Review of Radical Political Economics

Value Theory in an 43(4) 488­–505

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Political Economics
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System: Reprioritizing DOI: 10.1177/0486613411402641

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the Centrality of Social

Labor in Marxist
Political Economy

Bill Dunn1

Abstract
The centrality of social labor to Marxist epistemology and the need to understand relations
between capitalist production, strictly defined, and incompletely marketized forms of work
require a relatively broad concept of value. Not simply a theory of price, the utility of the
concept of value lies precisely in its ability to mediate between understanding the abstract truths
of labor’s centrality to social life and the complex concreteness of the real world economy. The
logical necessity and practical utility of the proposed interpretation is illustrated in relation to
state and domestic labor.
JEL classification: B51, B54, J01

Keywords
value, work, labor power, state capitalism, domestic labor

1. Introduction
This paper argues that the Marxist concept of value is based on the epistemological priority of
social labor. Value is determined in Marx’s words, by “objectified labor time whatever form it
may take” (1973: 532). This relatively broad understanding does not mean that value is simply a
quantity of work, but one aspect of labor time reflecting its social utility (Elson 1979: 132). Con-
versely, although capitalism has a tendency to directly compare the output of individual labor on
the market and to reflect value through price, the two are not equivalent. According to this inter-
pretation, value is not uniquely applicable to capitalism but is needed to understand a capitalist
system which necessarily remains incompletely commodified. Similar use-values can be produced

1
University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

Date received: June 1, 2008

Date accepted: February 25, 2010

Corresponding Author:
Bill Dunn, Political Economy, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia
Email: bill.dunn@sydney.edu.au

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Dunn 489

in different ways and through the interaction of different combinations of different forms of social
labor, and a consistent conceptual framework is needed to understand this.
That value theory should explain prices is, of course, a requirement set by many critics. Marxism
is, accordingly, found wanting. When Marxists do interpret value theory as one of price, it can
lead to circularity that mirrors mainstream economics (McDermott 2004). A persistent problem
for such approaches is that many economically important products and activities are not, or are
only incompletely, commodified. Socially necessary labor, for example for the state and in the
home, can create products that are intrinsically difficult to price. Problems become particularly
clear in the production and re-production of that most crucial of commodities: labor-power.
Marxists have conventionally read its value backwards from its price, from the wage level. This
mirrors Smith’s method, rather than that of Marx, and reproduces the neoclassical fetishism of
price relations. As a theory of price, the concept of value is vulnerable to mainstream critiques
while adding little to our comprehension of the complexity of a capitalist economy, which neces-
sarily remains incompletely commodified.
However, the opposite danger is that analysis remains uselessly abstract. Concepts have to
be amenable to concretization. Kicilloff and Starosta (2007), for example, accuse Rubin’s
“value-form” approach of becoming an abstract formalism, unable to reconcile the connections
between materiality and social form. This, too, precludes an adequate understanding of the inter-
connection of different forms of work and the concrete specificities of capitalist economy.
Value is interpreted here as a “mediating concept.” Marx described as “obviously the scien-
tifically correct method” of political economy a two-phase process (1973: 101). This first deve­
loped increasingly simple concepts from more heterogeneous ones, like population for example,
before moving back from the abstract to the concrete and specific. So it is an abstract truism that
people must work to live and, if their economy and society are to grow, work longer than is nec-
essary simply to reproduce themselves. Meanwhile, the concrete manifestations of capitalism,
including the complex workings of the money economy, are a jumbled ensemble of intercon-
nected parts. A descriptive accuracy may appear the only viable option. There are problems with
Marx’s formulation (as well as with the particular moments in the concretization Marx suggests).
Nevertheless, this method helps to effect a conceptual ordering while acknowledging complex
interconnectedness (Foley 1986). For Marxists, questions of work and exploitation remain cen-
tral to social life, and it is in this sense that value, as a measure of socially necessary labor, comes
in as a conceptual “pivot”1 between work’s general necessity and the specific form that it takes.
The problem and the proposed solution can be stated simply. It is obvious that two societies
could do a similar amount of work without being equally rich. However, it is also entirely pos-
sible for one society to be as rich as another, even materially identical, while less of its output is
denominated in dollars. Physically separate, the accounting techniques might matter little; if they
exist in the same economic universe, a consistent conceptual framework becomes essential. In
practice, different forms of economic organization interact. In particular, the contribution of
incompletely commodified labor in state-owned sectors of the economy and in domestic work
may be economically as well as socially, quantitatively as well as qualitatively, vital.
The proposed treatment of value as a conceptual pivot implies a research program that moves
backwards and forwards examining, on the one side, work and its products and, on the other, their
distribution and the role of price in deciding this. We cannot understand either production or
distribution if we think of them as worlds apart. Nor does one simply determine the other. Against

1
The term is from John McDermott (2004), to whom I am grateful. His critique of mainstream interpreta-
tions is also similar to that proposed here but his suggested solution, involving the concept of “social labor-
power” itself “almost coterminous with population itself” (2004: 90), involves a more radical break with
Marx’s method, the concept of value, and claims of an equivalence of labor-power.

