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Especially during the last half century, there have been many critical appraisals of
Karl Marx Karl Marx (; 5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, political theorist, economist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. He is best-known for the 1848 pamphlet '' The Communist Manifesto'' (written with Friedrich Engels) ...
’s ideas about the form of value in capitalist society. Marx himself provided a starting point for the scholarly controversy when he claimed that ''
Capital, Volume I ''Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital'' () is the first of three treatises that make up , a critique of political economy by the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx. First published on ...
'' was not difficult to understand, "with the exception of the section on the form of value."
Friedrich Engels Friedrich Engels ( ;"Engels"
''Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary''.
Anti-Dühring ''Anti-Dühring'' (, "Herr Eugen Dühring's Revolution in Science") is a book by Friedrich Engels, first published in German in 1877 in parts and then in 1878 in book form. It had previously been serialised in the newspaper '' Vorwärts.'' There ...
'' polemic of 1878 (when Marx was still alive) that "The value form of products... already contains in embryo the whole capitalist form of production, the antagonism between capitalists and wage-workers, the industrial reserve army, crises..." Nowadays there are many scholars who feel that Marx’s theory of the value-form was badly misinterpreted for more than a hundred years. This allegedly had the effect that the radical, revolutionary meaning of Marx’s critique of capitalism as a whole was misunderstood or diminished, so that it became just another version of academic economics -
heterodox economics Heterodox economics is a broad, relative term referring to schools of economic thought which are not commonly perceived as belonging to mainstream economics. There is no absolute definition of what constitutes heterodox economic thought, as it i ...
in the West, and
socialist economics Socialist economics comprises the economic theories, practices and norms of hypothetical and existing socialist economic systems. A socialist economic system is characterized by social ownership and operation of the means of production that m ...
in the East. Since the mid-1960s and after the collapse of state socialism and Marxism-Leninism in the
Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
and
Eastern Europe Eastern Europe is a subregion of the Europe, European continent. As a largely ambiguous term, it has a wide range of geopolitical, geographical, ethnic, cultural and socio-economic connotations. Its eastern boundary is marked by the Ural Mountain ...
, there has emerged a new critical literature by Western Marxist and non-Marxist scholars about the conceptual foundations of Marx’s theory of value (but Eastern Marxian scholars have also contributed to the international discussion and influenced it). The interpretation and criticism of Marx’s concept of the form of value was a part of these new foundational studies. Several different schools of academic "value-form theory" have appeared in different countries, and the critical value-form discourse has been to a considerable extent international. It emerged in many different contexts in different countries at different points in time. This article contains only a brief description of five main themes of criticism of Marx’s theory of the form of value, referencing some of the key thinkers and some of the important arguments made. *The first theme concerns the accusation of some scholars that Marx’s concept of the form of value is obscure, otiose or makes no sense. *The second theme is the criticism of Marx’s definition of the substance of product-value as social labour (abstract labour). *The third theme is the neo-Ricardian critique of Marx, which claims to make Marx’s theory of the form of value redundant. *The fourth theme is the Chartalist criticism of Marx’s theory of the money-form of value. *The fifth theme is the libertarian critique of Marx’s theory of the form of value, which defends the price system and free markets as progressive and as the foundation of a free society. *The concluding section of the article describes how Marxists and socialists responded to such criticisms by defending various theories of "market socialism" with multiple co-existing methods of resource allocation (both market allocation and non-market allocation), in advance of direct allocation within the communist economy.


Obscurantism

The criticism most often heard from the critics of Marx, such as
Friedrich von Hayek Friedrich August von Hayek (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian-born British academic and philosopher. He is known for his contributions to political economy, political philosophy and intellectual history. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobe ...
,
Karl Popper Sir Karl Raimund Popper (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austrian–British philosopher, academic and social commentator. One of the 20th century's most influential philosophers of science, Popper is known for his rejection of the ...
, Francis Wheen and
Ian Steedman Ian Steedman (born 1941, London) is a British economist. He was for many years a professor of economics at the University of Manchester before moving down the road to Manchester Metropolitan University. He retired from there at the end of 2006, but ...
is that, even if Marx himself meant well, Marx's value-form idea is simply an esoteric obscurantism, "dialectical hocus pocus", "sophistry", or "mumbo jumbo". Francis Wheen refers to "a shaggy-dog story, a picaresque journey through the realms of higher nonsense." Mark Blaug stated that "the reader will miss little by skipping the pedantic third section of Chapter I n Marx's ''Capital, Volume 1''. This type of criticism was already being made while Marx was still alive, as Marx himself reports in a postface to the second German edition of ''
Capital, Volume I ''Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital'' () is the first of three treatises that make up , a critique of political economy by the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx. First published on ...
'' in 1873. Often, Marxists have replied to this type of criticism by restating Marx's arguments in clearer language, or by showing that Marx's theory of economic value at the very least fares no worse than the subjective theory of value (the theory of the
util In economics, utility is a measure of a certain person's satisfaction from a certain state of the world. Over time, the term has been used with at least two meanings. * In a normative context, utility refers to a goal or objective that we wish ...
as the measuring unit of exchange). Even so, when he published his very clear restatement '' Karl Marx's Theory of History: A Defence'', the Analytic Marxist philosopher Gerald Cohen explicitly dissociated himself from Marx's value theory. Cohen argued that it is possible to have a
historical materialism Historical materialism is Karl Marx's theory of history. Marx located historical change in the rise of Class society, class societies and the way humans labor together to make their livelihoods. Karl Marx stated that Productive forces, techno ...
without a
labour theory of value The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory of value that argues that the exchange value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of " socially necessary labor" required to produce it. The contrasting system is typically known as ...
, because the one does not logically entail the other as well. Marcel van der Linden accepted Cohen's approach, noting that "whether Marx's theory is exactly right or not, it remains a fact that the working class produces a
surplus product Surplus product () is a concept theorised by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. Roughly speaking, it is the extra goods produced above the amount needed for a community of workers to survive at its current standard of living. Marx f ...
about which it has no say." Marx himself never referred to his own theory of value as a "labour theory of value" even once.Mike Beggs, "Zombie Marx and Modern Economics, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Forget the Transformation Problem." ''Journal of Australian Political Economy'', issue 70, Summer 2012/13, p. 1

Gary Mongiovi, "Vulgar economy in Marxian garb: a critique of Temporal Single System Marxism." In: ''Review of Radical Political Economics'', Vol. 34, Issue 4, December 2002, pp. 393-416, at p. 398.
Cohen's interpretation contrasts with
Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov ( 187021 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until Death and state funeral of ...
's opinion in 1894 — repeated by Johann Witt-Hansen—that with the appearance of ''
Das Kapital ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' (), also known as ''Capital'' or (), is the most significant work by Karl Marx and the cornerstone of Marxian economics, published in three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894. The culmination of his ...
'', "the materialist conception of history is no longer a hypothesis, but a scientifically proven proposition". Earlier on, in 1880, Engels had written (at the end of Part 2 of his pamphlet '' Socialism: Utopian and Scientific'') that "two great discoveries, the materialistic conception of history and the revelation of the secret of capitalistic production through surplus-value, we owe to Marx. With these discoveries, Socialism became a science."


Substance of value

Marx's argument is, that the exchangeability of reproducible commodities with recognition of their relative values is enabled by the common factor that all of them are products of social labour (co-operative human labour producing things for others). His critics however suggest that Marx's observations about commodity trade fail to provide any definite proof that human labour-time (work effort) is the real substance of the value of commodities. It is not self-evident, that commodities are commensurable in exchange because they are all labour products; one could just as well argue, that they are commensurable in exchange because they are all priced in units of money (which is what
Aristotle Aristotle (; 384–322 BC) was an Ancient Greek philosophy, Ancient Greek philosopher and polymath. His writings cover a broad range of subjects spanning the natural sciences, philosophy, linguistics, economics, politics, psychology, a ...
argued in his ''
Nicomachean Ethics The ''Nicomachean Ethics'' (; , ) is Aristotle's best-known work on ethics: the science of the good for human life, that which is the goal or end at which all our actions aim. () It consists of ten sections, referred to as books, and is closely ...
''). And if that is the case, it seems that the whole analysis of the form of value is redundant and pointless.


Marx's own response

In a famous letter from Marx to Ludwig Kugelmann dated 11 July 1868, Marx became extremely indignant and derisive about this objection, stating among other things that:


Modern value-form debate

In 1989, Simon Clarke captured the essence of the modern value-form debate within Western Marxism, as a hyper-abstract scholastic debate about the form and content of economic value: The unresolved issue, David Kristjanson-Gural commented, is that "If exchange effects the reduction of concrete to abstract labor, then the magnitude of value is determined not by the expenditure of labor in production, but only in exchange." Although Rubin did refer to "a quantitative determination of abstract labor before the act of exchange and independent of it", by his own definition he lacked any method for determining the magnitude of abstract labour prior to exchange, or for showing how it might influence product-values. Paradoxically, it seemed that if value itself can only be determined with reference to exchange ratios in markets, then value ''cannot'' be the sole determinant of prices (a conclusion already reached by
Joan Robinson Joan Violet Robinson ( Maurice; 31 October 1903 – 5 August 1983) was a British economist known for her wide-ranging contributions to economic theory. One of the most prominent economists of the century, Robinson incarnated the "Cambridge Sc ...
in 1950.) *The Rubin-followers generally abandoned any attempt to provide quantitative measures of value, being content with qualitative and theoretical discussion about social forms, fetishism, Hegelian dialectics, the value abstraction, etc. *The value-form theorists claimed, that value can only be expressed by money, and that value in a labour economy cannot exist prior to exchange (trade). In that case, the purpose of value theory is about (re-)interpreting the ''social meaning'' of market phenomena in a Hegelian philosophical way, and not with measuring the magnitudes of value. *Some Marxists argued, that Marx's theory of value is only intended to explain the macro-level, and is not applicable to the micro-level of the economy. *Some Marxists argued, that since money simply represents abstract labour or a claim on labour, money-quantities can be converted into labour equivalents according to some formula (by relating labour-inputs and material inputs to corresponding output-prices), enabling a comparison of product-values and product-prices, and a demonstration of how value is redistributed by the market. Different techniques have been proposed for the conversion. *There are also Marx-scholars, such as Guglielmo Carchedi, who try to combine a dialectical and econometric approach to understanding the forms of value. Contemporary Marxian academic research in "value theory" has become a broad area. In 2018, Riccardo Bellofiore, an Italian Marxist economist, concluded from his own perspective that Marx's value theory has "multiple meanings". This can cause extra confusion, because what one Marxist means by "value theory" may not be what another Marxist means by value theory. Nevertheless,
Ben Fine Ben Fine (born 1948) is Professor of Economics at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies. Background Fine was born in Coventry in 1948. One of six brothers, he and all but one other followed their father and studied m ...
and Alfredo Saad-Filho, commenting on contemporary Marxist economics, say that: The old Marxist theory was held together by the philosophy of
dialectical materialism Dialectical materialism is a materialist theory based upon the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that has found widespread applications in a variety of philosophical disciplines ranging from philosophy of history to philosophy of scien ...
, but in the new academic Marxism of the West, "value theory" is said to be the unifying factor. The unresolved issue then is, whether value theory really ''can'' be the unifying factor, if there are a large number of different and competing Marxist interpretations of value, with many different flavors, tastes and preferences, and pitched at many different levels of academic abstraction. Already in 1951, when he had tried to create firm conceptual foundations for value studies, the anthropologist
Clyde Kluckhohn Clyde Kluckhohn (; January 11, 1905 in Le Mars, Iowa – July 28, 1960 near Santa Fe, New Mexico), was an American anthropologist and social theorist, best known for his long-term ethnographic work among the Navajo and his contributions to the d ...
concluded that the task was exceedingly difficult, if not an impossible venture:


