory of substantialism and associated ‘objective’ theories of value from the seventeenth century was also deeply imbricated in social and political shifts, and served the purposes of different actors at different times in different places, with consequences by turns reformist, reactionary and revolutionary. Mercantilism buttressed the social power of the rising merchant class with a zero-sum understanding of value as bound within national borders in the face of expanding international trade; physiocracy buttressed the power of agriculturalists against mercantile interests; classical political economy, the power of industrialists against feudal remnants; and Marx’s version of the labour theory of value, the power of the increasingly assertive proletariat against the industrialists. Today, the national populist tenor of the times grants conservationist appreciations of value as a zero-sum game or substance in time and space fresh political potency, rendering the study of substance theories of value newly relevant. The present-day salience of such thinking shows that the problem of value is by no means a drily academic topic, but one that touches everyday life and current affairs.
Mercantilism and Physiocracy
Substantialist theories of value first had real-world economic and