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490 Review of Radical Political Economics 43(4)

Marx’s own warnings, a crude Ricardian/Marxist approach might posit labor as the sole source
of value and thence price. Alternatively a crude orthodoxy sees subjective utility determining
price and overcoming any disutility to work. “It is not that pearls fetch a high price because men
have dived for them; but on the contrary, men dive for them because they fetch a high price”
(Whately, cited in Black 1945: 141). A notion of value as “socially necessary” labor time poten-
tially bridges the gap. Diverse human labors produce value, but social organization decides what
work will be done and, at least in capitalism, continually compares and reappraises different
values. The price mechanism is now crucial to the form of this social decision making, but dis-
tribution also operates through many other processes, for example allocating mechanisms orga-
nized by the state, within firms and within families. Such processes are not simply aberrations,
falling short of (and needing to be reconciled with) market mechanisms. So it is important to
investigate the effects of the price mechanism on production and of work on prices, but neither
one simply mirrors the other. Were there simple determinations there could be no science. Work
would beget price or price beget work, resolving everything in a simple circularity but failing to
capture anything of the real economy’s disruptive dynamics.
In a sense this follows simply from an anti-determinist method. Marx thought “the production
relations of every society form a whole” (1978b: 103). If this cedes a certain methodological
priority to the totality, the whole is at the same time internally differentiated. The parts, individu-
als and groups of people, are not reducible to, and are not reduced to nothing by, the structures
of the global economy. People find different ways of dealing with the pressures, of resisting
them, and (at least occasionally) of altering them. There is not one right way to act. Even leaving
aside more or less direct forms of resistance and rejection, we might respond to the logic of capi-
talism in different ways. Individuals, groups, firms, national economies do things differently, or
employ different mixes of things at the same time. Hence there are constant processes of restruc-
turing and open-ended struggle, for example within and between industries to capture a greater
share of the surplus. So “the economy” cannot be studied simply “as a whole,” but also in its
unevenness. Of course, doing this is easier said than done.
Comparing different inputs and outputs in terms other than price presents a formidable empir-
ical challenge. We cannot analyze and somehow sum the billions of qualitatively different activi-
ties that make up the world’s work. However much money’s homogenizing ubiquity obscures, it
is tempting to fall in with price measures so richly provisioned with conventional statistics. Never­
theless, at least in principle but also in much useful existing research, it is possible to study not
only how work is paid and how the products of work are priced, but also the work and the work-
ers themselves, their skills and the sorts of activities they perform as well as the work involved
in their own reproduction. If here any averaging and comparison across time and place is inher-
ently approximate, at least some of the products are physically similar and therefore readily com-
parable. The practical difficulties remain considerable and are not confronted here, but understanding
the economy’s dynamics and its often hidden relations of power requires digging beneath assump-
tions of equivalence and market perfection.
The argument is intended as a contribution to Marxism, to articulate a coherent and useful
concept of value. Its approach is somewhat unorthodox and it may seem better to substitute a dif-
ferent noun. There is already potential misunderstanding in value’s vernacular association with
price and with normative concerns, as well as in the distinction between exchange value and use-
value. However, a proliferation of terms also adds to confusion, and if Marxism needs “concepts
of strategy” (Poulantzas 1978), this paper argues for rejecting the alternative understandings,
which are either too abstract to be amenable to concretization or too closely tied to the concrete
operations of the price mechanism to make sense of it.
The next section revisits controversies around value theory, explaining the perspective pre-
sented here and identifying its antecedents within the Marxist tradition. It argues for the priority

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Dunn 491

of work and production rather than exchange as the basis of value and for Marxist categories
amenable to concretization. Insisting too dogmatically on the specificity of capitalist forms makes
it impossible to investigate an incompletely commodified world.
Section 3 stresses the prevalence of organization over free markets. The tradition of institu-
tional economics highlights how little of the economy is directly commodified and the potential
economic utility of taking certain production processes out of the market. Similarly, nationalized
industries can be economically important, even efficient, and theories of “state capitalism” provide
a significant precedent for interpreting incompletely commodified labor in value-theoretic terms.
The importance of non-market mechanisms and for a consistent conceptual framework become
particularly clear in the case of sectors (re-)producing labor-power like health and education.
Section 4 argues that domestic labor should accordingly also be regarded as value producing.
This achieves theoretical consistency and enables concrete Marxist investigations of the economic
role of domestic labor and its dynamic relations with paid work. Conventional readings produce
conceptual anomalies while the potential explanatory power of the interpretation suggested here
is illustrated by considering changing employment and demographic structures in the United States.
The paper concludes that the broader, less market dependent, reinterpretation of value is both more
logical than conventional readings and opens useful lines of empirical investigation.