Historical specificity and generality

A "sub-theme" of this academic controversy concerns the issue of whether concepts like
abstract labour Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It refers to the difference between human labour in general as economically valuable worktime versus human labour as a particular a ...
or the value-form are "historically specific" categories or "transhistorical" categories. For example, Massimo de Angelis and Christopher J. Arthur claim that
abstract labour Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It refers to the difference between human labour in general as economically valuable worktime versus human labour as a particular a ...
is a "specifically capitalist category", which has no transhistorical validity in different modes of production. According to
Karl Korsch Karl Korsch (; August 15, 1886 – October 21, 1961) was a German Marxist theoretician and political philosopher. He is recognized as one of the "dissidents" that challenged the Marxism of the Second International of Karl Kautsky, Georgi Plekhan ...
's "principle of historical specification", "Marx comprehends all things social in terms of a definite historical epoch." Marx himself said that the abstract category of labour ("labour in general", or "labour as such", i.e. labour considered with indifference to its particular forms) expresses "an immeasurably ancient relation valid in all forms of society" (or "an ancient relation existing in all forms of society"); but, he went on to say, ''only'' in modern bourgeois society (as exemplified e.g. by the United States) is this category ''fully realized'' in practice. Because only there does a system of price-equations exist within a universal market, which can really and practically reduce the valuation of ''all'' forms and quantities of labour uniformly to sums of money, so that any kind of labour becomes an interchangeable, tradeable good or "input" with a known price tag - and is also practically ''treated'' as such. In other words, abstract labour for Marx was not a fixed, immutable and static category, which fell out of the air one day circa 1750, but an ''historically evolving'' category. If each social category was uniquely and exclusively applicable to only one specific stage of history, it would be impossible to understand the transition from one historical stage to another stage, or to understand human progress through different epochs. Marx does not say that trans-historical categories are not valid, but instead that historical categories which are applicable only to a particular epoch in human history should not be generalized or eternalized, "as if" they are everlasting trans-historical realities. Phenomena ought to be understood in their appropriate specificity, for the sake of valid generalizations. If, conversely, current transitory realities are treated as eternal in the imagination, it appears as if they are immutable and cannot change anymore (a conservative ideology), but that overlooks the very things which ''are'' changing. This leads to the confusion of ''analytical'' constants and variables, with constants and variables ''in the real world'' (ultimately, almost nothing in the universe stays constant, although for humans there are constants "for all intents and purposes"). Long before commercial trade emerged, when subsistence hunters, gatherers and farmers had to judge how much time and work it would take to obtain food, they were already compelled to think abstractly and value the allocation of their labour time – giving rise to the first numerical expressions. They had count and compare to survive, because their time and resources were limited, though obviously their valuations differed from the capitalist methods and concepts in use today. Even if they were ''not'' aware of the necessary proportions for the allocation of labour time by the clan, tribe, community etc., they were certainly confronted with its effects. Namely, if they did it wrong, their own people died. So they learnt soon enough from experience, to avoid all the worst mis-allocations of labour - they wanted to stay alive, and prosper. Modern research provides evidence that some animals, too, exhibit at least a rudimentary ability for numerical abstraction and a sense of numerical proportion, suggesting it is necessary for survival. In this sense, Marx comments that: "Value", Marx said, "does not have its description branded on its forehead: it rather transforms every product into a social hieroglyphic. Later on, men try to decipher the hieroglyphic, to get behind the secret of their own social product..."Karl Marx, ''
Capital, Volume I ''Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital'' () is the first of three treatises that make up , a critique of political economy by the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx. First published on ...
'', Penguin 1976, p. 167.
Thus, for example, archaeologist Marc Van de Mieroop comments about the Sumerian economy of ancient
Mesopotamia Mesopotamia is a historical region of West Asia situated within the Tigris–Euphrates river system, in the northern part of the Fertile Crescent. Today, Mesopotamia is known as present-day Iraq and forms the eastern geographic boundary of ...
as follows: On the basis of their input/output and labour accounting, the Sumerian accountants, particularly from the
Ur III period The Third Dynasty of Ur or Ur III was a Sumerian dynasty based in the city of Ur in the 22nd and 21st centuries BC (middle chronology). For a short period they were the preeminent power in Mesopotamia and their realm is sometimes referred to by ...
, were evidently able to estimate, in quantitatively accurate terms, how much labour it would take to produce a certain quantity of output, and therefore how many workers were needed for a given interval of time. According to archaeologist Robert K. Englund, "The concept of value equivalency was a secure element in Babylonian accounting by at least the time of the sales contracts of the ED IIIa (Fara) period, c. 2600 BC"; the formation and use of grain product equivalencies was "an important step in the direction of general value equivalencies, best attested for in the Ur III period for silver, but then still generally applicable for other commodities such as grain or fish, including finally also labor time." Labour historian Jan Lucassen states that the first
wages A wage is payment made by an employer to an employee for work done in a specific period of time. Some examples of wage payments include compensatory payments such as ''minimum wage'', '' prevailing wage'', and ''yearly bonuses,'' and remune ...
were paid to soldiers employed by early states 5,000 years ago, the first labour markets emerged between 2,000 and 1,000 BC (when temple officials began to subcontract labour), and waged workers were being paid with
coins A coin is a small object, usually round and flat, used primarily as a medium of exchange or legal tender. They are standardized in weight, and produced in large quantities at a mint in order to facilitate trade. They are most often issued by ...
since about 600 BC. Already 2,000 years ago, hired workers could be paid for a specific part of a working day with coin. The significance of such historical and archaeological data about the evolution of abstract labour and value is denied by many Marxists, because, according to their idea of "historical specificity", capitalism is capitalism only if there is capitalism, and value is exclusively a creation of capitalism.


Rubin

Since 1972, when Isaac Rubin's 1923 book was republished in translation, the Western Marxist value-form controversy has continued for nearly half a century. Different schools of thought have emerged, without however reaching a definite solution amenable to all. However, in reality, the intellectual controversy has much deeper historical roots. As Rubin himself stated, "All post-Ricardian political economy revolved around the question of the relation between production price and labor-value. Answering this question was an historic task for economic thought. In Marx's view, the particular merit of his theory of value was that it gave a solution to this problem." Rubin's claim was that, in Marx's view, the
labor theory of value The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory of value that argues that the exchange value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of " socially necessary labor" required to produce it. The contrasting system is typically known as ...
and the theory of production prices represent "two logical stages or degrees of abstraction from the same economic phenomena" instead of being two models that contradict each other. The next problem however was, that Rubin's vague "levels of abstraction" interpretation never clarified what ''exactly'' this means in ''verifiable'' and ''quantifiable'' scientific terms. And therefore, critics argue, Rubin's alleged "solution" is no scientifically acceptable solution at all, of the problem of the relationship between production prices and labour-values—it is just a "definition".


Final concept

In Marx's finished theory of value, the "value" of a commodity turns out to be the social valuation of ''its average, current replacement cost in labour time'' (a synchronic economic reproduction cost) but this particular labour requirement turns out to be quite a different quantity than ''either'' "labour embodied" in production (the actual worktime performed to make the commodity) ''or'' "labour commanded" in exchange (how much worktime can be purchased, on average, for the money-price of the commodity). That is a logical consequence of Marx's theory of market value and production prices. It remains true, however, that if we want to ''estimate'' or ''measure'' this average quantity empirically, as a statistic, this requires reference to money prices and price aggregates; we cannot measure average product-value, without reference to the forms in which value is expressed - in order to establish the connection between product units, prices and labour.Edward B. Chilcote, "Calculating Labour Values Empirically". In: Alan Freeman et al., ''The New Value Controversy and the Foundations of Economics''. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, 2004, pp. 199-217. In this respect, the input-output economics of
Wassily Leontief Wassily Wassilyevich Leontief (; August 5, 1905 – February 5, 1999) was a Soviet-American economist known for his research on input–output analysis and how changes in one economic sector may affect other sectors. Leontief won the Nobel Memo ...
and
Luigi Pasinetti Luigi L. Pasinetti (12 September 1930 – 31 January 2023) was an Italian economist of the post-Keynesian school. Pasinetti was considered the heir of the " Cambridge Keynesians" and a student of Piero Sraffa and Richard Kahn. Along with them, ...
's econometric concept of vertical integration have proved to be useful.


Japanese Unoist school

Because of the controversy over the substance of value, the famous Japanese Marxist scholar
Kozo Uno was a Japanese economist and is considered one of the most important theorists on the field of Marx's theory of value. He is an influential Marxist economist in Japan, where his school of thought is called the Uno School (''Uno gakuha'') . Hi ...
argued in his classic ''Principles of Political Economy'' that Marx's original argument had to be revised. In Uno's opinion, Marx had narrated the story the wrong way round, causing confusion. The arguments therefore had to be re-ordered. In the revised version, the theory of the value-form is integrated in the theory of commodity circulation, and does not refer to the substance (content) of value at all. The form and substance of value are radically separated. The substance of value as labour then becomes apparent (and is theoretically demonstrated) only in the analysis of the ''production'' of commodities "by means of commodities" (including the commodity
labour-power Labour power (; ) is the capacity to work, a key concept used by Karl Marx in his critique of capitalist political economy. Marx distinguished between the capacity to do the work, i.e. labour power, and the physical act of working, i.e. labour. ...
). Some Western Marxists do not find this Unoist approach very satisfactory however, among other things because (1) a "form" is a form "of" something, the form that a content takes, hence form and content are not really separable, and (2) Marx claims that the formation of product values is an outcome of ''both'' the "economy of labour-time" ''and'' "the economy of trade" working in tandem. When a product is produced, it has a value; we can say that it requires a certain amount of labour to produce it, supply it or replace it. How much that value is, however, becomes apparent only when it is traded regularly and compared with other products.


Western value-form school

From the 1970s, the so-called "value-form theorists" ("value-form school") have emphasized—influenced by
Theodor W. Adorno Theodor W. Adorno ( ; ; born Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund; 11 September 1903 – 6 August 1969) was a German philosopher, musicologist, and social theorist. He was a leading member of the Frankfurt School of critical theory, whose work has com ...
and the rediscovery of the writings of
Isaak Illich Rubin Isaak Illich Rubin (Russian language, Russian: Исаак Ильич Рубин; 12 June 1886 – 27 November 1937) was a Soviet Union, Soviet lawyer, Marxian economics , economist and scholar of Marx's work. His most important published work ...
—the importance of Marx's value theory as a ''qualitative'' critique—a cultural, sociological or philosophical critique of the reifications involved in capitalist commercialis

Rob Bryer stated that "The majority of Marxists today argue defensively that arxdid not intend is theory of valueto explain prices and rate of return on capital, but gave us only a qualitative theory of capitalist exploitation". In this way, the quantitative attack by neo-Ricardians against Marx's value theory is considered to become irrelevant. The value-form school has become very popular especially among Western Marxists who are not economists. Supporters of the "value-form school", especially in Germany and Britain, often regard Marx's theory of the form of value as proof of a radical break from all conventional economics. This implies there is little point in engaging with conventional economics, because conventional economics makes quite incompatible theoretical assumptions. Critics of the value-form school often see this intellectual tradition as an "evasive tactic", which avoids difficult quantitative problems concerning the relationship between economic value and money-prices which still need to be solved. Value-form theory as a special branch of radical theory has been popular among intellectual supporters of
Autonomism Autonomism or ''autonomismo'', also known as autonomist Marxism or autonomous Marxism, is an anti-capitalist social movement and Marxist-based theoretical current that first emerged in Italy in the 1960s from workerism (). Later, post-Marxist ...
and
Anarchism Anarchism is a political philosophy and Political movement, movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or Social hierarchy, hierarchy, primarily targeting the state (polity), state and capitalism. A ...
, although
Antonio Negri Antonio Negri (; ; 1 August 1933 – 16 December 2023) was an Italian political philosopher known as one of the most prominent theorists of autonomism, as well as for his co-authorship of ''Empire (Hardt and Negri book), Empire'' with Michae ...
thinks the theory is outdated now. Negri's theory is roughly the same as that of the ''
Financial Times The ''Financial Times'' (''FT'') is a British daily newspaper printed in broadsheet and also published digitally that focuses on business and economic Current affairs (news format), current affairs. Based in London, the paper is owned by a Jap ...
'' journalist John Kay, who believes that "The political and economic environment in which Marx wrote was a brief interlude in economic history." Both writers regard Marx's theory of value as outdated, although they still like to use some of Marx's rhetorics. Value-form theory is an important strand in the German
Neue Marx-Lektüre (German for "New Reading of Marx") or NML is a revival and interpretation of Karl Marx's critique of political economy, which originated during the mid-1960s in both Western Bloc, Western and Eastern Bloc, Eastern Europe and opposed both Mar ...
and there is also a post-Marxist value criticism school.Neil Larsen, Mathias Nilges, Josh Robinson, and Nicholas Brown (eds.), ''Marxism and the Critique of Value''. Chicago: MCM Publishing, 2014; Robert Kurz, ''The substance of capital''. London: Chronos publications, 2016.


