David Norman Smith — Sharing, not selling: Marx against value

In 1975, when I began to study Capital as a first-year graduate student, I was looking for the errors that my undergraduate economics teachers had told me rendered Capital obsolete. Several of these teachers belonged to the Union of Radical Political Economists and saw themselves as Marxists. But they agreed with their non-Marxist colleagues that Marx’s core value concepts were naively Hegelian. The good news, they said, was that the superstructure of Marx’s theory–class, capital exploitation–was sociologically valid. I had already begun to write about capital and class so I found this perspective congenial.(20) But, since I was also drawn to Capital’s value-logic, I was perplexed. I was still a raw beginner, and I was open to the premise that the critical theory of the future would sail from harbors other than Capital. But a simple question remained unclear to me: Was Capital actually wrong?

To see for myself I annotated Chapter 1 of Capital word for word, day after day, for a year, searching for Marx’s fundamental error. Decades later I still haven’t found it. I’ve now been immersed in Capital and Marx’s ancillary texts for a long time, and I always find them profound and convincing.(21) I find it jarring to set Capital aside to read lesser works. But I’ve also taught Capital for decades, and I know from experience that readers find his terminology confusing. So, in what follows, I attempt to explain Marx’s ABCs in a fresh way. My goal is not to reproduce every nuance of Chapter 1 but to capture Marx’s enduring, essential logic....

Monthly Review

Sharing, not selling: Marx against value
David Norman Smith | Professor of Sociology, University of Kansas
Originally published at Continental Thought & Theory 1 (4), 2017, 653-695