2. The Problem of Value

This section outlines a somewhat unorthodox interpretation of value theory based on the con-
ceptual priority of human labor in Marxist epistemology. There are precedents for this under-
standing within Marx and the Marxist tradition. However, the primary concern is with developing
theoretical consistency and conceptual utility rather than textural faithfulness
Value is posited as an analytically prior category to capitalism. However, it is not simply a
measure of work, irrespective of its usefulness or the society in which it is performed. It reflects
work’s social necessity and is an inherently imperfect abstraction, implying the equivalence of
different forms of labor. It can remain more or less concealed and economically unimportant in
non-capitalist societies. Even in capitalism, it is reflected only in a distorted and incomplete way
through the price system because capitalism remains (inherently) incompletely commodified.
Socially necessary labor time can produce outputs that are not (even cannot be) sold for money,
for example components within larger production processes; work providing what mainstream
economists term “public goods,” for example building infrastructure; and work producing labor-
power, for example teaching, health work, and domestic labor. These incompletely commodified
labors may be quantitatively as well as qualitatively important to the economy. They interact with
the money economy and need to be understood within the same conceptual framework.
As is well known, labor theories of value predate Marx who developed ideas already in Smith
and Ricardo. However, viewed under the influence of Hegelian philosophy (even in an inverted
form) and of radical socialist democracy, the questions as much as the answers are transformed.
There may, in Marx’s reinterpretation, be transcendence at least as much as continuity.
Smith’s starting point in the Wealth of Nations is “the annual labour of every nation” (1997: 104).
Slightly later he confirms “the real price of everything is the toil and trouble of acquiring it”
(1997: 133). However, the work required to produce commodities exactly represented their value
only in primitive society without profit or rent. Smith switches his interpretation of value in com-
mercial society from production to exchange, to the quantity of labor “commanded.” What matters
is how much labor goods can buy. Profits, which are assumed not explained, allow this to exceed
the labor expended in production. The conceptual priority of labor disappears (Rubin 1979).
Ricardo (1951: 11-51) criticizes the inconsistent employment of two criteria and (excluding
some rare goods whose value is determined by scarcity) returns to labor expended in production

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492 Review of Radical Political Economics 43(4)

as the sole source of exchangeable value. This includes not only the labor immediately involved
but also that bestowed on the implements which assist such labor. Value therefore also varies
according to the quality and durability of fixed capital. Thus, even if the physical output doubles,
there is no increase in value if it is the product of the same amount of labor. However, to antici-
pate elements of Marx’s critique, first, although wages and profit are now explicitly opposed, for
Ricardo their source remains obscure. Second, he does not adequately explain the practical varia-
tion of prices from embodied labor ratios. Third, while insisting precisely on its relevance even
in capitalist society, Ricardo gives value a trans-historical character. Thus he advanced beyond
Smith but still in ways that both neoclassical economists and Marx would find unsatisfactory.
Marx’s critique of the classical texts is familiar. First, he offers a powerful explanation of profit.
He suggests that under capitalism labor takes on an abstractly universal form. So the ability to
work, labor-power, is bought and sold as a commodity but then employed in particular concrete
labors. Like other commodities, labor-power (in general) exchanges at its value, but, uniquely,
once this exchange is made, labor-power can be employed longer than is needed to reproduce its
own value. Labor thus produces not only value but also surplus-value and thence profit. Marx
thus probes beneath the realm of apparent “freedom, equality, property and Bentham” (1976: 280)
to re-situate the core of political economy in labor and the sphere of production.
Second, he emphasizes that value and surplus-value do not directly produce the prices and
profits of the individual capitals where they are created. Instead (as Ricardo was of course aware)
market mechanisms mediate the relationship to determine “socially necessary” levels of work. If
the inefficient must labor longer, they do not thereby produce more value than would someone
working with average social skill and intensity. Capitalist competition also distributes a common
pool of value and surplus-value both within and between industries. Thus, the determination of
prices according to value is inherently approximate and “an average of perpetual fluctuations”
(Marx 1981: 261).
Marx’s articulation even of these approximate relationships remains incomplete. Amongst
other things, with market mechanisms determining the price and profits of the goods bought as
much as those sold by capitalists, two sets of transformation from value to price would be needed,
and simple algebra can show that total value and surplus value cannot equal total price and profit,
except occasionally and accidentally (Fine 1986). For neoclassical critics, this is fatal to Marx’s
system. It does present Marxists with a dilemma. Many follow the route of Sraffa, Steedman, and
the “neo-Ricardians” (see e.g. Steedman 1977). With enough assumptions and enough simulta-
neous equations, it perhaps remains possible to show a consistent relation between production
and price. This might be read as simply demonstrating that the operations Marx suggested can be
developed consistently. However, with capitalists now both buying and selling according to
price not value, the latter tends to drop out of the picture altogether. It may lurk as a metaphysical
presence, but the practical economics re-approaches that of the mainstream (McDermott 2004).
Other Marxists change the question, reinterpreting the tasks of political economy and Marx’s
methodology. Marx persistently identifies social work as the key abstract general determinant
from which to proceed to more concrete analyses (see e.g. Marx and Engels 1974; Marx 1973,
1981). If it is not the explicit starting point of Capital, there are reasons to believe even this was
for stylistic rather than methodological reasons (Carver 1975: 33). Social labor provides a metho­
dologically consistent basis for a concept of value, which avoids the mainstream preoccupation
with prices and prioritization of exchange relations. However, starting with labor and moving
forwards through value to price rather than the other way round, the labor theory of value becomes
a theory of price in at most a weak sense (Rubin 1973: 81). Instead of pursuing the labyrinthine
controversies attempting to prove their identity, as Marx acknowledged, even “the average price
of commodities is always different from their value” (1969: 95). This now admits to failing the
criteria of bourgeois economics. This stress on value form rather than on its specific content and