Sohn-Rethel

In a text which had a big influence on the scholarly discussion,
Alfred Sohn-Rethel Alfred Sohn-Rethel (; 4 January 1899 – 6 April 1990) was a French-born German Marxian economist and philosopher especially interested in epistemology. His main intellectual achievement was the publication of ''Intellectual and Manual Labour: A ...
examined the meaning and implications of Marx's concept of the forms of value in some detail. He claimed that "The formal analysis of the commodity holds the key not only to the critique of political economy, but also to the historical explanation of the conceptual mode of thinking and of the division of intellectual and manual labour, which came into existence with it." Marx had noted that by equating their products in exchange as values, people also equate the quantities of human labour ordinarily required to produce them, regardless of whether they are aware of it or not (very likely they would not—and could not—know accurately how much labour the products represent, or even where the products originated). This is a "functional effect" of the trading relationship. Sohn-Rethel calls this a "real abstraction"—it is an abstraction performed not primarily by thinking, but unintentionally by doing and participating in a system of symbolic conventions. Subsequently, the "real abstraction" is however transformed into a "conceptual abstraction" which, he argues, has very large implications for the further evolution of human thought. It then seems that
abstract labour Abstract labour and concrete labour refer to a distinction made by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. It refers to the difference between human labour in general as economically valuable worktime versus human labour as a particular a ...
is purely an ''effect'' of economic exchange. Sohn-Rethel pondered the question of what holds society together, when all production is carried on by private agents acting independently of each other. He concludes, like
Friedrich Hayek Friedrich August von Hayek (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian-born British academic and philosopher. He is known for his contributions to political economy, political philosophy and intellectual history. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobe ...
, that society can in that case cohere only through "buying and selling". It then seems to follow, that "The nexus of society is established by the network of exchange ''and nothing else''." This idea however departs from Marx's theory since, for Marx, it is not the relations of exchange (the market transactions) that hold society together, but the cooperative relations of production (governed by property rights), that form the economic structure of society. Part of this labour cooperation is certainly voluntary and freely chosen, but part of it is compelled by necessity since people cannot survive or prosper without it. What disappears from view in Sohn-Rethel's interpretation is that, in the production and reproduction of human life, people also need to cooperate in many ways which have nothing to do with trade (being a "market transactor" is just one role among others). Sohn-Rethel's radical idea is moreover not even very plausible, since (1) society does not simply collapse everywhere, if, in a crisis, the trading process breaks down to some large degree, and (2) at any time, the majority of the stock of objects of value in society (stored, or in use) is not being traded at all. So in reality, the "social nexus" or "social synthesis" involves at any time far more relations of cooperation than trade alone.


Moishe Postone

Borrowing ideas from (among others) Patrick Murray and Derek Sayer,
Moishe Postone Moishe Postone (17 April 1942 – 19 March 2018) was a Canadian historian, sociologist, political philosopher and social theorist. He was a professor of history at the University of Chicago, where he was part of the Committee on Jewish Studi ...
based his value-form interpretation on an excerpt of a footnote from Marx's ''
Capital, Volume I ''Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital'' () is the first of three treatises that make up , a critique of political economy by the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx. First published on ...
'', which was incorrectly translated by Ben Fowkes: Postone alleged that in "traditional Marxism" (such as " Sweezy, Mandel, and others"),Postone, ''Time'' etc., p. 45. the meaning of "value" and "labour" was wrongly interpreted: *Because "value" was allegedly equated with the transhistorical category of physical or material wealth, it became impossible to "analyze the historical specificity of the form of labor that constitutes value" within capitalism. Yet, such an analysis is required to understand "how the value-form structures the sphere of production as well as that of distribution." *For Marx, labor in capitalism "must exist in the form of value" and "necessarily appears in a form that both expresses and veils it." When Marx contrasts social labor and private labor, he did not mean a contrast between the transhistorical category of labor and the specifically capitalist type of labor, or a contrast of essence and appearance, but "two moments of labor in capitalism itself." Labor in capitalism is, according to Postone, "directly social" because it "acts as a socially mediating activity". An adequate analysis of capitalism is possible "only if it proceeds from an analysis of the historically specific character of labor in capitalism" Postone concludes from his story among other things that "the
law of value The law of the value of commodities (German: ''Wertgesetz der Waren''), known simply as the law of value, is a central concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy first expounded in his polemic ''The Poverty of Philosophy'' (1847) agains ...
, then, is dynamic and cannot be understood adequately in terms of an equilibrium theory of the market" and that the movement of history "can be expressed indirectly by time as a dependent variable; as a movement of time, though, it cannot be grasped by static, abstract time".


Monetary theory of value

In his initial discussion of the genesis of money, Marx makes his position quite clear: Nevertheless, there are value-form theorists who want to argue the exact opposite. The suggestion of some authors (such as Reuten/Williams) is that although Marx's alleged
labour theory of value The labor theory of value (LTV) is a theory of value that argues that the exchange value of a good or service is determined by the total amount of " socially necessary labor" required to produce it. The contrasting system is typically known as ...
is theoretically wrong as stated, his theory can be modified such that, rather than value being created by co-operative human labour, value and abstract labour can be regarded as effects ("social forms") created by the exchange-process itself. Simply put, the value of goods is nothing more than the money they will exchange for, from which it seems to follow, that if money does not exist, value does not exist either. This interpretation is often called the ''monetary theory of value''. Thus, Michael Heinrich claims that: The Greek Marxian economist
John Milios John Milios ( ; born 1952) is a Greek social scientist and Marxian economics scholar. He is Emeritus Professor of Political Economy and the History of Economic Thought at the National Technical University of Athens. An author of several scholar ...
also argues for a monetary theory of value, where "Money is the necessary form of appearance of value (and of capital) in the sense that prices constitute the only form of appearance of the value of commodities." Critics of this interpretation think that it cannot be correct, for three reasons: *Marx makes it explicit that "although price, being the exponent of the magnitude of a commodity's value, is the exponent of its exchange ratio with money, it does not follow that the exponent of this exchange-ratio is necessarily the exponent of the magnitude of the commodity's value." That is to say, prices need not express product-values accurately, or at all. *As Marx so painstakingly showed in his discussion of the development of the form of value, the value of commodities can also be expressed simply and directly in terms of a quantity of other commodities, or one referent commodity. To express a value relationship, in principle no money or prices are required at all – that is the whole point. All that is required is the expression that "''x'' quantity of product ''y'' is worth ''p'' quantity of product ''q''", whether ''y'' and ''q'' happen to be traded or not. *Milios's argument can be sustained only if, in the trade of one bundle of commodities for another (as in counter-trade), the bundle of commodities traded is itself treated as if it is a "price". But such a "price" is obviously not a quantity of money. The point here is simply that the form of value, in its less developed state, does not require any monetary expression; counter-trade does not necessarily require any monetary referent at all, although in modern times it often does take into account the cash value of a deal. Milios conflated the money that actually changes hands with all kinds of possible computable price data for a commodity under various conditions. Effectively, he conflated the form of value with the price-form, and real prices with ideal prices. Milios implies, that only priced goods can have value, but this idea flatly contradicts Marx's theory according to which product-values exist also quite independently from exchange (simply because products necessarily represent quantities of labour-effort). In ''
Capital, Volume II ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' (), also known as ''Capital'' or (), is the most significant work by Karl Marx and the cornerstone of Marxian economics, published in three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894. The culmination of his ...
'', Marx criticizes Samuel Bailey's mistaken belief that "commodity values cease to be comparable once they no longer actively function as exchange-values, and cannot actually be exchanged for one another". If Milios's interpretation is correct, Marx's value theory serves no good purpose—values and prices are hardly distinguishable. In all his economic manuscripts, Marx says that at best prices are the "idealized expression" of the forms of value. This view is only logical; after all, prices express the quantity of money for which particular commodities will, or could, change owners. If the idealization of the form of value as a price is ''equated'' with the value-form itself, the whole value-form idea is itself redundant. It is a bit like saying, that the ''price information'' about a good is the same thing as the ''actual money'' that changes hands when the good is traded. Most people know very well what the difference is; they could hardly afford not to know it.


Value as power

In various works, the Australian phenomenologist Michael Eldred radicalizes the reading of 'form' in the value-form concept so that it becomes a socio-ontological category. According to Eldred, the phenomenon of exchange-value is substantially one of social power. Hence, money reveals itself to be the quintessential, rudimentary form of reified social power in capitalist society. The further value-forms developed during the course of the capital-analysis, starting with the capital-form and the wage-form of value, through the value-forms of ground-rent, interest, profit of enterprise, to the revenue-form of these income-sources on the surface of economic life, unfold the socio-ontological structure and movement of capitalism as a " reified power-play". Eldred argues that such a total ontological structure of capitalist power-play can only come into view, if the whole of Marx's capital-analysis is reconstructed, not just the famous, notoriously difficult first chapter of Marx's ''Capital''. From a different angle,
Jonathan Nitzan Jonathan Nitzan is an Israeli-Canadian economist who is Professor of Political Economy at York University, Toronto, Canada. Work Nitzan is the co-author (with Shimshon Bichler) of '' Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder'', published 20 ...
and
Shimshon Bichler Shimshon Bichler () is an Israeli educator who teaches political economy at colleges and universities in Israel. Along with Jonathan Nitzan, Bichler has created a power theory of capitalism and theory of differential accumulation in their analys ...
also depict the phenomena of economic value as
power Power may refer to: Common meanings * Power (physics), meaning "rate of doing work" ** Engine power, the power put out by an engine ** Electric power, a type of energy * Power (social and political), the ability to influence people or events Math ...
relationships. While retaining some of the language of Marx, they however reject Marx's theory of value. The power dimension of value relationships is also prominent in Harry Cleaver's commentary ''Reading Capital Politically.'' This interpretation also has its critics, the main criticism being that by reducing all economic values to a matter of power, the concept of power itself becomes a nebulous idea, which explains "everything and nothing". For example, Andrew Kliman argues that Nitzan & Bichler seek to define power "in terms of market capitalization". On this view, "a market cap that is 1000 times as great as the average doesn't give the owners 1000 times as much power; it simply ''is'' 1000 times as much power." Kliman says that "This identification of capital and power—capital as power—is certainly not correct in a literal sense." "Power", like economic value, is by no means a straightforward, simple concept. Power is often circumstantial, or dependent on a position taken or a status gained. It cannot be automatically inferred, from the position taken by participants in market trade, what kind of power they really have. Particularly in economic crises, it is often discovered that those who were thought to have a lot of power, do not really have it (leading to political crises).


