Smith on Moseley, ’Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital: A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation’

BOOK REVIEW

Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital:
A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation

by Fred Moseley

Palgrave Macmillan
2023. xxix + 167 pp.
(cloth), ISBN 978-3-031-13209-4.

Reviewed by Jason E. Smith (Art Center College of Design)

Marx and Method

For the past few decades, Fred Moseley, a professor of economics at Mount Holyoke College until his recent retirement in 2016, has been a leading figure in the Anglophone interpretation of Karl Marx’s critique of political economy. Moseley’s earliest writings appeared in the mid-1970s in the “libertarian socialist†journal Root and Branch when he was still a graduate student. In 1982, he finished a dissertation that proposed an empirical examination of the validity of Marx’s theory of the rate of surplus value, focusing on the US economy between 1947 and 1977.[1] Soon after, he began publishing important interventions on any number of significant issues in the field of Marxist theory: productive and unproductive labor, the so-called transformation problem, the labor theory of value, and the tendency of the rate of profit to fall, as well as considerations of Marx’s theoretical method and the debt it does and does not owe to Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Beginning in the 1990s, he played an essential role in organizing the International Symposium on Marxian Theory, a research group that for years held annual conferences on hotly debated matters and issued a series of important edited volumes on many of these same issues in Marxist theory. Recently he edited the English translation (Marx’s Economic Manuscript of 1864-1865 [2017]) of the original draft manuscript of what Friedrich Engels reworked drastically into the so-called third volume of Marx’s Capital. At around the same time, what might be considered his career’s crowning achievement saw the light: Money and Totality: A Macro-Monetary Interpretation of Marx’s Logic in Capital and the End of the “Transformation Problem†(2016), a sweeping revision of the conventional understanding of the supposed problem of transforming values into prices in Marx’s theory. This book begins from the claim that there is no problem to be solved and takes on the entire history of what he deems a systematic and near fatal misreading of Marx’s logical method, challenging both the standard interpretations of Marx’s “error†(Ladislaus Bortkiewicz, Paul Sweezy, Piero Sraffa) and more recent attempts to “solve†this problem (Anwar Shaikh, “the new interpretation†of Duncan Foley and Gerard Duménil, TSSI [Temporal Single-System Interpretation], etc.). A willing and able debater, with a nimble mastery of the textual history of Marx’s critique of political economy, Moseley’s writing brings together philological attention, a sensitivity to the logical construction of Marx’s theory, and a commitment to comradely polemic, all present in spades in his most recent book, Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital: A Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation.

Marx’s Theory of Value in Chapter 1 of Capital is a short book—about 160 pages—composed of three chapters. The first presents Moseley’s own reconstruction of Marx’s theory of value as it is presented in the especially difficult chapter referred to in the title. All of the interpretive difficulties of this chapter are scrutinized closely: the commodity as the “cell-form†of the capitalist mode of production; the relation between exchange value and value; the three determinations of the concept of value (substance, magnitude, and form); and, for good measure, the concept of fetishism introduced in the fourth section of Marx’s presentation. This is followed by a chapter in which Moseley carries out a painstaking refutation of Michael Heinrich’s influential interpretation of these same questions, such as they are presented in his recent How to Read Marx’s Capital: Commentary and Explanations on the Beginning Chapters (2023) and, to a lesser extent, his earlier Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital (2012). Finally, a shorter third chapter discusses a little-known manuscript Marx sketched between December 1871 and January 1872 as he prepared to publish the second German edition of volume 1, and which Heinrich presents in an appendix to How to Read Marx’s Capital as a “new version of the value-form analysis†that confirms his interpretation of Marx’s concept of substance as a relational one established through acts of monetary exchange. Here again, Moseley’s efforts are devoted to disputing Heinrich’s analysis and use of these manuscript pages, which are almost entirely unknown outside of Germany and which Heinrich characterizes as a revision of the version of Marx’s value theory presented in the first German edition of Capital, meant to correct ambiguities or misleading formulations in the earlier version. A final concluding chapter restates in a highly distilled form the results of the preceding analyses, while underlining what Moseley calls the “weak textual evidence†—even when citing manuscripts Marx did not publish—Heinrich marshals in favor of what is here called the “value-form interpretation†of Marx’s value theory, whose foremost proponent, in Moseley’s estimation, Heinrich is.

