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Studies in the Labor Theory of Value
This pioneering survey of the development of the “labor theory of value,” advances Marxian economic categories for contemporary conditions.
379 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1956
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
February 22, 2015
similar to Dobb's work; Meek was Dobb's teacher. i can't really recall the exact differences between the two, except that Meek's is more of an overall history. both misrepresent the core of Marx's critical social theory but both provide good introductions to Smith and Ricardo, which most of the sexy value-form readings assume as prior knowledge. from my notes, i also have down that Meek misreads abstract labor as being abstract by virtue of human labor becoming ever more interchangeable thanks to mechanization/standardization of labor (Marx, to be fair, basically says the same in the Contribution to the Critique). the better read is that it becomes abstract through exchange of concrete labor with the value-form / representation of abstract labor incarnate--money. if you need or want to read a traditional history of the LTV, i'd pick up the Dobb since he later became more relevant and thus there are more interesting connections to be had there. Meek is now almost totally obscure--he became a Sraffian later on, IIRC, and did some work on Adam Smith, fwiw.
November 12, 2018
Review of Studies in the Labor Theory of Value, Ronald Meek, 1956
If you want to understand the labor theory of value (LTV), this is perhaps the definitive text. It is a remarkable book but not necessarily best for the beginner. It assumes a familiarity with Marxian economics and with economics in general. Still, one of its great strengths is that it places the LTV in its historical context. Meek starts with Aquinas and mentions Locke. But the origins really begin in the 18th century when it comes to be accepted that profit is not made by buying cheap and selling dear. Rather, profit is made in the production process and its causal source is labor.
There is both ethical and a scientific element in this assessment. Ethically and politically it means that labor is exploited and that the income of the capitalist is unearned. Meek makes clear that while Marx and Marxists claim this ethical element as a part of the overall “vision” of their science, they do not stress the ethics but rather the science of this vision. The reason for understating or deferring the ethical element of exploitation is because the central concern for Smith, Ricardo, and Marx is to understand the causes of wealth; how the emergence of profit in production leads to surplus and to national and international wealth generation.
My interpretation here is that the exploitation of labor then might be ethically tolerated because the science of wealth production allows humans to go beyond collecting the paltry “wealth” that Nature makes easily accessible and instead create abundance. Smith, Ricardo and Marx are showing how wealth production comes to be internal to human relations. The laws of internalizing wealth generation exploit labor within the production process, on the one hand. On the other hand, that same internalization allows humans to accumulate vast wealth – a precondition for becoming fully human. So, becoming fully human depends on a denial of that humanity to wage-earners. At least, under capitalism.
The book is thorough: we receive a chapter on the origins of the LTV of value prior to Smith, a chapter on Smith, one on Ricardo, two on Marx, a chapter and non-Marxist developments in the LTV since Marx, a chapter on critiques of the LTV, and an appendix on Marx’s method. Each chapter is rich and engaging.
As Meek writes in the preface, the book began as correspondence with Joan Robinson’s claim that, in effect, the LTV was unnecessary to Marx’s system. Meek’s historical approach shows us the centrality of the LTV in Marx’s vision and method.
The key to all this, from Meek’s point of view, is to understand a few things about Marx’s method:
1. That focusing on production allows us to locate the central facet of our contemporary condition, namely, the exploitation that occurs in the capital-wage relation. (Consider, in contrast, how neo-classical economics evades this central and necessary insight by making the key feature of economics the mental relationship a consumer has to a commodity object. No production, no social relations, no exploitation, no systematic analysis, no institutions.
2. That production relations, while they are dialectically one with exchange relations, also really determine those exchange relations. This commitment allows both Ricardo and Marx (and to an extent Smith) to assert or hypothesize that the labor-embodied in a commodity, that is, its value has some quantitative determining relationship to its price. Much of the book shows how this commitment works out differently in Smith, Ricardo, and Marx.
3. That, on the one hand, all the critiques of the LTV aim either at the way Marx handles the seeming lack of association between values and prices or, given the critics conclusion that Marx has misconstrued the relationship between values and prices (in social science language, the gap between the concept and its indicator), that Marx really does not need the LTV for his system to be otherwise meaningful. Meek, on the other hand, believes that ejecting the LTV would undermine Marx’s materialist method – a method which he concludes is really what today is still left for us to emulate in Marxian economics.
And yet, Meek seems almost ready to give up on the quantitative elements of the LTV.
Consider this long quote from page 311:
“Joan Robinson has recently suggested that it was an “aberration” for Marx to tie up the problem of relative prices with the problem of exploitation in the way that he did. [however]…there were very good reasons, given the particular view with which Marx had to fight, for the adoption of this particular method of tying them up. Today, however, it does seem to me that Marx’s method of making the quantitative tie-up between economics and sociology tends to obscure the importance of the infusion of sociology rather than reveal it.
“Certainly, at any rate, generations of Marx-scholars have felt that they have proved something important about the real world when they have shown that in some moderately meaningful mathematical sense the “sum of the prices” is equal to the “sum of the values.”