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Dunn 493

manifestation as prices, may be stretched still further to deny any practical application, even any
content. Radically abstracted from the workings of the real economy, value theory becomes almost
the antithesis of the classical concept. To say anything about capitalism, rather than about bour-
geois characterizations of it, is to objectify, to render what is actual, rational (Holloway 2002).
Between these opposite poles of “neo-Ricardian” and “value-form” critique, many Marxists,
in principle at least, would defend a method involving a movement from the abstract to progres-
sively more concrete levels of analysis (Marx 1973). If collective capital can realize total value
and surplus-value only occasionally and accidentally, this might indicate problems for capital
and open lines of enquiry rather than closing them off. However, attempts to do this remain less
common than might be hoped. One obstacle seems to lie in the level of generality with which
value is conceived. An effective conceptual “pivot” needs to remain constant while allowing
alteration in the two poles it mediates. Too abstract and it simply repeats truisms about the impor-
tance and interaction of work. Too specific and it simply records the vicissitudes of the world
market and crises (Marx 1973: 108).
To address the appropriate level of abstraction and generality requires a comment on the third
of the objections to Ricardo, in contrast to whom Marx emphasized the historical specificity of
capitalism. For many authors, this specificity implies that value is a uniquely capitalist phenom-
enon. The labor theory of value is socially specific. It refers only to capitalist processes; it comes
into being with capitalism and will disappear with its passing (Pilling 1986; Fine 1986: 12). At
most, “lower forms of value” may be admitted in pre-capitalist societies (Weeks 1981: 38). Only
the market makes equivalent otherwise dissimilar use-values, turning the concrete labor of mak-
ing them into the abstract labor of making commodities to make money. Without a market system,
concrete labors remain qualitatively different and incomparable.
In particular, wage labor under capitalism is unique. Free labor becomes wholly dependent on
the market, and the value of labor-power or variable capital is accordingly that of the necessary
consumption commodities. “The worker spends the value or price of the labor-power he has sold
on means of subsistence, on the means to reproduce his labor-power. A sum of money equal to
the variable capital forms his income” (Marx 1978a: 455). Failure to distinguish wage-labor from
non-capitalist work, slave labor, peasant labor, domestic labor, can blur capitalism’s distinctive-
ness and upset Marxist characterizations of its incomparable processes of production, reproduc-
tion, and accumulation.
However, insisting too rigidly on this distinctiveness, the concept of value becomes applica-
ble only to a purely capitalist system; a world that cannot exist. By definitional fiat, Marxists can
say nothing—or at least nothing value theoretic, nothing analytical rather than descriptive—
about a real world in which all sorts of non-commodified labors stubbornly persist. Such work is
deeply, but only more or less directly, implicated in capitalist production and reproduction.
This seems particularly pertinent to questions of the value of labor-power. Marx wrote in
Capital that its value:

is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for
the production and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article. In as far as it
has value, it represents no more than a definite quantity of the average social labour objec-
tified in it. (1976: 274)

This very general characterization would appear to imply that the parenting, teaching, and
household production that contribute to the labor-time necessary for the production and reproduction
of this specific article add to its value (Quick 2004). This contrasts with the more usual view, which
sees this simply as equal to the labor embodied in the commodities purchased with the wage.

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494 Review of Radical Political Economics 43(4)

However, in practice, the ability to work, labor-power, can be produced through different relative
amounts of domestic and commodity labor.
A less categorical assertion of the specificity of value to capitalist relations seems necessary.
There are many precedents for this in Marx and Marxism and a methodological basis in the cen-
trality of human labor to the materialist conception of history. Marx writes that “value is deter-
mined by objectified labour time whatever form it may take” (1973: 532). This general character
is also implied in his famous letter to Kugelmann which insisted that “every child knows that
the volume of products corresponding to the various needs calls for various and quantitatively
determined amounts of total social labour” (Marx and Engels 1983: 148). In his more considered
writing, too, Marx suggests that value persists in different forms of society. It exists in subsis-
tence societies (Marx 1969: 49) and would do so in socialist ones (Marx 1981: 288-9, 991).
Value is then analytically prior to capitalism, our understanding of which is increased by consid-
ering the way value is expressed as a particular form of exploitation involving wage-labor and
competition between capitalists, etc. It becomes entirely appropriate to ask how value is specifi-
cally manifested. This includes, is even primarily, price. But price is an emergent property. This
form also uniquely conceals exploitation, with market relations apparently those between equals.
With a consistent concept it becomes possible to contest this apparent equality, to compare the
hidden exploitation under capitalism with the direct, naked exploitation of earlier societies. This
approach, writes Campbell, “renders capitalism comparable to other kinds of appropriation…
Marx’s point is that capitalism is another form of the same thing, the difference between it and
the others being that capitalism is indirectly rather than directly collective” (1993: 151).
Value categories may also be useful in understanding other societies and perhaps particularly
the transition between different economic systems. The money economy was never wholly absent
in feudalism; lords bought luxury goods and even the poor would have to buy basics like salt and
iron, exchanged for local products or money these could raise (Takahashi 1976; Hilton 1990). It
seems reasonable to believe such goods were priced, at least approximately, according to the toil
and trouble of acquiring them. However, market relations were relatively peripheral and work in
peasant households was not radically separate from “life” in the way achieved by capitalism.
Therefore, as will be discussed below in the case of housework, even if we knew for how long
people worked it would be hard to discern “socially necessary” levels for any particular process.
The category of value, as socially necessary labor, might still retrospectively have critical pur-
chase. For example it might inform discussion of the relation between crudely “demographic”
inabilities of societies to reproduce themselves, and particular questions of the (lack of) agricul-
tural innovation or of levels of exploitation within those societies (Bois 1985; Brenner 1985a,
1985b; Harman 1989). Within feudalism, surplus extraction also took different forms, as demesne
labor and tithes, for example. It also changed form, with money becoming increasingly important
even while still coerced through “extra-economic” means. Whether these represented a quantita-
tive lessening or intensification seem at least appropriate questions, which might be addressed
through a consistent concept of value.
Historians debate both the timing and the causes of capitalism’s emergence, how or whether it
came from within European feudalism or from without. Various theories of imperialism point
to surpluses extracted from the “periphery” as vital to the success of the “core.” Similarly, long-
standing debates argue whether, or to what extent, modern capitalism succeeds through its own
inherent dynamism (and exploitative practices) or through its ability to appropriate resources from
elsewhere. Processes of “primitive” and capital accumulation continue to co-exist, the former not
relegated to some primordial stage (Marx 1976; Harvey 2003). These important debates cannot be
addressed here. However, a precondition for understanding the interaction of these different pro-
cesses would appear to be the adoption of concepts which render them analytically comparable.