Subjective and objective

There are also anthropologists such as the socialist
Lawrence Krader Lawrence Krader (December 9, 1919 – November 18, 1998) was an American socialist anthropologist and ethnologist. Early life Krader was born on December 9, 1919, in Jamaica, New York. In 1936, at the Philosophy Department of the City College of N ...
and the anarchist
David Graeber David Rolfe Graeber (; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American and British anthropologist, Left-wing politics, left-wing and anarchism, anarchist social and political activist. His influential work in Social anthropology, social ...
who have argued that Marx's value categories should be modified in the light of historical and anthropological research about how human communities value objects. Ever since
Werner Sombart Werner may refer to: People * Werner (name), origin of the name and people with this name as surname and given name Fictional characters * Werner (comics), a German comic book character * Werner Von Croy, a fictional character in the ''Tomb Rai ...
and
Nikolai Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (; rus, Николай Иванович Бухарин, p=nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪdʑ bʊˈxarʲɪn; – 15 March 1938) was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and Marxist theorist. A prominent Bolshevik ...
first argued it, Marx's theory of value has been described as a purely objective theory of value, as opposed to the subjective theory of the bourgeois economists. However, Krader argued (just like
Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky Mikhail Tugan-Baranovsky (; ; January 20, 1865 - January 21, 1919) was a Russian and Ukrainian Marxism, Marxist, economist, and politician. He was a leading exponent of Legal Marxism in the Russian Empire and was the author of numerous works dea ...
and Oskar R. Lange) that Marx's theory of value and the theory of utility are compatible, i.e., the one does not exclude the other; and Krader insisted that value has both objective and subjective aspects. Graeber's work was very focused on how value categories shape human lives, and the direct political effects of that. To understand and aggregate the subjective preferences that determine trading choices and economic decisions in the real world, those subjective preferences themselves have to be treated as knowable, objective and measurable data. Therefore, even a subjective theory of value cannot get away entirely from treating value also as an objective social fact. If that wasn't the case, then all economic statistics and marketing research would be invalid and useless. It follows that in the real world, all economists always have to deal with ''both'' subjective value ''and'' value as an objective market reality. True, Marx focused mainly on the overall objective outcomes of capitalist valuations. Individual workers and individual owners of capital could not determine what the markets were going to do, although important decisions by politicians can strongly influence the markets. Yet that obviously did not mean, that workers and capitalists made no subjective valuations or choices at all, or that they were completely at the mercy of market forces. On this view, value cannot exist ''without'' the presence of valuing subjects, it is just that the value of objects escapes from their control, and starts to lead a life of its own, independent from the volitions of particular individuals. Paradoxically, as Marx himself says, the more that producers become dependent on exchange, the more exchange appears to become independent of them. That is, markets can not only favour the interests of the individual, but can also work against the interests of the individual, because they have their own independent dynamics. Market movements can be quite different from what people expected or predicted, giving rise to many theories of market expectations, to fathom how trading patterns and people's expectations interact and influence each other.


''More Heat than Light''

In his widely-read book ''More Heat than Light: Economics as Social Physics, Physics as Nature's Economics'',
Philip Mirowski Philip Mirowski (born 21 August 1951 in Jackson, Michigan) is a historian and philosopher of economic thought at the University of Notre Dame. He received a PhD in Economics from the University of Michigan in 1979. Career In his 1989 book ''More ...
examined in greater detail the theoretical conflicts between "substance" theories of value and "field" theories of value. He claims that "Marx vacillated between two mutually exclusive labor theories of value", which according to him explains "the incoherence of his attempt to solve the
transformation problem In 20th-century discussions of Karl Marx's economics, the transformation problem is the problem of finding a general rule by which to transform the "values" of commodities (based on their socially necessary labour content, according to his labo ...
". One theory is the "embodied" labour theory of value (or crystallized labour), the other theory is a "cost" theory of value. "Crystalized labor highlights exploitation and fixes the locus of surplus generation in production; real-cost labor values obscure the generation of surplus and open up the possibility that the global magnitude of profit is altered (and hence generated) in exchange". This interpretation is essentially a version of the conventional neo-Ricardian critique, which claims there is an unbridgeable inconsistency between the value theory of ''
Capital, Volume I ''Capital. A Critique of Political Economy. Volume I: The Process of Production of Capital'' () is the first of three treatises that make up , a critique of political economy by the German philosopher and economist Karl Marx. First published on ...
'' and the value theory of ''
Capital, Volume III ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' (), also known as ''Capital'' or (), is the most significant work by Karl Marx and the cornerstone of Marxian economics, published in three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894. The culmination of his ...
''. Mirowski claims that Marx, in the tradition of classical political economy, believed that "regular capitalist trades are normally trades of equivalent values" This claim is not easy to sustain, since the whole architecture of ''
Capital, Volume III ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' (), also known as ''Capital'' or (), is the most significant work by Karl Marx and the cornerstone of Marxian economics, published in three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894. The culmination of his ...
'' is built upon the idea that product-values, prices of production and market prices systematically diverge from each other, and can diverge very considerably for a prolonged time – profit-making does not require that commodities trade at their values, and, as Marx himself notes at the beginning of ''
Capital, Volume III ''Capital: A Critique of Political Economy'' (), also known as ''Capital'' or (), is the most significant work by Karl Marx and the cornerstone of Marxian economics, published in three volumes in 1867, 1885, and 1894. The culmination of his ...
'', good profits can be made by trading large quantities of goods quite fast below their value (the classical principle of competition). According to Ian Paul Wright, "Mirowski unfortunately misreads Marx's concept of substance."


Capital without production

As the
accumulation of capital Capital accumulation is the dynamic that motivates the pursuit of profit, involving the investment of money or any financial asset with the goal of increasing the initial monetary value of said asset as a financial return whether in the form ...
grows, more and more durable and financial assets exist ''external'' to the sphere of production. When society becomes wealthier, the total value of the personally owned properties of individuals (assets owned by households) and public property increases, even if some people own little and others own a lot. Marx was primarily concerned with the value of newly produced commodities, but it is unclear from his theory about the capitalist mode of production what determines the value of a growing stock of durable assets in society, a stock of assets which is neither an input nor an output of current production (except for the maintenance labour for already existing physical and financial assets). Contrary to a pernicious but popular myth, Marx only provided a theory of the ''foundations'' of capitalist society, its characteristic mode of production. He did not provide a theory of the total economy, or a theory of the whole of bourgeois society. That is why, later on, Marxist and critical social scientists were forced to develop Marx's insights much further in many new areas. The old reproduction schemes of
Otto Bauer Otto Bauer (; 5 September 1881 – 4 July 1938) was an Austrian politician who was one of the founders and leading thinkers of the Austromarxists who sought a middle ground between social democracy and revolutionary socialism. He was a member of t ...
,
Nikolai Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (; rus, Николай Иванович Бухарин, p=nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪdʑ bʊˈxarʲɪn; – 15 March 1938) was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and Marxist theorist. A prominent Bolshevik ...
,
Rosa Luxemburg Rosa Luxemburg ( ; ; ; born Rozalia Luksenburg; 5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalised-German revolutionary and Marxist theorist. She was a key figure of the socialist movements in Poland and Germany in the early 20t ...
,
Henryk Grossman Henryk Grossman (; pen name Grossmann; 14 April 1881 – 24 November 1950) was a Polish economist, historian, and Marxist revolutionary active in both Poland and Germany. Grossman's key contribution to political-economic theory was his book, ''T ...
,
Ernest Mandel Ernest Ezra Mandel (; 5 April 1923 – 20 July 1995), also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter, was a Belgian Marxian economist, Trotskyist activist and theorist, and Holocaust survivor. He f ...
and other famous Marxists all have in common, that they assume that the income obtained from the use of capital and labour is ''either'' used up in consumption expenditure, ''or'' re-invested in production. But this conflates the theory of the self-reproduction of the capitalist mode of production with the reproduction of capitalist society as a whole, and it conflates the accumulation of production capital with the accumulation of total social capital. Ernest Mandel partly admitted this – he stated that it was an error to think that a nation's resources are simply divided into a consumption fund and productive investment fund, with a zero-sum trade-off between them. There is also an "unproductive investment fund", which finances government administration, military spending, elite maintenance and entourage, luxuries, prestige goods, hoarded savings, speculation, tax havens etc. Hence, if austerity policies reduce the consumption fund, this does not automatically increase the productive investment fund - it might only increase the ''unproductive'' investment fund. Inversely, Keynesian-type pump-priming techniques (stimulus techniques) aiming to boost consumer demand, may increase ''neither'' ordinary consumer expenditure ''nor'' productive investments by very much, if they just enrich the administrators of the stimulus program and financial institutions, and if the extra subsidy given to citizens and organizations is in reality largely spent on paying off or rescheduling/refinancing debt. In a globalized, leveraged economy, even if local consumer expenditure does rise, it does not mean automatically that local productive investment will increase also - the main effect of increased consumer spending may only be to boost imports, and not to develop the local economy. In reality, as capitalist development advances, the share of ''non-productive accumulation'' in total accumulation keeps growing, as shown by capital market data and data on the national asset wealth for the advanced capitalist countries. This means that the overall structure of capital holdings, nationally and internationally, bears very little resemblance anymore to what that structure looked like in Marx's and Keynes's time.


Non-material goods

In value theory, there is also the problem of so-called "non-material goods and services", such as intellectual property (all kinds of texts, data sets, software, designs, techniques, knowledge, inventions, information services etc.). Sometimes scholars refer to "cognitive commodities". Obviously intellectual property existed already in Marx's time, but its scope and volume was fairly small. In modern times, in which science and education have become large-scale businesses, there is a general tendency to attach a property right and a price-tag to more and more ideas, which are given precise boundaries (See
World Intellectual Property Organization The World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO; (OMPI)) is one of the 15 specialized agencies of the United Nations (UN). Pursuant to the 1967 Convention Establishing the World Intellectual Property Organization, WIPO was created to pr ...
). However, it remains unclear what ''regulates'' the value of intellectual property in an economic sense. How is the value of intellectual property correctly defined and calculated? Often the prices paid for intellectual assets are not proportional to real production costs.


Neo-Ricardian critique

This criticism (made primarily by neo-Ricardians and post-Keynesians) is basically that all the problems Marx tries to solve with his theory of the forms of value can be solved much better and more plausibly with modern price theory.


Meek

In a 1975 paper subtitled "Was Marx's Journey Really Necessary?", the influential
Marxian economist Marxian economics, or the Marxian school of economics, is a heterodox school of political economic thought. Its foundations can be traced back to Karl Marx's critique of political economy. However, unlike critics of political economy, Marxian ...
Ronald L. Meek argued that Marx's value theory had become redundant, because all economic relationships can be described and explained in terms of prices. Indeed, what Marx calls "value" can be regarded simply as a kind of "theoretical price". In this interpretation, the conclusion drawn is that Marx's value theory really adds nothing much to the economic arguments, and is therefore probably best abandoned.


Response

Most Western Marxists had accepted the conventional price-theories of economics as largely correct and unproblematic, and just kept insisting that value-theory was a necessary "add-on" to make sense of the economy. Alternatively, Marxists argued that value theory had nothing much to do with the market economics of prices, because it referred to a quite different "level of abstraction" or had a different intention. Rob Bryer stated in 2005 that "The majority of Marxists today argue defensively that arxdid not intend is theory of valueto explain prices and rate of return on capital, but gave us only a qualitative theory of capitalist exploitation". There was no systematic critique of price theory, and almost no attempt to connect the "
transformation problem In 20th-century discussions of Karl Marx's economics, the transformation problem is the problem of finding a general rule by which to transform the "values" of commodities (based on their socially necessary labour content, according to his labo ...
" controversy to the
socialist calculation debate The socialist calculation debate, sometimes known as the economic calculation debate, was a discourse on the subject of how a socialist economy would perform economic calculation given the absence of the law of value, money, financial prices for ...
. When, in his
neo-Ricardian The neo-Ricardian school is an economic school of thought that derives from the close reading and interpretation of David Ricardo by Piero Sraffa, and from Sraffa's critique of neoclassical economics as presented in his ''The Production of Commo ...
attack on Marx's value theory,
Ian Steedman Ian Steedman (born 1941, London) is a British economist. He was for many years a professor of economics at the University of Manchester before moving down the road to Manchester Metropolitan University. He retired from there at the end of 2006, but ...
simply disregarded ''all'' market prices altogether (all prices in Steedman's models are purely hypothetical production prices), there was no objection from the Marxist camp, although there were plenty of other criticisms.


Shaikh

In his 2016 ''magnum opus'', the classical economist Anwar Shaikh argues that all the main economic propositions of Marx's ''Capital'' can be demonstrated in a coherent way and verified empirically — without any need to imitate Marx's own dialectical narrative about value (a position that is controversial among Marxists). Contrary to the East German Marxists and the West German value-form theorists, Shaikh and his colleagues devised techniques to test the classical theories of value empirically, using input-output data, capital stock data, labour data, price indexes and incomes data. He claims that generally the deviation of estimated labour-values from the corresponding observable market prices of outputs or derived production prices is not very great (which suggests that the classical
transformation problem In 20th-century discussions of Karl Marx's economics, the transformation problem is the problem of finding a general rule by which to transform the "values" of commodities (based on their socially necessary labour content, according to his labo ...
is empirically much less significant than previously thought. However, the validity of econometric techniques used to estimate price-value deviations is still in dispute. The strength of the econometric approach is that, if the task is to ''measure'' value, then it is essential to get conceptually very exact about what value is, in order to measure it, even if the empirical measure is only a proxy variable or an approximate indicator for the real thing.


