Marx’s Argument for the Labor Theory of Value

Gregory Slack

Review of Radical Political Economics, 2021, vol. 53, issue 1, 143-156

Abstract: In a Times Literary Supplement review of some recent literature on Marx and Marxism for a general readership, Jonathan Wolff claimed that Marx’s solution to the so-called “transformation problem†is “half-baked.†The aim of this paper is to challenge this complacent dismissal of some of Marx’s central economic ideas. In the process, I want to show that although the issues here are subtle and complex, Marx’s ideas retain a great deal of intuitive appeal, and his “solution†to the so-called “transformation problem†is neither conceptually implausible nor mathematically dubious. Crucial to this aim is to show that Marx viewed the categories of (what he called bourgeois) economics through a social lens, which is given in the first chapter of the first volume of Capital .

Keywords: Marx; value theory; abstract labor; transformation problem; B14; B51 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:reorpe:v:53:y:2021:i:1:p:143-156

DOI: 10.1177/0486613419895275

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