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Dunn 495

There is an alternative criticism that the value of commodities, and of labor-power in particu-
lar, cannot be reduced to this quantitative differentiation. In their concreteness, labors are always
different. Skilled labor, for example, is never easily reduced to the simple. It requires skilled
labor for its own reproduction and cannot be a straightforward multiple of simple, abstract labor.
The social ensemble is irreducible and concrete labors are qualitatively as well as quantitatively
different (McDermott 2004). Yet although inherently approximate (Thompson 1978), notions of
abstract labor may remain useful as a way of ordering an empirically heterogeneous collectivity
of labor. The reality of social immobility does not preclude us from believing, for example, that
most miners could manage, and most managers mine, if only they had the training. Value
involves an abstraction but not an arbitrary categorization. Although “social necessity” is always
historically specific, there is something recognizably homologous about people’s social labor,
similarities between the work and exploitation of people in different situations. However, Marx
argued that only with capitalism does value become apparent, the “price of labour-power…
expressed as the value or price of labour itself, i.e. as wages” (1981: 121, emphasis added). So
what was opaque to Aristotle, for example, because he lived in slave society lacking notions of
human equality, becomes manifest through exchange (Marx 1976: 152). It would seem unfortu-
nate if contemporary radical democrats, remembering the criticisms of Ricardo too well, forget
even the bourgeois prejudice of equivalence, of a basic, if approximate, human equality.
Suggesting that value is not unique to purely capitalist processes allows for, and helps reveal,
important differences between societies. For Marx, value changes form and “requires for its pure
development a mode of production founded on capital” (1973: 251). In capitalism, it asserts itself
as exchange value so “the labour process itself is no more than the instrument of the valorization
process—in the sense of the process of creating surplus value and not, as previously, in the sense
of simply creating value” (1976: 1,017). Moreover, the “concept of value is entirely peculiar to the
most modern economy” (Marx 1973: 776, emphasis added). Markets simultaneously reveal indi-
vidual equivalence and obscure the exchange of social labor behind the monetized form; precisely
the source of Smith’s ambiguity, which Ricardo begins to overcome (Rubin 1979). Meanwhile a
greater or lesser distance from the market allows more or less freedom from the law of value, prac-
tical variation or what mainstream economists might describe as “inefficiency.” However, these are
often differences of degree rather than of kind, and the interaction of different forms of work and
their changes and continuities over time should be amenable to investigation. Capitalism is sub-
stantially but incompletely commodified, and Marxists need to be able to analyze this complex
whole. Value takes different social forms in different societies, and science “consists precisely in
working out how the law of value asserts itself” (Marx and Engels 1983: 148).

3. Capital, the State, and Value

Capitalism is not characterized by free markets. Marxists and other critical political economists
have long seen an irony in the timing of neoclassical economics’ triumph: free market ideology
established just as giant trusts and robber barons strengthened their grip on the real economies of
Europe and America. Levels of state planning and bureaucracy had also begun to rise. These
trends towards the increased direct organization of economic life continued, albeit unevenly,
throughout the twentieth century. Markets themselves are pervaded with power and long-term
relationships. The social nature of what appears private, and the organized character of capitalism,
are an enduring indictment of orthodoxy’s individualism. Free markets are not the norm; capital-
ism and planning are not antitheses (Kidron 1974; Secombe 1975; Simon 1991) and economic
theory founded on prices is correspondingly misleading.
This prevalence of hierarchy and power within and between firms, and of state planning, mean
that most work produces commodities only indirectly. Commodity exchange dominates production