“I am now persuaded that this was in some measure an illusion. In my more heretical moments, I sometimes wonder whether much of real importance would be lost from the Marxian system if the quantitative side of the analysis of relative prices were conducted in terms of something like the traditional supply and demand apparatus…”
Quite a concession from someone who has contextualized and preserved the LTV for the previous 300 pages. Meek’s defense of the labor theory of value allows us to see the fissures, ambiguities, and complexities within the LTV and within historical materialism. I consider this a great achievement.
If you want to understand the labor theory of value (LTV), this is perhaps the definitive text. It is a remarkable book but not necessarily best for the beginner. It assumes a familiarity with Marxian economics and with economics in general. Still, one of its great strengths is that it places the LTV in its historical context. Meek starts with Aquinas and mentions Locke. But the origins really begin in the 18th century when it comes to be accepted that profit is not made by buying cheap and selling dear. Rather, profit is made in the production process and its causal source is labor.
There is both ethical and a scientific element in this assessment. Ethically and politically it means that labor is exploited and that the income of the capitalist is unearned. Meek makes clear that while Marx and Marxists claim this ethical element as a part of the overall “vision” of their science, they do not stress the ethics but rather the science of this vision. The reason for understating or deferring the ethical element of exploitation is because the central concern for Smith, Ricardo, and Marx is to understand the causes of wealth; how the emergence of profit in production leads to surplus and to national and international wealth generation.
My interpretation here is that the exploitation of labor then might be ethically tolerated because the science of wealth production allows humans to go beyond collecting the paltry “wealth” that Nature makes easily accessible and instead create abundance. Smith, Ricardo and Marx are showing how wealth production comes to be internal to human relations. The laws of internalizing wealth generation exploit labor within the production process, on the one hand. On the other hand, that same internalization allows humans to accumulate vast wealth – a precondition for becoming fully human. So, becoming fully human depends on a denial of that humanity to wage-earners. At least, under capitalism.
The book is thorough: we receive a chapter on the origins of the LTV of value prior to Smith, a chapter on Smith, one on Ricardo, two on Marx, a chapter and non-Marxist developments in the LTV since Marx, a chapter on critiques of the LTV, and an appendix on Marx’s method. Each chapter is rich and engaging.
As Meek writes in the preface, the book began as correspondence with Joan Robinson’s claim that, in effect, the LTV was unnecessary to Marx’s system. Meek’s historical approach shows us the centrality of the LTV in Marx’s vision and method.
The key to all this, from Meek’s point of view, is to understand a few things about Marx’s method:
1. That focusing on production allows us to locate the central facet of our contemporary condition, namely, the exploitation that occurs in the capital-wage relation. (Consider, in contrast, how neo-classical economics evades this central and necessary insight by making the key feature of economics the mental relationship a consumer has to a commodity object. No production, no social relations, no exploitation, no systematic analysis, no institutions.
2. That production relations, while they are dialectically one with exchange relations, also really determine those exchange relations. This commitment allows both Ricardo and Marx (and to an extent Smith) to assert or hypothesize that the labor-embodied in a commodity, that is, its value has some quantitative determining relationship to its price. Much of the book shows how this commitment works out differently in Smith, Ricardo, and Marx.
3. That, on the one hand, all the critiques of the LTV aim either at the way Marx handles the seeming lack of association between values and prices or, given the critics conclusion that Marx has misconstrued the relationship between values and prices (in social science language, the gap between the concept and its indicator), that Marx really does not need the LTV for his system to be otherwise meaningful. Meek, on the other hand, believes that ejecting the LTV would undermine Marx’s materialist method – a method which he concludes is really what today is still left for us to emulate in Marxian economics.
And yet, Meek seems almost ready to give up on the quantitative elements of the LTV.
Consider this long quote from page 311:
“Joan Robinson has recently suggested that it was an “aberration” for Marx to tie up the problem of relative prices with the problem of exploitation in the way that he did. [however]…there were very good reasons, given the particular view with which Marx had to fight, for the adoption of this particular method of tying them up. Today, however, it does seem to me that Marx’s method of making the quantitative tie-up between economics and sociology tends to obscure the importance of the infusion of sociology rather than reveal it.
“Certainly, at any rate, generations of Marx-scholars have felt that they have proved something important about the real world when they have shown that in some moderately meaningful mathematical sense the “sum of the prices” is equal to the “sum of the values.”
“I am now persuaded that this was in some measure an illusion. In my more heretical moments, I sometimes wonder whether much of real importance would be lost from the Marxian system if the quantitative side of the analysis of relative prices were conducted in terms of something like the traditional supply and demand apparatus…”
Quite a concession from someone who has contextualized and preserved the LTV for the previous 300 pages. Meek’s defense of the labor theory of value allows us to see the fissures, ambiguities, and complexities within the LTV and within historical materialism. I consider this a great achievement.
May 6, 2014
Great pre-sraffian analysis of competing labor theories of value. The author is a marxist, so of course he comes down on one side (the right side), but he certainly gives Smith and Ricardo a more robust defense than they're usually granted.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews