On Some Modern Reformulations of the Labour Theory of Value

This paper, which develops an unfinished joint work with P. Garegnani, discusses three reinterpretations of the labour theory of value: the New Interpretation of Duménil and Foley, the approach of Wolff–Callari–Roberts, and the Temporal Single System approach. In all three, the labour theory of value loses the role of instrument for the determination of the rate of profit and relative prices, and is redefined as the reinterpretation of independently determined prices as ‘representing’ quantities of labour, on the basis of the postulate that only labour produces exchange value. The paper argues that these approaches reduce the labour theory of value to something with no implication on how the economy works, in particular, unable to defend the thesis that profits result from labour exploitation, because this thesis must rest on what causes wages to remain below their potential maximum, an issue that these reinterpretations leave unexplained and potentially open to neoclassical explanations. There emerges an imperfect grasp of the role of the labour theory of value in Marx, and of the foundations in Marx of the thesis that labour is exploited, foundations better grasped by P. Garegnani and clarified here with an example. A formal analysis of the ‘reduction’ of heterogeneous labour to homogeneity confirms the arbitrariness of these approaches.