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496 Review of Radical Political Economics 43(4)

relations only in a more or less strongly mediated fashion. Contemporary capitalism is not Smith’s
world of individual butchers, brewers, and bakers buying and selling on their own account. For
example, even within strictly capitalist factories, most work is likely to produce components, or
components of components, or to service their production in one way or another, rather than
make the finished goods. Therefore even within firms that ultimately sell commodities, produc-
tion relations are necessarily bureaucratically organized, more planned than market driven. Many
other firms sell goods or services in relationships that themselves involve power and hierarchy,
trust and long-term planning rather than spot market transactions. There are different ways of
doing business, most of which involve an admixture of market and power relations (Gereffi et al.
2005; McDermott 2004). This represents a “problem” for neoclassical economics and for Marxist
analyses based on conventional interpretations of value.
“New institutional” approaches recognize that the prevalence of hierarchy and bureaucracy
represents a challenge for liberal models. Their solution suggests that the persistence of bureau-
cratic inefficiencies may be accounted for by the market imperfections they overcome (Coase
1937; Williamson 1975). This assumes market efficiency, and then reads back the causes and
extent of bureaucracy as a reflection of failures to match this ideal. However clever the solution,
it struggles to explain structural variations, including the very different sizes of apparently suc-
cessful firms. The solution only becomes necessary because markets are taken as the norm and
organization is seen as a problem that needs to be explained away.
To begin with markets and price mechanisms, and see variation from this as abnormal, is the
opposite of Marx’s approach which precisely begins within work and production. It should not
then be surprising, even if we allow that firms’ ultimate goal is profitability, that the paths to
success may be various. So for example, production of a vital component may be outsourced or
brought “in-house.” The latter may overcome uncertainties in quality or supply (as the new insti-
tutionalists would suggest), or simply be cheaper, the integrated firm able to produce below
market price. If all the production was taken in-house and the separate industries disappeared, we
would have no market price for the component. If such component making had never been spun-
off as a separate industry, successful firms might continue to do it in very different ways. Any
inefficiencies within one firm would have been absorbed in the overall production process and
might continue for a greater or longer period. The better component maker might be driven out
of business because of inefficiencies elsewhere in its production regime. The point is simply that
distance from the market is the norm and the price mechanism typically is at most indirect. Lev-
els of socially necessary labor time are reflected in prices, if at all, after the event, sometimes
days, months, or years after the work is done. Marxists, perhaps particularly in a highly orga-
nized capitalism in the 21st century, but in principle from the beginning, need to understand
value as arising in production, not impute it backwards from the market. This allows many eco-
nomically important forms of work at varying distances from the market to be understood in
value theoretic terms and incorporated into any understanding of capitalism as a social whole.
In particular, both private and “public” sectors can perform similar economic roles and produce
identical use-values. Conceptual and empirical problems rapidly emerge if they are perceived
as radically different, as capable and incapable, respectively, of producing value. Here there are
significant precedents for seeing state labor as capable of producing value. This was stressed by
Marxists who characterized the former communist regimes (and later other state activities) as
“state capitalist.” Political economy differed markedly between East to West. It also displayed
similarities. It was always a choice, and an inescapably political choice, which to emphasize. In
particular, a focus on the internal organization of, say, the Soviet Union, tended not to discern any
law of value. Formally, the state (and, if less plausibly, the people) owned the means of production,
there was no free market and ultimately only one employer. There was therefore no commodity
production, no wage labor, and, according to conventional readings, no value. Alternatively, the

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context of the wider world economy allowed at least the possibility of state capitalism. In extremis,
and more or less by definition, there is a world system and no part can be anything else but capi-
talist (Wallerstein 2000). For others (e.g. Cliff 1974; Kidron 1974) it was necessary to show the
historical development of class society, the degeneration of the revolution, the nature of accumu-
lation, its implications in terms of competitive effects on the labor process, and so on. However,
military competition in particular now drove a competitive accumulation similar to that in Western
capitalism. Within the Soviet economy many production processes were not subject to the imme-
diate discipline of market competition. However, similar things might be said looking within any
capitalist firm. The point here is that whether or not similarities allow their categorization as
capitalist, it is useful to acknowledge that the different economies represented alternative ways
of producing value.
The false dualism between value and non-value producing, capitalist and non-capitalist labor,
seems particularly stark in considering post-communist transformations. The opening of the
economies of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe, particularly through “shock therapy,”
often led to massive destructions of wealth. Even mainstream accounts acknowledge falls in real
GDP from which it often took years to emerge. Yet Marxists would presumably agree that these
openly capitalist successor regimes have value. Unless it also existed previously, the collapse of
communism must be reckoned to have created value on a massive scale, not destroyed it. Con-
versely, China has become richer, huge problems and increasing inequalities notwithstanding.
The basis of this growth and the extent of any state retreat remain controversial. For Harvey
(2005), China is a prime example of accumulation by dispossession achieved not least by the
transfer of resources from formerly state and collective spheres to private capital. This is dis-
puted (Ashman and Callinicos 2006; Dunn 2007). However, if such claims are to be susceptible
to serious Marxist enquiry, it would seem necessary to employ concepts that have continuity
across the different social forms. If state-owned and collective enterprises are deemed value-free
by definition, we necessarily have accumulation de novo. If values already existed prior to mar-
ketization, an investigation of the extent of transfers of wealth against those of its creation through
processes of capital accumulation might be possible.
The idea of state labor as productive of value may be at least as important in understanding
the role of state intervention within established capitalist economies. It seems clear that some
nationalized industries meet even the narrowest definitions of “productive capital” (Poulantzas
1978). Renault, nationalized for political reasons, did not thereby become a wholly different,
valueless, and unproductive species of car firm. Other firms, even whole industrial sectors, were
nationalized in the postwar period but continued to produce commodities, which at a national or
global level competed with those directly produced by capital. Certainly, state ownership could
take some of the heat out of competition, allow subsidies and the persistence of production at less
than “socially necessary” levels of productivity. But the idea that a car produced by French state
employees or British state-owned coal has no value seems untenable.
Many other state activities seem less clear-cut. However, even liberal accounts allow certain
areas of state intervention in the provision of “public goods,” where individual capitals cannot
glean profit but collective capital needs resources. Lighthouses are often the classic example.
Roads and canals (Smith 1997) and education (Mill 1994) might also qualify. These things might
be produced by the private sector or to a greater or lesser extent provided or subsidized by the
state. It would seem curious for Marxists to see their value as hanging on how their production
was funded. The point here is that there is no clear divide. Some state firms may be profitable.
Some may make losses. Some may be nationalized for sound “economic” reasons, for the
“public” (or collective capitalist) good. Some may be nominally privatized while receiving state
support. The sheer diversity of forms seems irreducible to the simple binaries of value/non-value,