Chartalist critique

An implicit technical and historical criticism of Marx's value-form theory is made by some Post Keynesian and heterodox Marxian economists as well as
anarchists Anarchism is a political philosophy and movement that seeks to abolish all institutions that perpetuate authority, coercion, or hierarchy, primarily targeting the state and capitalism. Anarchism advocates for the replacement of the state w ...
like
David Graeber David Rolfe Graeber (; February 12, 1961 – September 2, 2020) was an American and British anthropologist, Left-wing politics, left-wing and anarchism, anarchist social and political activist. His influential work in Social anthropology, social ...
, who are inspired by the chartalist theory of money. These economists interpret Marx's narrative about how money originates in the exchange process as a theory of
commodity money Commodity money is money whose value comes from a commodity of which it is made. Commodity money consists of objects having value or use in themselves ( intrinsic value) as well as their value in buying goods. This is in contrast to representa ...
, or the "commodity theory of money". That is, they believe that Marx's theory is more or less the same as the "barter theory of money".


MMT

The "neo-Chartalist" interpretation of money entails, that the commodity theory of money is false; the latter, it is argued by neo-chartalists, can neither explain the origin of money and credit, nor provide a credible account of monetary phenomena in the modern world. Chartalists argue that money is completely "a creature of the state"—it first arises as a
unit of account In economics, unit of account is one of the functions of money. A unit of account is a standard numerical monetary unit of measurement of the market value of goods, services, and other transactions. Also known as a "measure" or "standard" of ...
for state debts, credits and taxes, and is then gradually imposed on the whole of the trading process in society. If this Chartalist argument is true, then it cannot also be true that, as Marx argues, money originates as a "special commodity" (a referent of value and a universally exchangeable good) within the exchange process itself. The neo-Chartalist theory is known as
Modern Monetary Theory Modern monetary theory or modern money theory (MMT) is a heterodox macroeconomic theory that describes currency as a public monopoly and unemployment as evidence that a currency monopolist is overly restricting the supply of the financial ass ...
(MMT). There exist also quite a number of other credit theories of money which differ to one degree or another from MMT, with different policy conclusions. The controversy about this challenge to Marx's idea is far from being resolved at this stage, for five reasons.


No consensus

Firstly, there is nowadays no consensus view among Marxists about Marx's theory of money. *Some Marxists deny that Marx had any full-fledged theory of money in the modern sense of the word, since he never developed any substantive theory of money circulation and public finance; Marx had deliberately kept his discussion of money and bank capital brief, it is argued, because he aimed only to explain the nature of the capitalist mode of production as simply as possible. *Some Marxists, like Thomas T. Sekine, regard the value-form discussion as a purely theoretical discussion with no bearing on empirical or historical reality; its main purpose is just to show why the money-form necessarily emerges from the exchange of products, not how exactly it originates. *Some Marxists, such as
Ernest Mandel Ernest Ezra Mandel (; 5 April 1923 – 20 July 1995), also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter, was a Belgian Marxian economist, Trotskyist activist and theorist, and Holocaust survivor. He f ...
and John Weeks, have argued that Marx really did have a commodity theory of money. *Others argue that (a) a commodity-money theory can only be a "special case" of a more general theory of money, or (b) that it is a purely theoretical/analytical assumption, or (c) that it applied only in a certain period in history, or (d) Marx did not have or need a commodity theory of money. *Some Marxists think that Marx's theory is substantially the same as the barter theory of money, while others argue it is very different from the barter theory. So, there exists no general agreement about the exact theoretical status of Marx's theory of money. The core problem here is, that in its evolution across millennia of trading activity, money itself has taken a multiplicity of different forms, and new types of monetary transactions keep emerging, that were previously unheard of (see also e.g.
electronic money Digital currency (digital money, electronic money or electronic currency) is any currency, money, or money-like asset that is primarily managed, stored or exchanged on digital computer systems, especially over the internet. Types of digital cu ...
,
collateralized debt obligation A collateralized debt obligation (CDO) is a type of structured finance, structured asset-backed security (ABS). Originally developed as instruments for the corporate debt markets, after 2002 CDOs became vehicles for refinancing Mortgage-backed se ...
, credit default swap and
cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership record ...
). For almost the whole history of commercial capitalism from the 15th century onward, currencies were used which were convertible into gold and silver, but from 1971 onward, most currencies have become fiat money (see Nixon shock).


Money's origins

Secondly, the analysis of the historical and archaeological evidence about the real origins of money is not simply a matter of "facts", but also a matter of the interpretation of the facts using theoretical frameworks. At what point, exactly, did primitive money come into being? When is money really money? How exactly do we draw the boundary between a "chiefdom" and an "early state"? How economists will interpret the historical record of human exchange processes is influenced by their theory of how markets work in the modern world, and by how they define monetary phenomena. The further one goes back into the past, however, the more fragmentary the scientific evidence about the circulation of goods is, and the more interpretation is involved to understand how it worked. It is easy to project a modern understanding of money into the past, even although money was understood quite differently in the past, or money functioned differently in the past, because people were related and relating in a different way.


Disagreement

Thirdly, beyond Keynesian and Marxist theories about money, there is a lot of controversy and theoretical disagreement within the discipline of economics as a whole about money, credit and finance. Representatives of different schools of thought in economics often cannot agree at a very basic scientific level about the causes and effects of monetary phenomena, even if they share the same elementary concepts about the circulation of money. They are therefore likely also to interpret economic developments in quite different ways.


Few Marxist works

Fourthly, as a matter of fact, very few Marxian economists have studied monetary economics in any detail, and there are few significant Marxist works on the role of money in the economy.


SFC model

Fifthly, when economists try to "modernize" Marx's view of money, they strike the problem that in orthodox economics the "macro-theory" of money is very different from the "micro-theory" of money. The way economists think that money functions at the macro-level of society as a whole, differs a lot from the way they say money functions at the level of individuals and businesses. They have one story for transactions between individuals or individual enterprises, and quite another story for the "big picture". According to Marxist, classical and post-Keynesian economists such as
Wynne Godley Wynne Godley (26 September 192613 May 2010) was an economist famous for his pessimism about the British economy and his criticism of the British government. In 2007, he and Marc Lavoie wrote a book about the " Stock-Flow Consistent" model, an a ...
,
Marc Lavoie Marc Lavoie (born 1954)Marc Lavoie profile
at the
,
Steve Keen Steve Keen (born 28 March 1953) is an Australian economist and author. He considers himself a post-Keynesian, criticising neoclassical economics as inconsistent, unscientific, and empirically unsupported. Keen was formerly an associate profe ...
,
Edward J. Nell Edward J. Nell (born July 16, 1935) is an American economist and a former professor at the New School for Social Research. Nell was a member of the New School faculty from 1969 to 2014. He achieved the rank of Malcolm B. Smith Professor of Econom ...
and Anwar Shaikh, this creates all kinds of theoretical inconsistencies. To overcome the inconsistencies, post-Keynesian Marxists try to create a so-called " stock/flow consistent model" of monetary transactions, which can explain the circulation process of money, commodities and capital in an integral way. This approach is needed especially because "unfortunately, the finance sector is one of the more poorly measured sectors in national accounts".


Pre-sovereign money

The main objection to the Chartalist theory of the origins of money is that, for the largest part of recognizably human history, economic exchange in whatever form took place without using a sovereign currency, and that all kinds of physical goods (such as minerals, cattle, hides, shells and slaves) were used as a kind of money. That is, commodity money existed long before sovereign currency emerged, and the economic significance of the early state was very small. A. Hingston Quiggin, A survey of primitive money; the beginnings of currency. London: Methuen & Co., 1949; Paul Einzig, ''Primitive money in its ethnological, historical and economic aspects''. Pergamon, 1966. On this view, sovereign currency could replace non-sovereign currency, only because there already existed a lot of experience in trading with non-sovereign currency beforehand. This does not deny that informal and contractual lending/borrowing arrangements also already existed in ancient times, but currency was not even necessary for that. Because labour productivity was comparatively low, the
surplus product Surplus product () is a concept theorised by Karl Marx in his critique of political economy. Roughly speaking, it is the extra goods produced above the amount needed for a community of workers to survive at its current standard of living. Marx f ...
was relatively small and the ability of early states to appropriate it through levies and taxes was usually also limited (though e.g. the
Aztec The Aztecs ( ) were a Mesoamerican civilization that flourished in central Mexico in the Post-Classic stage, post-classic period from 1300 to 1521. The Aztec people included different Indigenous peoples of Mexico, ethnic groups of central ...
emperors apparently hoarded cocoa beans, and at one time owned a stockpile of some 960,000,000 beans). In addition, large trading houses—such as the
Dutch East India Company The United East India Company ( ; VOC ), commonly known as the Dutch East India Company, was a chartered company, chartered trading company and one of the first joint-stock companies in the world. Established on 20 March 1602 by the States Ge ...
—sometimes issued their own currency, quite independently of the state (see: Dutch East India Company coinage). So the ability of tokens of value (e.g.
cryptocurrency A cryptocurrency (colloquially crypto) is a digital currency designed to work through a computer network that is not reliant on any central authority, such as a government or bank, to uphold or maintain it. Individual coin ownership record ...
) to function as money does not necessarily depend on the state at all, even although, in the modern era, money has ''mostly'' taken the form of state-issued currency and, after the demise of the Bretton-Woods Agreement is always in the form of
fiat money Fiat money is a type of government-issued currency that is not backed by a precious metal, such as gold or silver, nor by any other tangible asset or commodity. Fiat currency is typically designated by the issuing government to be legal tende ...
.


Tally-sticks

Neo-Chartalists argue however that, although we will never be certain, for lack of definite archaeological proofs, about the origins of money, the first instances of units of account are debt markets, the so-called "
tally stick A tally stick (or simply a tally) was an ancient memory aid used to record and document numbers, quantities, and messages. Tally sticks first appear as animal bones carved with notches during the Upper Palaeolithic; a notable example is the Is ...
s" in antiquity. Money issued is always debt issued, and, therefore, the notion that money originated as a means of exchange first is regarded as false.


Libertarian critique

A fifth line of criticism, articulated especially by libertarians such as
Friedrich von Hayek Friedrich August von Hayek (8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992) was an Austrian-born British academic and philosopher. He is known for his contributions to political economy, political philosophy and intellectual history. Hayek shared the 1974 Nobe ...
and the
Austrian School The Austrian school is a Heterodox economics, heterodox Schools of economic thought, school of economic thought that advocates strict adherence to methodological individualism, the concept that social phenomena result primarily from the motivat ...
, concerns the role of value in human freedom and progress. Marx and Engels tended to present "value" and "value relations" as negative, alienating and reifying phenomena that cause people to get used by others, for ends they can no longer fathom. Therefore, markets appear to be evil things, and the conclusion then follows that people are better off without them. Yet market value can also be viewed as a very positive thing. Hayek stated that: According to Marxists, value phenomena belong to the
prehistory Prehistory, also called pre-literary history, is the period of human history between the first known use of stone tools by hominins   million years ago and the beginning of recorded history with the invention of writing systems. The use ...
of
human Humans (''Homo sapiens'') or modern humans are the most common and widespread species of primate, and the last surviving species of the genus ''Homo''. They are Hominidae, great apes characterized by their Prehistory of nakedness and clothing ...
ity that closes with the abolition of capitalism. Thus, for example,
Iring Fetscher Iring Fetscher (1922–2014) was a German political scientist and researcher on Hegel and Marxism. Fetscher was born on 4 March 1922 at Marbach am Neckar, and was brought up in Dresden. After the Second World War he studied at Tübingen and Pari ...
claims: "Marx's criticism is directed against value as such, not merely against its consequence, capital." Similarly,
Moishe Postone Moishe Postone (17 April 1942 – 19 March 2018) was a Canadian historian, sociologist, political philosopher and social theorist. He was a professor of history at the University of Chicago, where he was part of the Committee on Jewish Studi ...
argued that Marx was mainly concerned with "the abolition of value as the social form of wealth." In other words, the negative, dehumanizing features of market valuations for workers' lives have had prominence for Marxists, even although Marx also acknowledges here and there that markets have some progressive, developmental and "civilizing" features. Marx and Engels seem to depict the forms of value as an alien, impersonal and corruptive force that gradually subordinates anything and everything to "making money" — and it leads to the reification of human life (and to wars). This opens up a far-reaching and complex theme of criticism. There are many libertarian criticisms of Marxism and socialism – economic, political, moral and technical. In the context of this article, five points are particularly relevant (whether one agrees with them, or not).