Moseley’s disagreements with Heinrich’s interpretation of chapter 1 are so fundamental that they cannot even agree, in Moseley’s estimation, on what the subject of the chapter is. Though they concur that the object of analysis is the “commodity†—Marx’s chapter title says as much—as the “economic cell-form†of capitalist society, they have distinct understandings of what this singular noun refers to. For Moseley, the commodity in question is an individual commodity, held up as “representative†of all commodities, and closely examined in view of determining the salient features of the general category of the commodity (a category broad enough to include money, on the one hand, and labor power, on the other). Moseley argues that Heinrich, however, understands the subject of the chapter to be an “exchange-relation†between two commodities that have actually been exchanged on the market against money. Marx obtained this so-called exchange-relation, Heinrich claims, by bracketing away the means of exchange, money, as well as the commodities owners who exchange them (these latter are reintroduced in chapter 2, which concerns the exchange “process†). Both authors agree that money and prices constitute the necessary forms of appearance of the substance and magnitude of value, as Marx argued in section 3 of this first chapter. But they differ dramatically not only in their understanding of what Marx meant by money and prices in this first chapter but more importantly on whether exchange plays a determinant role in constituting both the substance and the magnitude of value represented in a given commodity.

For Heinrich, value quite precisely is not contained “in†a given commodity but emerges as a relation between commodities established through actual market exchanges. Moseley argues, however, that the substance and magnitude of value necessarily expressed in money and prices are, though not directly observable, presupposed—a term used insistently by Moseley—in this expression rather than constituted through it. The “relation of equality†among commodities that Marx invoked in this chapter is not, according to Moseley, established in exchange but is an assumed starting point from which the notion of value as a common property shared by commodities in definite proportions is to be derived or “deduced.†In the chapter on the commodity, commodities have not actually been exchanged but are exchangeable in defined ratios insofar as they each contain quantities of abstract human labor that has been “expended†in order to produce them. Moseley underlines how Heinrich wrongly construes what Marx called the “relation of equality†that prevails among all commodities and which served as Marx’s point of departure for his deduction of the substance of value, as a relation of exchange, or as the result of actual market exchanges.

The point of contention for Moseley is not that Heinrich construes Marx’s concept of value as relational rather than substantial in a narrow sense, that is, as the property of individual commodities. Moseley equally insists on the “social†or “communal†character of value, which he understands to mean a “common property that all the commodities possess as a result of their production by the same kind of labor (abstract human labor)†(p. 142). The flaw in Heinrich’s interpretation of Marx is to consistently read the notion of exchange back into this notion of a “common property†and to identify the “relation of equality†among all commodities examined in chapter 1 as an “exchange-relation†in the peculiar sense Heinrich, and Heinrich alone, imposes on this expression.

Heinrich’s How to Read Marx’s Capital is an unorthodox and often tendentious interpretation (or reconstruction) of Marx’s value theory that presents itself unassumingly as a reader’s guide to the “beginning chapters†of Capital. One peculiarity of this reading, Moseley notes, is that exactly what Heinrich means by “exchange-relation,†which he makes the subject of chapter 1, is not made clear until the book’s sixth “appendix,†almost four hundred pages in. In that same appendix Heinrich offers what is arguably the most succinct formulation of his exchange-centric interpretation of Marx, which holds that the substance of value, abstract human labor, is “not simply present†and “does not come to exist†in the capitalist production process, but rather only “in exchange,†where the reduction of different concrete labors to a single, homogenous, abstract labor takes place: “Based on the analysis of commodities’ exchange-relations, Marx characterizes the substance of value, magnitude of value, and value-form. The substance of value, abstract human labor, is not simply present in the labor process (nor does Marx develop the category by analyzing the labor process). Rather, abstract labor results from the reduction of the different types of concrete labor. Just like the value it creates, abstract labor does not come to exist in the labor process. Instead, it exists only in the social relationship where this reduction actually takes place: that is, in exchange, which is what Marx stresses in the manuscript Ergänzungen und Veränderungen of 1871–72 and later in the French edition of Capital.†[2]