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498 Review of Radical Political Economics 43(4)

capital/state. There seems scant Marxist rationale for imposing categorical judgments of whether
or not the potentially identical use-values they produce have value.
Finally, but not least, the expansion of welfare states may have been a concession forced upon
capital. However, it could also prove functional, contributing to the reproduction of labor-power.
Healthier and better educated than hitherto, labor-power would appear to have increased its value
in the postwar period as its reproduction was taken out of the market (Harman 1984). Nor was
this a one-off transformation, and states can reasonably be interpreted as funding an on-going
commitment to “the production and secular improvement of labor-power” (McDermott 2007: 300).
The ability of firms and national economies to draw on non-marketized, even non-marketizable,
forms of labor can be vital to their success. However, to somewhat anticipate the discussion
below, if, for example, workers buy drugs directly from pharmaceutical companies or education
from private schools, for Marxists, these are commodities, consumption goods like any other.
However, their value cannot evaporate if the state subsidizes or produces them. The goods and
services contribute identically to labor-power. State employees may thus produce value, in repro-
ducing labor-power and other goods, albeit at rates which, for a longer or shorter period, may
remain somewhat indeterminate, not subject to the immediate discipline of the market.
The tendency to equalize profit rates occurs within and between industrial sectors and, with
more or less difficulty, across national boundaries. The labor time that is “socially necessary” is
ultimately determined on a world scale. Nevertheless, just as there are variations between the
sizes and organization of successful firms, there remain substantial differences between coun-
tries in the proportion of people in paid employment and in the proportion working for private
businesses and the state. Yet when (the products of) these countries come into direct competition,
there is no straightforward relation between the proportion of private, strictly capitalist, employ-
ment and their competitiveness. Socially necessary labor times are constituted on a world scale
by a variety of different labors, of varying adjacency to the market, with no necessary correspon-
dence between this and their efficiency. Opening “protected” sectors to competition may reveal
their social (in)efficiency and the law of value as price. The market now casts its unforgiving
measure. A competitive world capitalist economy, for state capitalism as for firms, in the long run
means efficiency or (very often and, for example, in the case of the USSR) ruin. The judgment of
the market makes value manifest. But that which is un-weighed does not lack weight. Uncalculated
value is value already.

4. Domestic Labor and the Value of Labor-Power

This section argues that domestic labor can produce value and in particular that it contributes to
the value of labor-power. Conventional Marxist understandings, which read the value of labor-
power backwards from the wage level, are Smithian not Marxist in their methodology, theoreti-
cally circular, and arbitrarily exclude this vital form of labor from analyses of the real world
economy. They are unable to conceptualize the nature or the changes in the relationship between
paid and unpaid work. Too abstract an understanding of value both reflects and reinforces a pre-
occupation with market relations and becomes a legitimate target for feminist critics that Marxism
remains as preoccupied as neoclassical analysis with profits, markets, and rational decision mak-
ing (Jefferson and King 2001; Waring 1988). Conversely, understood in the sense suggested in
the previous sections, value theory can usefully inform an understanding of the relations between
paid and unpaid work and reclaim issues of domestic labor for a Marxist research project.
The argument risks censure from mainstream economists as a deluded throwback to discarded
Ricardian-Marxian theories (Beneria 1999), as well as from more doctrinaire Marxists. Brevity
risks oversimplification. Domestic labor is and does much more than just reproduce labor-power