Progress

The first objection is that the negative historical judgement about the capitalist market economy is ''not objective'', because, on balance, the results for human civilization of the valuation of labour by capital have had much more ''progressive'' effect than Marx and Engels were willing to acknowledge. The proof is said to be, that workers themselves prefer choosing their own employer, purchasing goods at stable prices, and owning private property; market trade has improved their standard of living faster than any other method. On this view, Marxists exaggerated the "money-making" aspect of business, by simply ignoring many other human considerations involved in it (as an impoverished migrant, Marx wrote almost nothing on the social, legal and economic forms of civil society and of the sphere of consumption).


Value inevitable

A second objection is that Marxists are wrong to think that ''value disappears when commercial trade is abolished''. Here the argument is that humans would simply continue to make valuations anyway, and that goods continue to have value, except that knowing what exactly the magnitude of that value is, becomes much more problematic because a general, shared standard of valuation (expressed in money quantities) is absent. The proof of this is supposed to be the experience of Soviet-type societies where a very large amount of goods was effectively "bartered" or allocated by government decree. Even if there was no trade at all, however, the Soviet authorities knew very well that the products of human labour had value, and, with experience, planners could estimate fairly accurately how much labour would need to be employed to produce various kinds of outputs. More generally, it can be argued that human beings as moral subjects are intrinsically valuing subjects, and therefore human relations without values or valuations of some sort do not exist. At best one could say (as Marx did), that the type of value or valuation can change.


Freedom

A third objection is that people can distinguish quite well between the means/ends rationality of commerce, and non-commercial relationships. Therefore, it is simply an inaccurate and false subjective opinion to claim that there exists some kind of "monumental domination" of commercial relationships over people's lives, because that is not true—except perhaps for people who are obsessively focused on trading relationships. What is ignored is that markets can offer a freedom of choice and development to those who value themselves, and believe in their own self-worth. This kind of argument suggests that the "oppression by economic value" or the "domination of economic value" might only exist as a mistaken belief or as an erroneous interpretation which itself can be oppressive.


Efficiency and fairness

A fourth objection made is that without the "discipline" and "incentives" of value relations, it is simply ''impossible to reconcile self-interest and the common interest in any efficient and fair manner'', and achieve sensible cost-economies in the use of resources. Again, this is supposed to be proved by the resource waste and ecological damage suffered by Soviet-type societies. If people don't have to work for a living, they will just try to live at the expense of other people. But giving people monetary rewards and costs as a framework to reckon with in making choices about their lives is vastly preferable to forcing them to work with the threat of real punishment if they don't.


Trade persistence

A fifth objection is that it is practically ''impossible'' to abolish trade as such in complex societies, and that trade could not be prevented, even if a central state authority allocated resources to individuals through some kind of credit or
rationing Rationing is the controlled distribution (marketing), distribution of scarcity, scarce resources, goods, services, or an artificial restriction of demand. Rationing controls the size of the ration, which is one's allowed portion of the resourc ...
system (see e.g.
Social Credit System The Social Credit System ( zh , c = 社会信用体系 , p = shèhuì xìnyòng tǐxì ) is a national credit rating and Blacklisting, blacklist implemented by the government of China, government of the People's Republic of China. The social cred ...
). So long as people can privately own belongings, they will trade them, if it is in their interest to do so. In Soviet-type societies, trading continued to occur anyway, even if it was highly regulated, or driven underground (the " grey economy" or
black market A black market is a Secrecy, clandestine Market (economics), market or series of transactions that has some aspect of illegality, or is not compliant with an institutional set of rules. If the rule defines the set of goods and services who ...
). Since there is practically no alternative to trading, it is argued the only dispute there can be, concerns the terms on which goods and services are traded—whether that is efficient or morally justifiable. Any policy that aims to regulate or control how people may trade, libertarians argue, represents an attack on their
liberty Liberty is the state of being free within society from oppressive restrictions imposed by authority on one's way of life, behavior, or political views. The concept of liberty can vary depending on perspective and context. In the Constitutional ...
and presumes wrongly that the regulators know better what trade is beneficial, than the trading individuals do themselves (see further
socialist calculation debate The socialist calculation debate, sometimes known as the economic calculation debate, was a discourse on the subject of how a socialist economy would perform economic calculation given the absence of the law of value, money, financial prices for ...
).


Response: market socialism

Arguing against total statization such as in the Soviet Union, many modern socialist theorists have claimed however that markets aren't necessarily (or by definition) a bad thing. It all depends on how property rights and claims to resources are organized or institutionalized. Instead, they argue, markets should combine with non-market allocation methods within a
market socialism Market socialism is a type of economic system involving social ownership of the means of production within the framework of a market economy. Various models for such a system exist, usually involving cooperative enterprises and sometimes a mix ...
. A very large amount of literature now exists on this topic, for and against. Similar to classical social-democratic reformism, the principle is argued that the more that economic goods are allocated by the market, the more the financially strong will defeat the financially weak, and the more socio-economic inequality there will be. Therefore, it is argued, a more egalitarian society requires ''both'' market ''and'' non-market mechanisms, to allocate goods in a fair way. In this respect, there are many different possible combinations of argument. *In 1919, in the context of the Russian civil war,
Nikolai Bukharin Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin (; rus, Николай Иванович Бухарин, p=nʲɪkɐˈlaj ɪˈvanəvʲɪdʑ bʊˈxarʲɪn; – 15 March 1938) was a Russian revolutionary, Soviet politician, and Marxist theorist. A prominent Bolshevik ...
and Evgeny Preobrazhensky published the first comprehensive description of the transition to socialism, talking about "the abolition of private trade" (see also
war communism War communism or military communism (, ''Vojenný kommunizm'') was the economic and political system that existed in Soviet Russia during the Russian Civil War from 1918 to 1921. War communism began in June 1918, enforced by the Supreme Economi ...
). However, in his own 1924 study, written after the introduction of Lenin's
New Economic Policy The New Economic Policy (NEP) () was an economic policy of the Soviet Union proposed by Vladimir Lenin in 1921 as a temporary expedient. Lenin characterized the NEP in 1922 as an economic system that would include "a free market and capitalism, ...
, Preobrazhensky recognized the persistence of trade in the transitional era. He claimed though that there was a fundamental contradiction between collective planning and markets. This idea of a fundamental contradiction between planning and markets became enormously influential in later 20th century Marxist thought. However, when Bukharin wrote on his own about the transition to socialism, he was much more relaxed about market activity in the Soviet Union. Bukharin and Preobrazhensky were both executed on
Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Dzhugashvili; 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin, his death in 1953. He held power as General Secret ...
's orders during the
Great Terror The Great Purge, or the Great Terror (), also known as the Year of '37 () and the Yezhovshchina ( , ), was a political purge in the Soviet Union that took place from 1936 to 1938. After the assassination of Sergei Kirov by Leonid Nikolaev ...
in 1937–38, but their ideas resurfaced from the 1960s onward, when Western scholars began to dig out the real historical record of Marxism. Stalin's general program was to eradicate capital markets and free enterprise completely, as well as bringing almost all independent producer and consumer cooperatives under state control: the abolition of almost all private ownership of means of production, which simultaneously abolished the commercial
bourgeoisie The bourgeoisie ( , ) are a class of business owners, merchants and wealthy people, in general, which emerged in the Late Middle Ages, originally as a "middle class" between the peasantry and aristocracy. They are traditionally contrasted wi ...
as a social class in society. *
Ludwig von Mises Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (; ; September 29, 1881 – October 10, 1973) was an Austrian-American political economist and philosopher of the Austrian school. Mises wrote and lectured extensively on the social contributions of classical l ...
was already attacking the concept of market socialism in 1920, even before a detailed theory actually existed. This received replies from
Karl Polanyi Karl Paul Polanyi (; ; 25 October 1886 – 23 April 1964)''Encyclopædia Britannica'' (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica Inc. 2003) vol 9. p. 554 was an Austro-Hungarian economic anthropologist, economic sociologist, and politician, best kno ...
and Eduard Heimann in 1922. *Comparing market and non-market production,
Michael Ellman Michael John Ellman (born 1942, United Kingdom) has been a professor of economics at the University of Amsterdam since 1978. He is now an ''emeritus professor''. He has written on the economics of the Soviet Union, transition economics, Russia a ...
concluded that the socialist system is "an efficient system for resource mobilisation, normally achieving high participation rates and high investment rates." However socialism was "the less efficient system with respect to the use of raw materials and intermediate products." Ellman argued that the evidence shows that Preobrazhensky's famous theory of " primitive socialist accumulation" simply did not hold water. In the end, Ellman concluded that "revolutionary social change aiming to eliminate the role of money and the market economy may well fail to eliminate inequality" and instead "simply change its causes". There could be more or less inequality, or different types of inequality in the allocation of resources. *One of the first theorists of market socialism was the Polish economist Oskar R. Lange who, fairly uniquely, aspired to integrate classical and neoclassical economics in one theory. In Lange's view, central planning by the state and market activity were quite compatible. The Japanese Marxist Kei Shibata was skeptical of Lange's theory and considered Hayek's criticism, arguing that Lange fell victim to the "old economic logic" that had to be discarded.
Moishe Postone Moishe Postone (17 April 1942 – 19 March 2018) was a Canadian historian, sociologist, political philosopher and social theorist. He was a professor of history at the University of Chicago, where he was part of the Committee on Jewish Studi ...
however agreed that "there is not even a necessary logical opposition between value and planning". *
Maurice Dobb Maurice Herbert Dobb (24 July 1900 – 17 August 1976) was an English economist at Cambridge University and a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. He is remembered as one of the pre-eminent Marxist economists of the 20th century. Dobb was high ...
published many texts in response to the controversy about market allocation versus economic planning. However, because Dobb was sympathetic to the
Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
, his writings were simply erased and deleted (like the writings of most other Marxist Soviet-sympathizers in the West) from the tradition of "
Western Marxism Western Marxism is a current of Marxist theory that arose from Western and Central Europe in the aftermath of the 1917 October Revolution in Russia and the ascent of Leninism. The term denotes a loose collection of theorists who advanced an i ...
" invented by
New Left The New Left was a broad political movement that emerged from the counterculture of the 1960s and continued through the 1970s. It consisted of activists in the Western world who, in reaction to the era's liberal establishment, campaigned for freer ...
intellectuals like
Perry Anderson Francis Rory Peregrine "Perry" Anderson (born 11 September 1938) is a British intellectual, political philosopher, historian and essayist. His work ranges across historical sociology, intellectual history, and cultural analysis. What unites An ...
,
Alex Callinicos Alexander Theodore Callinicos (born 24 July 1950) is a Rhodesian-born British political theorist and activist. An adherent of Trotskyism, he is a member of the Central Committee of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and serves as its Internatio ...
and Marcel van der Linden. Therefore, very few people nowadays know what Dobb actually said. *In 1963–65,
Che Guevara Ernesto "Che" Guevara (14th May 1928 – 9 October 1967) was an Argentines, Argentine Communist revolution, Marxist revolutionary, physician, author, Guerrilla warfare, guerrilla leader, diplomat, and Military theory, military theorist. A majo ...
and Cuban treasury minister Luis Alvarez Rom spearheaded what came to be known as "the Great Debate" about the organization of the Cuban economy. It concerned primarily questions about the economic autonomy of enterprises, and the mix of material and moral incentives that would work best for the Cuban production system. An international conference was organized in Havana, which was attended by
Ernest Mandel Ernest Ezra Mandel (; 5 April 1923 – 20 July 1995), also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter, was a Belgian Marxian economist, Trotskyist activist and theorist, and Holocaust survivor. He f ...
and
Charles Bettelheim Charles Bettelheim (20 November 1913 – 20 July 2006) was a French Marxian economist and historian, founder of the Center for the Study of Modes of Industrialization (CEMI: ''Centre pour l'étude des modes d'industrialisation'') at the EHESS, ...
among others, to debate the theory of the transition to socialism. * The Czech socialist economist Ota Šik, who appeared on Western TV stations numerous times, originally promoted market liberalization in Eastern Europe in the 1960s. However, he became increasingly critical of the system in operation, and began to regard it as "anti-socialist" and "
neo-Stalinist Neo-Stalinism is the promotion of positive views of Joseph Stalin's role in history, the partial re-establishing of Stalin's policies on certain or all issues, and nostalgia for the Stalinist period. Neo-Stalinism overlaps significantly with n ...
" in the 1980s. He claimed that the existing political system of the communist party had presented an insurmountable obstacle to progressive economic reform. In the end, Ota Šik's "third way" argued for a humane economic democracy: a method for the allocation of resources should be judged not on whether it conformed to a doctrine or principle, but whether it really met people's needs and improved their lives, i.e. on results. In the 1990s, he tried to draw some theoretical lessons from the experience of what had, or had not been achieved. In 1969, his countryman
Petr Uhl Petr Uhl (8 October 1941 – 1 December 2021) was a Czech journalist, activist, and politician. A member of the Civic Forum, he served in the Federal Assembly of Czechoslovakia from 1990 to 1992. He was also a signatory of Charter 77 Chart ...
had published a proposal for socialist self-management and democratization in
Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...
. In 1978,
Václav Havel Václav Havel (; 5 October 193618 December 2011) was a Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright, and dissident. Havel served as the last List of presidents of Czechoslovakia, president of Czechoslovakia from 1989 until 1992, prior to the dissol ...
, a leader of Charta 77, published his famous
samizdat Samizdat (, , ) was a form of dissident activity across the Eastern Bloc in which individuals reproduced censored and underground makeshift publications, often by hand, and passed the documents from reader to reader. The practice of manual rep ...
essay ''
The Power of the Powerless ''The Power of the Powerless'' () is an expansive political essay written in October 1978 by the Czech dramatist, political dissident, and later statesman, Václav Havel. The essay dissects the nature of communist regimes of the time, life with ...
''. Havel argued that in
neo-Stalinist Neo-Stalinism is the promotion of positive views of Joseph Stalin's role in history, the partial re-establishing of Stalin's policies on certain or all issues, and nostalgia for the Stalinist period. Neo-Stalinism overlaps significantly with n ...
Czechoslovakia Czechoslovakia ( ; Czech language, Czech and , ''Česko-Slovensko'') was a landlocked country in Central Europe, created in 1918, when it declared its independence from Austria-Hungary. In 1938, after the Munich Agreement, the Sudetenland beca ...
, people had to behave "as if" they believed the state ideology, even if they did not believe it at all, and so, they were really "living a lie". This had, among other things, terrible ''economic'' effects, because it subverted the very possibility for honest and transparent transactions. *The Croatian socialist economist
Branko Horvat Branko Horvat (24 July 1928 – 18 December 2003) was a Croatian economist and politician. Horvat was born in Petrinja on 24 July 1928. In 1944 during World War II, Horvat and his father Artur Horvat joined the Partisan movement in Croatia. He ...
championed a type of democratic market socialism and criticized excessive privatization and oppression of ethnic minorities. *The East German dissident Rudolf Bahro claimed in his widely read theoretical critique ''The Alternative in Eastern Europe'' (1977) that "actually existing socialism" had not been real socialism. Subsequently, he became a leader of the West German Green Party, and devoted his last years mainly to the philosophy of spirituality. *One of Abel Aganbegyan's first books was called ''Regional studies for planning and projecting: the Siberian experience''. Subsequently, he rose to become one of the key economic advisors for
Mikhail Gorbachev Mikhail Sergeyevich Gorbachev (2 March 1931 – 30 August 2022) was a Soviet and Russian politician who served as the last leader of the Soviet Union from 1985 to dissolution of the Soviet Union, the country's dissolution in 1991. He served a ...
's
Perestroika ''Perestroika'' ( ; rus, перестройка, r=perestrojka, p=pʲɪrʲɪˈstrojkə, a=ru-perestroika.ogg, links=no) was a political reform movement within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) during the late 1980s, widely associ ...
program to restructure the Soviet planned economy, and wrote many books about it, some of them translated into English. In the first phase of perestroika, the state monopoly of foreign trade was abolished; in the second phase, many enterprises could trade part of their output on own initiative, and retain the profits. However, when Gorbachev lost his job, the envisaged Perestroika reform programme could no longer go ahead. *
Alexander Yakovlev Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev (; 2 December 1923 – 18 October 2005) was a Soviet and Russian politician, diplomat, and historian. A member of the Politburo and Secretariat of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union throughout the 1980s ...
, the chief architect of
Glasnost ''Glasnost'' ( ; , ) is a concept relating to openness and transparency. It has several general and specific meanings, including a policy of maximum openness in the activities of state institutions and freedom of information and the inadmissi ...
in the
Soviet Union The Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. (USSR), commonly known as the Soviet Union, was a List of former transcontinental countries#Since 1700, transcontinental country that spanned much of Eurasia from 1922 until Dissolution of the Soviet ...
, argued that free speech, intellectual freedom and human rights were essential for a well-functioning socialism. Under his leadership, the official Soviet archives were opened for the study of the real history of Russia, and he was a founder of the
Memorial A memorial is an object or place which serves as a focus for the memory or the commemoration of something, usually an influential, deceased person or a historical, tragic event. Popular forms of memorials include landmark objects such as home ...
movement. However, after his death his intellectual and political legacy was largely repressed, deleted and forgotten in Russia and elsewhere; many of the Soviet archival collections were locked up aga

