The value-form or form of value ("Wertform" in German) [1] is an important concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy, discussed in the first chapter of Capital, Volume 1.
[2] It refers to the social form of tradeable things as symbols of value, which contrast with their physical features, as objects which can satisfy human needs or serve a useful purpose.
Precisely because the political economists kept conflating and confusing the most basic economic categories, Marx argued, they were unable to provide a fully consistent, integral theory of the economy.
[20] Marx claimed that the origin of the money-form of value had never before been explained by bourgeois economics, and that "the mystery of money will immediately disappear" once the evolution of value-relations has been traced out from its simplest beginnings.
"[23] In a preface to the second edition of Capital, Volume I, Marx claimed that he had "completely revised" his treatment, because his friend Dr. Louis Kugelmann had convinced him that a "more didactic exposition of the form of value" was needed.
In their pathbreaking treatises on political economy, both Adam Smith and David Ricardo had started out from an analysis of the value of traded commodities produced by human labour.
[46] Initially, in primitive exchange,[47] the form that economic value takes does not involve any prices, since what something is "worth" is very simply expressed in (a quantity of) some other good (an occasional barter relationship).
Marx himself believed that nomadic peoples were the first to develop the money-form of value (in the sense of a universal equivalent in trade) because all their possessions were mobile, and because they were regularly in contact with different communities, which encouraged the exchange of products.
Thus, for example, in 1912, Frank Fetter gathered 117 different definitions of "price" used by economists, which he grouped under three categories: objective exchange-value, subjective value, and ratio of exchange.
The Latin word transactor refers to the mediator, the "go-between" or intermediary operative in some kind of deal, and transactus means "pierced", "penetrated", or "stuck through" (many Roman coins had holes through them, for storage on a string, or decorative purposes).
However, the expression of product-value by prices in money-units in most cases does not diverge very greatly from the actual value; if there was a very big difference, people would not be able to sell them (insufficient income), or they would not buy them (too expensive, relative to other options).
Aristotle developed a fairly sophisticated theory of money, and in chapter 9 of Book 1 of his Politics, he describes the circuits of commodity trade C-M-C' (oekonomia) and M-C-M' (chrematistikon).
"[134] Marx was also influenced by, and responding to, the "classical" political economy discourse about the economic laws governing commodity values and money,[135] in Europe beginning (in Marx's view) with William Petty's Quantulumcunque Concerning Money (1682),[136] reaching a high point in Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776) and culminating with David Ricardo's Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817).
Given that Joseph Stalin declared in 1936 that, with full state control over the whole economy, socialism had been achieved,[159] it was logical to think that commodity production and the law of value no longer existed either.
[168] Ladislaus von Bortkiewicz, the originator of the famous "transformation problem" controversy, claimed confidently that in Marx's text, "the context always reveals clearly which value is meant".
[179] As he explains in Capital, Volume III, in an overall sense business competition among producers centres precisely on the discrepancies between the socially established values of commodities in production and their particular exchange-values manifested in the marketplace.
[221] In her critical analysis of Islamic hijab in Iran, Professor Rebecca Ruth Gould claims that "The exchange value dimension to the commodity form crucially structures the hijab-as-commodity".
[253] High-yield and investment-grade notes were headed "for losses in both euros and dollars", the first time all four asset classes "posted negative total returns since 2008, based on Bloomberg Barclays indexes".
"[283]In a digitalized, globalized 21st century world, buzzing with possibilities to connect or disconnect, people may start to regard themselves – seriously or surrealistically – as a kind of "stock" in the social marketplace, with a rather volatile value, which goes up and down all the time – whether they like that, or not.
All these forms of "price volatility" suggest, that there is a dimension of "value" now gaining prominence, which is to an important extent unpredictable, capricious, uncontrollable and elusive, tricking even the most powerful government institutions at times.
[290] In February 2018, the US Senate Democrats released a special report which stated that a sample of just 33 corporations were planning $209 billion worth of buybacks in 2018, while at the same time laying off large numbers of workers.
[291] According to Goldman Sachs, US companies authorized $1 trillion worth of stock buybacks in 2018,[292] while Europe, Canada, Japan and industrialized East Asian countries also got into the act with a combined $248 billion of buyouts in the first half of 2018.
[293] The global equity market was "shrinking at the fastest pace in at least two decades" although its total value was still increasing, partly due to buybacks pushing up stock prices.
[296] The ordinary capitalist logic fails to provide any agreed standard valuation, or property right, for new kinds of "semi-public" goods that are considered to have a lot of economic value, such as social networks, collective intellectual and cultural assets, eco-systems, and stocks of non-renewable natural resources.
The Facebook–Cambridge Analytica data scandal indicated that the for-profit, legalized robbery and exploitation of information about people's known personal networks – amongst other things to dupe them into voting for right-wing politicians – has become a big business internationally.
The exit of wealthy people affected mainly China, India, Turkey, United Kingdom, France, Russia, Brazil, Indonesia, Saudi Arabia, Nigeria and Venezuela.
A lot of research is no longer being done, because if it is done, it is immediately stolen without trace (by hackers, brainpickers and burglars who want to cream off and head off the most advanced ideas at their point of production, in real time).
[389] Critics of breakdown theories, by contrast, argue that systemic crises, though hardly pleasant, are precisely the way through which the developmental problems and growing pains of capitalist business are resolved.
This is not a new idea (it was raised by Elmar Altvater in 1991,[401] Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen in 1971,[402] and Frederick Soddy in 1921)[403] but Keen proposes a new type of production function, in which energy plays an essential role.
[404] The economist Anwar Shaikh however rejects the neo-classical concept of the production function as kind of sudoku game,[405] preferring a reconstructed classical economics solidly based on empirical facts and econometric evidence.