This passage is notable not only for its clarity but also for the fact that nowhere is the production process, which Marx characterized as the “unity of the labor process and the value-forming process [Wertbildungsprozess],†mentioned.[3] To suggest that abstract human labor is absent from the “labor process†is little more than a tautology, since the labor process is defined as the expenditure of concrete labor to produce use-values. The valorization process, for its part, is this same labor insofar as these use-values are produced in order to be exchanged on the market. The monetary theory of value proposed by Heinrich compels us to assume that both abstract labor and value do not exist in the production process, but only in exchange; it requires in turn that the quantity of socially necessary labor expended in “the labor process†be determined only in the reduction carried out at the moment of, and by, market exchanges.[4]

We might conclude, then, that before these acts of sale and purchase, the goods brought to market are mere use-values, worked up by concrete labor in the labor process. But the logic of the market “reduction†as Heinrich depicts is more radical, since the existence of use-values themselves depend on the existence of a “social demand†for these goods. Since Marx defined use-values as “use-values for others, social use-value,†this can only mean that unsold goods would not even be use-values, since they “do not represent ‘social use-value[s].’†[5] On the basis of insufficient paying demand for these goods at a particular moment, the goods produced for exchange by a private employer consuming labor power in production would be neither use-values nor commodities, just as the labor power consumed would be wasted, “useless,†without use-value in its turn.[6]

Heinrich’s insistence that abstract labor and value are “not simply present†in production but are instead established by means of real exchanges on the market is peculiar, Moseley observes, since nowhere in chapter 1 is the exchange process treated or invoked. Marx’s method pointedly brackets actual market exchanges in this crucial chapter, saving consideration of them for chapter 2 (on “the exchange process†) and chapter 3 (which deals with the “circulation of commodities†). Heinrich is fully aware of this, of course, which means that he is forced to smuggle, as it were, the exchange process into this chapter by means of what he claims is Marx’s own “abstraction.†The exchange-relation that he promotes to the position of the subject of the first chapter is glossed as a “part of the exchange process ... obtained by abstracting from the commodity owners,†in other words, from those who carry out the real transformation of commodities into money (and vice versa) through acts of sale and purchase.[7] Since Marx himself did not define the so-called exchange-relation in these terms, Heinrich must perform this reduction himself, introducing the exchange process into the first chapter in a form that abstracts away its defining features, the actual circulation of commodities on the market.

The strangeness of this operation becomes clearer when we consider Marx’s treatment of money and prices—or, better, the “money-form†and the “price-form,†which he used interchangeably—in the first chapter.[8] Moseley’s understanding of value shares certain features with Heinrich’s monetary theory of value. In contrast with the so-called pre-monetary or substantialist interpretation of the theory of value, which treats value as the property of individual commodities, Moseley insists that quantities of value contained in individual commodities are invisible and can only be observed indirectly, by means of their expression in quantities of another commodity and, ultimately, in sums of money or prices. The long third section of the first chapter traces the evolution of the form of value, from the “simple†to its fully “ripened†monetary forms. Marx cited Aristotle’s treatment of these forms as an important touchstone in his consideration, noting that he understood the inner connection between the inadequacy of the simple form of value— “the expression of the value of a commodity in some other commodity chosen at random†—and the necessity of the money form of value, in which the value of a given commodity is expressed in units of money, be it two ounces of gold or fifty dollars.[9] The point of the analysis of the value form in section 3 is therefore to establish “the insufficiency of the simple form of value†while understanding that imperfect shape as an “embryonic form which must undergo a series of metamorphoses before it can ripen into the price-form.†[10]