https://www.alexanderyakovlev.org/] *
Yegor Gaidar Yegor Timurovich Gaidar (; rus, Егор Тимурович Гайдар, p=jɪˈɡor tʲɪˈmurəvʲɪtɕ ɡɐjˈdar; 19 March 1956 – 16 December 2009) was a Soviet and Russian economist, politician, and author, and was the Acting Prime Min ...
believed that there was only one way to get out of the problems of Soviet socialism, and that was what amounted to an economic "shock therapy" of large-scale marketization and privatization (though he officially denied it was a "shock therapy"). This very radical program would demolish political resistance before the opponents of reform could mobilize and organize. Gaidar argued that "The arguments of Mises and Bruzkus, despite their coherence and consistency, are insufficient to explain the systemic causes of the crisis and death of Soviet communism, as well as the general reasons for its failure in competition with Western capitalism. A more painstaking analysis is required, one based on concrete historical experience." *In her book ''Sale of the century: the inside story of the second Russian revolution'',
Chrystia Freeland Christina Alexandra Freeland (born August 2, 1968) is a Canadian politician and journalist who has served as the Member of Parliament (Canada), member of Parliament (MP) for University—Rosedale (federal electoral district), University—Rose ...
documents how Russia's transition to state capitalism was highly profitable to a new Russian
oligarchy Oligarchy (; ) is a form of government in which power rests with a small number of people. Members of this group, called oligarchs, generally hold usually hard, but sometimes soft power through nobility, fame, wealth, or education; or t ...
, but a disaster for most ordinary Russians. Ruslan Dzarasov provides an alternative Marxist perspective on marketization in post-Soviet Russia.
Zbigniew Brzezinski Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński (, ; March 28, 1928 – May 26, 2017), known as Zbig, was a Polish-American diplomat and political scientist. He served as a counselor to Lyndon B. Johnson from 1966 to 1968 and was Jimmy Carter's National Securi ...
, writing in 1989, stated that "For the world at large, the Soviet experience, an icon no more, is henceforth not to be imitated but avoided. As a result, communism no longer has a practical model for others to emulate." *The critical Marxist Professor Aleksandr Buzgalin of Moscow State University, a leader of the contemporary Russian democratic Left, tried to bridge the theoretical differences between the traditional communists and modern New Left socialists. He has written some twenty books and about two hundred articles, arguing for the possibility of a democratic, self-managed socialist economy, with a variety of property forms and institutions, and some market activity. Some of these writings, like his classic '' Russia: capitalism's Jurassic Park'', have been translated into English. He was in favour of celebrating the 100th anniversary of the
Russian Revolution The Russian Revolution was a period of Political revolution (Trotskyism), political and social revolution, social change in Russian Empire, Russia, starting in 1917. This period saw Russia Dissolution of the Russian Empire, abolish its mona ...
, which Western Marxists had turned into a "red
mirage A mirage is a naturally-occurring optical phenomenon in which light rays bend via refraction to produce a displaced image of distant objects or the sky. The word comes to English via the French ''(se) mirer'', from the Latin ''mirari'', mean ...
". *In his 2011 retrospective ''From solidarity to sellout: the restoration of capitalism in Poland'', Tadeusz Kowalik criticized the "shock therapy" of market reforms in Poland after 1989. Others however note that in the first decades of the 21st century, "Poland's economy has consistently expanded at one of the fastest rates in Europe".
Jeffrey Sachs Jeffrey David Sachs ( ; born November 5, 1954) is an American economist and public policy analyst who is a professor at Columbia University, where he was formerly director of The Earth Institute. He worked on the topics of sustainable develop ...
stated: "I'm not a heartless guy. I'm not a free-market libertarian by a million miles. I wanted a cushion for Poland. That was a large part of my aims and a large part of their interest in me, in terms of what I could get for them. And I did this in a number of ways." In his book ''Poland's jump to the market economy'', Sachs outlines how the restructuring of the Polish economy was carried out. *The leading Chinese economist Jinglian Wu claims that a thorough analysis of planned economy since the 1980s (coinciding with Chinese economic reforms) proves that it is "impossible for such an institutional arrangement to be efficient". Critics, including
Chinese New Left The Chinese New Left is a term used in the China, People's Republic of China to describe a diverse range of left-wing political philosophies that emerged in the 1990s that are critical of the Chinese economic reform, economic reforms institute ...
scholars such as Minqi Li and Wang Hui, however question what is meant by "efficiency". *The dissident Russian socialist
Boris Kagarlitsky } Boris Yulyevich Kagarlitsky (; born 29 August 1958) is a Russian Marxism, Marxist Political philosophy, theoretician and sociology, sociologist who has been a Dissident, political dissident in the Soviet Union and the Russia, Russian Federation. ...
argued in 1992 that "no economy can dispense with market relations". But, he asked, " why should we regard the capitalist 'free' market as the only possible one, and bureaucratic centralized control as the only possible form of planning? (...) What people with initiative need is not the market or private property, but the opportunity to realize their initiative. If this can be done through the market, fine. If through some other means, then that is fine too". *The
Trotskyists Trotskyism (, ) is the political ideology and branch of Marxism developed by Russian revolutionary and intellectual Leon Trotsky along with some other members of the Left Opposition and the Fourth International. Trotsky described himself as a ...
, the
International Socialist Tendency The International Socialist Tendency (IST) is an Political international, international grouping of unorthodox Trotskyist organisations espousing the ideas of Tony Cliff (1917–2000), founder of the Socialist Workers Party (UK), Socialist Wor ...
and the
International Socialist Organization The International Socialist Organization (ISO) was a Trotskyist group active primarily on college campuses in the United States that was founded in 1976 and dissolved in 2019. The organization held Leninist positions on imperialism and the role ...
have always maintained that there has never existed any real socialist society anywhere, only "transitional formations", a
degenerated workers' state In Trotskyist political theory, a degenerated workers' state is a dictatorship of the proletariat in which the working class' democratic control over the state has given way to control by a bureaucratic clique. The term was developed by Leon T ...
, a deformed workers state,
bureaucratic collectivism Bureaucratic collectivism is a theory of class society. It is used by some Trotskyists to describe the nature of the Soviet Union under Joseph Stalin and other similar states in Central and Eastern Europe and elsewhere (such as North Korea). T ...
or
state capitalism State capitalism is an economic system in which the state undertakes business and commercial economic activity and where the means of production are nationalized as state-owned enterprises (including the processes of capital accumulation, ...
, and that the only real socialism is Marx and Engels's own sketch of the ideal socialism. The Trotskyist and neo-Trotskyist critique of the "so-called socialist societies" is essentially that state allocation and market allocation were combined, but this had nothing to do with socialism, even although these societies called themselves "socialist" and claimed to build socialism. Therefore, the collapse of so-called socialist societies in their eyes does not prove that socialism is impossible, only that fake socialism is impossible to maintain, and that true socialism has never been implemented or put to the test anywhere, so far. * Marxist–Leninists regard the Trotskyist and International Socialist interpretation as supremely idealist and infantile, because the Trotskyists and International Socialists lack any realistic understanding of socialist economics and socialist state management in the real world. The basic reason for this lack of understanding is that, if, as Trotskyists claim, there has never existed any actually-existing socialism, then there is nothing there that can be understood about socialism. All one can do, is analyze utopian dreaming, socialist hope, longing or yearning, or testimonies to a socialist faith, or spiritual sentiments about a "socialist heaven on earth" as ideal or utopian future. Or, one can complain about missing the ideal in reality, showing how the real does not live up to the ideal. Trotsky could lead by command and by executive orders "from above", but he was useless as a team-builder in civil life. When, after the civil war, he was appointed Commissar of Transport, he made himself very unpopular with the trade unions - by trying to convert the railway workers into a "labour army" with draconian military-style policies. Most Marxist-Leninists agree, that the Soviet Union under
Joseph Stalin Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin (born Dzhugashvili; 5 March 1953) was a Soviet politician and revolutionary who led the Soviet Union from 1924 until Death and state funeral of Joseph Stalin, his death in 1953. He held power as General Secret ...
was socialist, but that Soviet socialism was later destroyed, because successive market reforms went much too far, and Soviet leaders became more and more right-wing—abandoning real Marxism. The Marxist-Leninists however disagree among themselves, when exactly capitalism was restored in the Soviet Union. For example, some will say it happened after the end of Stalin, i.e. in the
Khrushchev Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev (– 11 September 1971) was the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1953 to 1964 and the Premier of the Soviet Union, Chai ...
era, some argued it happened after the Liberman reforms in the
Brezhnev Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (19 December 190610 November 1982) was a Soviet politician who served as the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 until his death in 1982 as well as the fourth chairman of the Presidium ...
era, and some say it happened after the Gorbachov era when the Soviet Union collapsed. Similarly, some Chinese Marxist-Leninists think that China is now state capitalist, others think that it remains socialist "with Chinese characteristics", and some think it is partly capitalist and partly socialist. All these different viewpoints obviously cannot all be true at once. It helps to explain, why the Marxist–Leninist movement has fragmented since about 1960, just like the Trotskyist and neo-Trotskyist movement. *A substantive visionary statement of the
Council Communists Council communism or councilism is a current of communist thought that emerged in the 1920s. Inspired by the November Revolution, council communism was opposed to state socialism and advocated workers' councils and council democracy. Cou ...
wa
Principles of Communist Production and Distribution
