1 Marx’s Value Theory Revisited. A ‘Value-form’ Approach John Milios Department of Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, National Technical University of Athens, Greece (jmilios@hol.gr) 1. The object and method of Marx’s Capital Marx’s Capital does not present an analysis of different economic ‘models’ of ‘themes’ (first the ‘simple commodity production’, then the ‘capitalist commodity’, etc.). It has a unique object of study, the capitalist mode of production (i.e. the immanent regularities and tendencies of capitalist social relations), which Marx analyses, first of all, in relation with the concept of value: From the first text in the period under examination, the Grundrisse (1857-8), 1 to Capital (1867), 2 Marx insisted that value is an expression of relations exclusively characteristic of the capitalist mode of production (CMP). Marx specifies and develops the notion of value and through it all other notions reflecting the CMP on the basis of a twofold methodology: (a) an analysis on different levels of abstraction, which aims at (b) a process of gradual clarification-concretisation, starting from a commonly accepted definition of the concept under discussion and reconstructing it step by step into a new (Marxian) concept. 3 It is in this sense that his theory constitutes a Critique and not a correction (or a version) of Classical Political Economy (see also Arthur 2002: 33 ff.). 4 1 ‘The concept of value is entirely peculiar to the most modern economy, since it is the most abstract expression of capital itself and of the production resting on it. In the concept of value, its secret is betrayed. (...) The economic concept of value does not occur in antiquity’ (Marx 1993: 776 ff.). 2 ‘The value form of the product of labour is the most abstract, but also the most general form of the bourgeois mode of production as a particular kind of social production of a historical and transitory character’ (Marx 1990: 174). 3 A small illustration of Marx’s method regarding the ‘deconstruction’ of ‘common parlance’ and the gradual build up of the notions proper to his theory: In Ch. 1, Sec. 4. of Vol. 1, of Capital (‘The Elementary Form of value considered as a whole’), he writes: ‘When, at the beginning of this chapter, we said, in common parlance, that a commodity is both a use-value and an exchange-value, we were, accurately speaking, wrong’ (Marx 1872-Internet, emphasis added). Or in respect to use-value: After having accepted as a point of departure the common-sense idea of use-value being a ‘useful thing’, he later clarified ‘that the product must be not only useful, but useful for others’ (op. cit.). Besides, when Marx emphasised, from the very first page of Vol. 1 of Capital, before having spoken about capital, wage labour or surplus-value, that the products of labour become commodities in ‘those societies in which the capitalist mode of production prevails’, he simply called his readers’ attention to the fact that his analysis should not be regarded as concluded when the first definitions were introduced. For a more detailed argument in concern with the thesis that Marx’s notions are being gradually built up through his abovementioned method see Arthur 2002, Dimoulis, D. and J. Milios 2003. 4 The point of departure shall always be a ‘simple’, i.e. easily recognizable form, which though may lead to the ‘inner’-causal relationships: ‘De prime abord, I do not proceed from “concepts”, hence neither from the “concept of value”, and am therefore in no way concerned to “divide” it. What I proceed from is the simplest social form in which the product of labour presents itself in contemporary society, and this is the “commodity”. This I analyse, initially in the form in which it appears’ (MEW 19: 368, Marx 1881- Internet). ‘The simple circulation is mainly an abstract sphere of the bourgeois overall production process,