But the prices treated in chapter 1 remain what Marx would later, in chapter 3, come to define as ideal prices, just as money would remain merely the measure of value, rather than a means of circulation. The sums of money expressed in the prices of commodities do not represent actual sums of money exchanged for commodities, and the transformation of the magnitude of value into prices remains an “ideal act,†a mere expression of one quantity in terms of another, as when a business owner decides to assign a monetary value to a particular asset for tax purposes. These ideal prices—Marx sometimes called them “imaginary†—are, in the third chapter, explicitly contrasted with real or, better, realized prices, the actual sums of money paid for commodities in market exchanges. Ideal prices are, moreover, assumed to coincide with the magnitudes of value they express, since the first two volumes of Capital assume, for methodological purposes, that commodities exchange at their values, and therefore that prices equal values.

In chapter 1, then, what Marx called the money-form or the price-form refers to a purely ideal act of transformation, of value into prices, and commodities into money. Money, at this point in the analysis, merely measures value, by expressing it as a price: “The prices, or quantities of gold, into which the values of commodities are ideally changed are therefore now expressed in the money-names.†[11 These purely ideal or nominal changes are contrasted with actual exchanges on the market, which Marx identified with a process of “realizing†these otherwise notional prices. The German term realisieren was chosen by Marx not only for its contrast with the ideality of money prices expressed before any exchange but also because it can also mean to liquidate an asset, to convert a commodity into cash.[12] “The realization [Realisierung] of a commodity’s price, or of its merely ideal value-form,†Marx wrote, is “the metamorphosis of a commodity into money.†[13] This process of realizing or liquidating the commodity by means of exchange requires that commodity owners be present to take them to market. But before they take their wares to market, these same owners must assign them a price, which they display by means of a sticker or tag. In a metaphor of the sort Marx often employed, he stated that at the level of analysis carried out in the first chapter of Capital, prices are only ideal prices because the equation of one quantity of goods with sums of money “exists only in their [i.e., the commodities] heads, so to speak.†[14]

These prices, though they express otherwise invisible amounts of value contained in particular commodities, must be assigned by “their guardians†before they are taken to market: “Although invisible, the value of iron, linen and corn exists in these very articles: it is represented through their equality with gold, even though this relation with gold exists only in their heads, so to speak. The guardian of the commodities must therefore lend them his tongue, or hang a ticket on them, in order to communicate their prices to the outside world.... Every owner of commodities knows that he is nowhere near turning them into gold when he has given their value the form of a price or of imaginary gold.†[15] In this passage we can distinguish the level of abstraction characteristic of the first chapter, in which ideal prices exist only in the heads of commodities, with that of the second and third, in which owners of commodities assign visible but still ideal prices representing the value of commodities in view of realizing those prices in market exchanges. This passage not only has the virtue of vividly clarifying the distinction between two levels of analysis but also provokes a particularly telling interpolation from Heinrich, one that illustrates the lengths to which he sometimes goes to make his case for the role of exchange in the creation of value. To Marx’s contention that “invisible†quantities of value exist “in†the commodities iron, linen, and corn, Heinrich adds the following revision: “to the extent that they are exchanged as commodities, it should be added.†[16] But, of course, this passage makes quite clear that the commodities in question have not yet been exchanged, indeed, that they contain quantities of value that are expressed in prices even before their owner affixes a price tag to them, much less brings them to market where they may, or may not, realize the value contained in them by selling them.

The distinction Marx made between ideal and “realized†prices would have further implications for his theory of value, and in particular for his understanding of how the magnitude of value is determined. It is meant in part to demonstrate that value magnitudes are determined outside of and prior to market relations: in production, prior to exchange. In situations where commodity owners cannot sell the products they bring to market, or can only sell them at prices below the value quantities crystallized in them, we say that the prices obtained do not realize the value of the commodities. But, Moseley convincingly demonstrates, Heinrich’s contention that social demand determines, at least in part, the actual magnitude of value of commodities, rather than their market prices, has devastating consequences for Marx’s theory of value and his conception of the so-called price-form.

First and foremost, such a claim obviates any rigorous distinction between value and price, which will ultimately—as we will see—make any conceptual distinction between surplus value and profit impossible. Again in chapter 3, Marx insisted that the “price-form†is “compatible with the possibility of a quantitative incongruity between magnitude of value and price ... despite the fact that money is nothing but the value-form of commodities.†[17] It is inherent in the very form of prices that they deviate from their underlying values, Marx insisted, even though these prices are “nothing other†than the expression of those values. To understand the price-form, then, we must distinguish two types of prices. Moseley’s argument revolves around the distinction between what Marx called “normal†(or “average†) prices and actual market prices, which correspond to two levels of abstraction in Marx’s analysis.[18] In the first two volumes of Capital, Marx understood normal prices to correspond to labor values, understood as centers of gravity around which realized market prices fluctuate. These two prices never coincide, or do so only by accident; yet market prices are said to be regulated by the underlying values. Moseley casts this distinction as one between long-term “equilibrium†—his term, not Marx’s—prices, which coincide with value quantities, and short-term disequilibrium prices, which are shaped by temporary imbalances between supply and demand. Changes in long-range equilibrium prices not only are possible but are also a normal feature of capitalist economies. Yet these changes are brought about solely by changes in the conditions of production and the productivity of labor, not by the pressures of “social demand,†as Heinrich maintains, unless these pressures bring about, indirectly, these changes.

Moseley’s differentiation of these two price structures, which correspond to two levels of abstraction—between normal and market prices—holds only for the first two volumes of Capital, where it is methodologically supposed that long-run equilibrium or normal prices are proportional to value quantities. In the first chapter of volume 1, Marx’s analysis is not yet concerned specifically with capitalist production relations but merely with formally independent commodity producers. Marx’s later fully developed account of capitalist production relations introduces still another price structure, one that accounts for the tendency of profit rates to equalize, regardless of the value capital composition of the particular businesses competing for shares of the total surplus value produced by society. In societies in which goods are not simply produced for market exchange but in which private businesses employ wage laborers to carry out such production, normal prices do not correspond to value quantities at all, but instead to so-called prices of production, which represent the cost-prices of the produced goods plus the average profit such businesses might expect relative to the total capital they have invested in production.

These prices of production represent still a third price structure, in addition to the two structures exhibited in the first two volumes (and, therefore, the first three chapters of volume 1), a structure more closely approximating the actual functioning of the price patterns typical of capitalist societies. The introduction of this third price structure, in contrast with the “normal prices†that Moseley identifies as long-run equilibrium prices, no longer corresponds to commodity values, such that goods and services would exchange at their labor-time quantities. The theoretical upshot of the value analysis of the first two volumes is not therefore the explanation of individual exchange ratios, but that only changes in production conditions—changes in labor productivity or in socially necessary labor time—regulate price movements at the level of total social production.[19]

Moseley’s retracing of Marx’s argument, and his criticism of Heinrich’s competing interpretation, remains focused on the conceptual developments presented in chapter 1 of volume 1, though this focus requires that he refer at crucial points to passages in the third chapter, and offer his own interpretation of the still-untranslated manuscript Heinrich claims proposes a “revised†version of Marx’s value theory. Since Moseley’s interpretative style is relentlessly centered on what he calls “textual evidence†and proceeds in a linear order that reproduces the sequence of Marx’s own conceptual presentation, there are few opportunities in a book like this for Moseley to spell out the stakes of his reading of Heinrich and more broadly the so-called value-form interpretation of Marx. The preoccupation with textual evidence can, at times, seem near-sighted, since it stresses the scrutiny of particular textual moments over more general conceptual and methodological reflections on why getting these readings right matters in the first place. Just what are the stakes of combating a reading of Marx which claims that neither abstract labor nor value are present in production but only in discrete acts of exchange? Why is it necessary to insist that Marx bracketed any direct correlation between the market prices realized in exchange with the determination of the magnitude of value crystallized or “congealed,†yet not directly observable, in particular commodities?

In the book’s “general conclusion,†we are offered a rare glimpse of such a broad perspective: “Volume 3 of Capital is still at a high level of abstraction and still generally assumes that prices of production are equilibrium prices (with equal rates of profit across industries). Marx’s theory of crises is based on the tendency of the rate of profit to fall which is derived on the basis of the assumption that prices = values. The rate of profit falls according to Marx’s theory, not because of insufficient demand and market prices less than equilibrium prices, but because technological change causes the composition of capital to increase faster than the rate of surplus-value in the economy as a whole†(p. 159). As mentioned above, the distinction between value and price that Marx laid out in Capital’s first chapter will have enormous implications for his theory as a whole. What is at stake in these distinctions—which are not distinctions in any normal sense, since prices are simply the necessary form of appearance of value, and nothing else—is not simply a conceptual matter, as the labyrinthine progression of the first chapter might suggest. What is in question here is the conceptual distinction between surplus value and profit, as well as the origin of surplus value itself in production. Equally at stake here is Marx’s theory of crisis itself, since it assumes that at the level of the capitalist economy as a whole “prices = values.â€

In a similar way, some readers of this book will wonder whether the criticisms of Heinrich’s reading of the first chapter of volume 1, such as it is presented in his Introduction to the Three Volumes of Karl Marx’s Capital and the more recent How to Read Marx’s Capital, constitute as thoroughgoing a criticism of the “value-form interpretation†as Moseley suggests. These claims warrant an entire introduction. Moseley’s claim that the “quantitative issue of whether the magnitude of value is determined in production alone or also depends on supply and demand in exchange†has been “the main issue in the controversy over the value-form interpretation†seems to do a disservice to his own criticism, since it defines that interpretive current in such narrow terms (p. xvii). Heinrich’s particular interpretation might be better framed as a reconstruction of Marx’s value theory as a “monetary theory of value†—opposed to a supposed “substantialist†account—rather than as the “most important proponent of the value-form interpretation today, both in Germany and in the English-speaking world,†though this statement is literally the case (p. xvii).

One would need, in any case, to articulate the differences between the German-centered “Neue Marx Lektüre†and a broader value-form interpretation, for starters, while also acknowledging the sheer diversity of the latter, which is ample or poorly delineated enough to include interpreters like Moishe Postone, who according to Heinrich has a pre-monetary theory of value. Many commentators sympathetic to the value-form approach have little interest in the “quantitative issue†Moseley identifies as the main issue of controversy associated with the tendency, concerned as they are not with Marx’s theory of price structure and determination but with the social production relations necessitating that products assume the form of commodities in the first place. By the same token, certain supposed adherents of this approach, like Postone, argue that a correct understanding of Marx’s value theory compels us to understand his theory of social domination not as the domination of one class by another but as the domination of “everyone†—capitalist and workers alike—by an impersonal, and abstract, system of social forms.

Getting Marx’s value theory right as it is presented in the first chapter of Capital is essential, since so much else depends on it: not least, Marx’s theory of exploitation, which posits that surplus value originates exclusively in production and not exchange, and his theory of capitalist crisis, since “the total value of the commodities ... governs the level of average profit and hence the general rate of profit.†[20] Heinrich’s exchange-centered account of the origin of value and value magnitudes undermines the conceptual coherence of these key pillars of Marx’s critique of political economy. But Moseley’s purpose in writing this book is, he notes in a recent interview with Michael Roberts, also in part to stem the growing influence of Heinrich’s “monetary theory of value†interpretation among Anglophone Marxists, especially young people new to Marxist theory.[21]