There was no space for markets in this communist system, and workers would be credited goods & services according to the labour they put in, according to some formula. In general, the Council Communists regarded the Soviet Union as a type of state capitalism, ruled over by a state bourgeoisie (comprising higher functionaries and managers in the government and party officialdom, who had special consumer privileges). Similar ideas occur in the essay "value and socialism" by
Paul Mattick Paul Mattick Sr. (March 13, 1904 – February 7, 1981) was a German-American Marxist political writer, activist, and theorist, associated with the council communist movement. Throughout his life, Mattick was critical of capitalism, Bolshevism ...
. *In his "Real Utopias project" since 1991, the analytical Marxist
Erik Olin Wright Erik Olin Wright (February 9, 1947 – January 23, 2019) was an American analytical Marxist sociologist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, specializing in social stratification and in egalitarian alternative futures to capitalism. He ...
has edited and published a series of six books, with writings by a large number of contemporary socialist scholars that explore what an alternative egalitarian, democratic society would look like, and how it would work. The second volume in the series is titled ''Equal shares: making market socialism work''. *
Michael Albert Michael Albert (born April 8, 1947) is an American economist, speaker, writer, and political critic. Since the late 1970s, he has published on a variety of subjects. He has set up his own media outfits, magazines, and podcasts. He is known for ...
and
Robin Hahnel Robin Eric Hahnel (born March 25, 1946) is an American economist and professor emeritus of economics at American University. He is best known for his work on participatory economics with '' Z Magazine'' editor Michael Albert. Politically, Hahne ...
have formulated a theory of
participatory economics Participatory economics, often abbreviated parecon, is an economic system based on participatory decision making as the primary economic mechanism for allocation in society. In the system, the say in decision-making is proportional to the impa ...
, otherwise known as parecon. *The Canadian professor Michael Lebowitz has outlined his theory of the potential for a self-managed socialism in the 21st century, inspired by his experience in Venezuela. *
Makoto Itoh was a Japanese economist who was considered internationally to be one of the most important scholars of Karl Marx's theory of value. He taught at Kokugakuin University, Tokyo, and was a professor emeritus of the University of Tokyo. Itoh belon ...
and
Ha-Joon Chang Ha-Joon Chang (; ; born 7 October 1963) is a South Korean economist and academic. Chang specialises in institutional economics and development, and lectured in economics at the University of Cambridge from 1990–2021 before becoming pro ...
offer a strong defence of state-directed economic organization. *
Anthony Giddens Anthony Giddens, Baron Giddens (born 18 January 1938) is an English sociologist who is known for his theory of structuration and his holistic view of modern societies. He is considered to be one of the most prominent modern sociologists and is ...
,
Robert Rowthorn Robert Rowthorn FAcSS FLSW (born 20 August 1939) is Emeritus Professor of Economics at the University of Cambridge and has been elected as a Life Fellow of King’s College. He is also a senior research fellow of the Centre for Population Resea ...
and
Geoffrey Hodgson Geoffrey Martin Hodgson (born 28 July 1946, Watford) is Emeritus Professor in Management at the London campus of Loughborough University, and also an editor of the ''Journal of Institutional Economics.'' Hodgson is recognised as one of the le ...
have argued for a "third way" between capitalism and socialism. *
János Kornai János Kornai (21 January 1928 – 18 October 2021) was a Hungarian economist noted for his analysis and criticism of the command economies of Eastern European communist states. He also covered macroeconomic aspects in countries undergoing pos ...
and
Ernest Mandel Ernest Ezra Mandel (; 5 April 1923 – 20 July 1995), also known by various pseudonyms such as Ernest Germain, Pierre Gousset, Henri Vallin, Walter, was a Belgian Marxian economist, Trotskyist activist and theorist, and Holocaust survivor. He f ...
have argued — for different reasons — that any durable "third way" between capitalism and socialism is ''impossible''. *
Diane Elson Diane Rosemary Elson (born 20 April 1946) is a British economist, sociologist and gender and development social scientist. She is professor emerita of sociology at the University of Essex and a former professor of development studies at the Un ...
argued in favour of "embedding markets in egalitarian social relations, which in turn means exploring ways of transforming the property relations that underlie and shape the current configurations of market institutions." *In their book ''Toward a new socialism'' (1993), computer scientist W.
Paul Cockshott William Paul Cockshott (born 16 March 1952) is a Scottish academic in the fields of computer science and Marxist economics. He is a Reader at the University of Glasgow. Since 1993 he has authored multiple works in the tradition of scientif ...
and economist Allin Cottrell defended a market in consumer goods, but rejected the concept of
market socialism Market socialism is a type of economic system involving social ownership of the means of production within the framework of a market economy. Various models for such a system exist, usually involving cooperative enterprises and sometimes a mix ...
, regarding it as "a damaging accommodation to the dominance of the right." These authors were criticized by
Geoffrey Hodgson Geoffrey Martin Hodgson (born 28 July 1946, Watford) is Emeritus Professor in Management at the London campus of Loughborough University, and also an editor of the ''Journal of Institutional Economics.'' Hodgson is recognised as one of the le ...
. *The Russian economist Yakov Abramovich Kronrod (1912–1984) argued that public ownership and democracy are dominant in socialist society, but that commodity-market relations nevertheless play an important role in a planned economy as well. *In ''The economics of feasible socialism revisited'', Alec Nove argues for a democratic socialism, combining centralized state corporations, public enterprises, self-managed enterprises such as cooperatives, private enterprises, and self-employment. The advantage of feasible socialism would be, that different ownership forms and allocation methods could be tried out, to see what works best for different types of activities. *
Frank Furedi Frank Furedi (; born 3 May 1947) is a Hungarian Canadians, Hungarian-Canadian academic and emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Kent. He is well known for his work on culture of fear, sociology of fear, education, therapy culture ...
, the ideological leader of a libertarian grouping known as th
Living Marxism network
has argued that " should attempt to defend capitalism from its small-minded opponents" but also "rethink the categories and ideas through which we make sense of the human condition". For Furedi, "What is needed now is a turn away from the divisive politics of cultural identity towards the democratic and liberal values of the Enlightenment. Such a politics should encourage identification with popular and national sovereignty rather than with sub-cultures and lifestyle groups." *In her book ''Markets in the name of socialism'', sociologist Johanna Bockman argues that "far from a hegemonic juggernaut, neoliberal capitalism was a parasitic growth on the very socialist alternatives it attacked". *In their more recent research, the American socialists Samuel Bowles and
Herbert Gintis Herbert Gintis (February 11, 1940 – January 5, 2023) was an American economist, behavioral scientist, and educator known for his theoretical contributions to sociobiology, especially altruism, cooperation, epistemic game theory, gene-culture co ...
look at the whole problem from a different angle: human beings cannot exist without social cooperation, as atomized individuals or isolated monads, so the dispute between capitalists and socialists really revolves around the methods of cooperation that work best for humanity. Bowles believes that
liberalism Liberalism is a Political philosophy, political and moral philosophy based on the Individual rights, rights of the individual, liberty, consent of the governed, political equality, the right to private property, and equality before the law. ...
is in trouble, and could be coming to an end. *Last but not least, there are also "market anarchists" who believe in free markets but not in capitalism. All these arguments remain much in dispute among economists seeking economic reform; the debaters still cannot agree about basic concepts of economics, about the possible ways that production, trade and democracy can be combined, or about what factual evidence would finally clinch the controversy. At a fundamental level, the theorists still cannot agree about what capitalism is, what socialism is, and how you get from the one to the other. Among other things, Marxists proposed a planned allocation of resources, without a coherent ethical framework for the evaluation of allocative priorities, and without much understanding of effective management. During the
Cold War The Cold War was a period of global Geopolitics, geopolitical rivalry between the United States (US) and the Soviet Union (USSR) and their respective allies, the capitalist Western Bloc and communist Eastern Bloc, which lasted from 1947 unt ...
era, it was very difficult to pursue a scientific discussion about the issues, because positions were highly polarized. Strong moral sentiments and biases got in the way of objective analysis. Marxist discussion was dominated by the hegemonic Marxist–Leninist ideology, because Marxist-Leninists had the most resources and political power. Either people were "for" or "against", and if they were on the "wrong" side, there was little scope for pursuing any objective inquiry (see also
Culture during the Cold War The Cold War was reflected in culture through music, movies, books, television, and other media, as well as sports, social beliefs, and behavior. Major elements of the Cold War included the threat of communist expansion, a nuclear war, and – conn ...
). The effect of that was, that very little progress could be made with the scientific analysis of the transition to socialist society and the functioning of socialist society. In the cyber-age of the internet, a whole new language is emerging to conceptualize the battles people have with capitalist value relationsMassimo de Angelis, ''The beginning of history: value struggles and global capital''. London: Pluto Press, 2007.—meaning that often the old traditions do not speak clearly anymore to the new situation; their precise relevance is in dispute. With the growth of
social media Social media are interactive technologies that facilitate the Content creation, creation, information exchange, sharing and news aggregator, aggregation of Content (media), content (such as ideas, interests, and other forms of expression) amongs ...
, what socialism means is no longer under the control of academics and political elites. For some, this is a good thing: they argue that the academics and the elites never got it correct anyway, only real workers did. For others, it is a bad thing: they argue that at least the academics and the elites had some rational, thought-through and coherent ideas about socialism. In the second volume of ''The Cambridge History of Socialism'' (2023), its editor Marcel van der Linden concludes that:


References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Value-Form Marxian economics Criticisms of political philosophy