The value-form interpretation of Marx has been debated for decades among specialists in the US and UK, familiar with the complex technical aspects of Marx’s theory and the history of debates around them. The two best-known Heinrich publications in English, however, are both “introductions†targeting readers of Marx unfamiliar with these debates, if not entirely new to Marx altogether. The success of these books can be attributed to Heinrich’s genial style and evident erudition, which present themselves as deftly navigating the ambiguities and contradictions of Marx’s formulations, often by appealing to “mature†manuscripts that are presented as new, corrected versions of Marx’s theory. This revised theory is then set off against all other interpretations of Marx, assimilated either broadly into something called “worldview Marxism,†or more narrowly as “substantialist†interpretations of value: aberrations to which not only vast swathes of Marxists are condemned but also much of Marx himself in the end. The marketing of these books has been especially successful, driven by online fan clubs that treat Heinrich less as an especially eloquent and informed German academic than as a theory “star†in the American style, or even as an outright successor to Marx himself, whose reconstruction of Marx’s theory makes the confused jumble of the original increasingly superfluous. Moseley’s patient exegesis of chapter 1 in this book is unlikely to supplant or replace Heinrich’s interpretation among young readers. What it does do is provide a systematic rebuttal of that reading for those willing to confront the daunting difficulties of Marx’s theory head-on rather than accept a revised and misleading version of it.

Notes

[1]. This dissertation, directed by James Crotty at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, appeared in revised form as Moseley’s first book, The Falling Rate of Profit in the Postwar United States Economy (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991).

[2]. Michael Heinrich, How to Read Marx’s Capital: Commentary and Explanations on the Beginning Chapters, trans. Alexander Locascio (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2023), 393.

[3]. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. Ben Fowkes (London: Penguin, 1976), 1:293.

[4]. Strictly speaking, Heinrich claims that abstract labor cannot actually be “expended†at all, only concrete labor, since it “is not simply present†in the labor process (Heinrich, How to Read Marx’s Capital, 392). This claim, meant to dissociate homogeneous, abstract human labor from what Heinrich claims is a transhistorical notion of homogenous physiological labor, is refuted by Moseley as well. The intricacies of this debate would require too much space to reconstruct here.

[5]. Marx, Capital, 1:131; and Heinrich, How to Read Marx’s Capital, 76.

[6]. Heinrich, How to Read Marx’s Capital, 75-76. Heinrich seems to equivocate on this point, however, as when he suggests that “prior to and outside of this [exchange] relation, [goods produced for exchange] are mere use-values: they are on the way to becoming commodities, but far from being commodities†(p. 95).

[7]. Heinrich, How to Read Marx’s Capital, 208-9.

[8]. Marx, Capital, 1:163.

[9]. Marx, Capital, 1:151.

[10]. Marx, Capital, 1:154.

[11]. Marx, Capital, 1:194.

[12]. An unrealized gain or loss occurs when the putative market price of an asset has increased or decreased but has not actually been sold at that price.

[13]. Marx, Capital, 1:203 (translation lightly modified).

[14]. Marx, Capital, 1:189.

[15]. Marx, Capital, 1:189.

[16]. Heinrich, How to Read Marx’s Capital, 217.

[17]. Marx, Capital, 1:197, emphasis added.

[18]. Moseley’s emphasis on the difference between “normal prices†and market prices shaped by imbalances between supply and demand is one of the central axes of his criticism of Heinrich, who glosses over this key distinction in his discussion of prices as they are conceptualized in Marx’s Capital, volume 1.

[19]. For an especially cogent exposition of the relation between Marx’s value theory and the regulation of price movements, see the chapter “Value and Price†in Paul Mattick, Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy (Boston: Porter Sargent, 1970), 40-50.

[20]. Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, trans. David Fernbach (New York: Penguin, 1992), 3:281.

[21]. Fred Moseley, interview by Michael Roberts, “Marx’s Value Theory and the Value Form Interpretation,†Michael Roberts Blog, December 23, 2023, https://thenextrecession.wordpress.com/2023/12/23/marxs-value-theory-and-the-value-form-interpretation/.
are condemned

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