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Dunn 499

(Meagher 1997; Anderson 2000). Nevertheless, the inextricable connections between public and
private have also been seen as the core of feminism (Anderson 2000), and their explication, how-
ever imperfect, remains a necessary ingredient of a research project that aims at generality. The
section exemplifies how the world looks different when value is conceived in the inclusive way
advocated here and how this opens useful lines of empirical enquiry.
Neoclassical economists enjoy Pigou’s now rather quaint anomaly that GDP falls when a man
marries his housekeeper. It was always a circumstance sufficiently rare that it could be passed off
as mere theoretical quirk. However, movements in the opposite direction, from unpaid to paid
work, are too substantial to be so easily dismissed and even some liberals have recognized that
domestic and paid work are interdependent and mutually conditioning (Cloud and Garrett 1996;
Wood 1997). Attempts to calculate the economic importance of unpaid housework date from at
least 1912, but how it should be integrated into conventional economic analysis presents concep-
tual and empirical problems. In practice, unlike activities such as subsistence agriculture, it typi-
cally remains excluded (Hoskyns and Rai 2007). With the task of imputing market prices,
practical difficulties include those of delineation of “production boundaries”; what constitutes
(different kinds of) work; and of relative productivity (Cloud and Garrett 1996; Wood 1997;
Boskin 2000). One influential convention, after Reid, counts things potentially replaced by third
parties (Benaria 1999). Bread can be baked or bought, laundry or childcare performed by others.
However, there seems almost no limit with a whole range of potentially marketable activities
from servicing psychological needs to child surrogacy and sex (Wood 1997). Furthermore, even
within any limits, it is unclear what sort (and price) of labor, for example how skilled, whether
specialist or generalist, would be taken as performing these substitute tasks. One approach esti-
mates “opportunity costs” in terms of earnings forgone. However, this rapidly produces absurdi-
ties, for example that a lawyer’s housework would be more valuable than that of the skilled cook
or cleaner (Jefferson and King 2001). In short, including unpaid labor, obstinately recalcitrant to
monetary measurement, spoils “the neatly-defined, presumably ‘objective’ orthodox economic
model” (Beneria 1999: 305).
An alternative, mainly feminist inspired, approach based on “time-use” has become relatively
widespread (Boskin 2000; Fraumeni 2005; Hoskyns and Rai 2007). Quantitative estimates vary
widely, but unpaid work accounts for huge proportions of national wealth (Anderson 2000;
Jefferson and King 2001; Himmelweit 2002; Williams 2003; Fraumeni 2005). Conversely:

Caring work removed from the unpaid economy is a cost not only to households but also
to society. The gains realized from increased employment of people with caring responsi-
bilities in the public or private sectors of the economy must be balanced against losses in
the output of the unpaid economy. (Himmelweit 2002: 54)

We might reasonably “deflate” current figures, or perhaps better inflate past measures of
wealth, by the substantial proportion of unpaid work (Beneria 1999; Himmelweit 2002). Again
there are practical and conceptual difficulties. Work in the home is unlike wage labor. Sometimes
it can be enjoyable and rewarding. Even the most onerous chores are not subject to what Marx
describes as the real subsumption of labor to capital. They escape some of the competitive
imperatives of capitalist accumulation. There is no market, and any compulsion to produce at
“socially necessary” rates is indirect (Secombe 1974). However, for Marxists “time-use” might
appear to provide a sensible starting point. Indeed, one might expect Marxist emphases on
production rather than exchange, on the importance of human labor-power and on human equality
to have responded to and radicalized such discussions of work and commodification.
Domestic labor indeed provoked considerable debate amongst Marxists in the 1970s. Without
any satisfactory resolution, interest subsequently diminished. Sometimes the reasons for excluding

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domestic labor seem essentially pragmatic (Shaikh and Tonak 1994). However, the theoretical
consensus also maintains that domestic labor does not produce value: “the products of this pri-
vate labour are not exchanged on the market, they are not commodities and exchange no value in
the technical sense” (Foley 1986: 16). For Himmelweit and Mohun, domestic labor is “a whole
sector of production central to, but existing outside capitalist relations of production” (1977: 15).
Therefore, it “is not value creating because it is not subject to the law of value” (1977: 27). With
a certain circularity (Folbre 1982), the technical and conceptual reinforce each other in ways that
appear to mirror mainstream economics, putting important features and transformations in con-
temporary society beyond the scope of value theory. Like state or subsistence labor, domestic
work is conventionally disqualified from contributing to value on the distinctly neoclassical
ground that labor-power is not produced for exchange and its output is not immediately measured
or measurable (Masterson 1998). Unsurprisingly, the field of enquiry was largely abandoned to
an empirically based feminist or institutional economics (Jefferson and King 2001).
As mentioned above, Marxists conventionally characterize the value of labor-power as the price
of its consumption goods. Unfortunately, this avoids the (Ricardian) assumption of the inherent
commensurability of different (capitalist and non-capitalist) work only by regression to Smith. It
is regression to Smith because it defines value according to the labor commanded, the consump-
tion goods labor buys, instead of the total amount of work required for its reproduction. These
would be the same in an entirely static and purely capitalist system. In a dynamic and incom-
pletely commodified system, the necessary use-values can be provided in different ways. If only
genuinely commodity inputs “count,” the labor-power of the worker arriving from the country-
side or perhaps fleeing communism would have no value. The worker, whose childhood involved
food cooked at home and educated by the state, would have less valuable labor-power than her
contemporary whose meals were bought and who was sent to the shoddiest of private schools.
Unpaid labor can provide similar use-values to paid, can add socially useful labor to that embodied
in consumption commodities, and must logically be able to add to the value of labor-power
(Masterson 1998). Unless domestic labor does produce value, Marxists also face Pigou’s paradox.
Secombe (1974, 1975) therefore proposes that non-market labors can produce value, albeit
under conditions where their quantitative dimensions may be revealed only retrospectively,
when the labor is thrown onto the market. Rather than a Smithian conception of value as given
by the commodities bought, better that only “[t]he ultimate or minimum limit of the value of
labor-power is formed by the value of commodities which has to be supplied” (Marx 1976: 276,
emphasis added). Perhaps two isolated societies producing similar use-values might be reckoned
to have different amounts of value, or those with dissimilar material outputs identical value. The
accounting technique might matter little. However, the contradiction becomes practical and con-
crete if two societies interact or, to put it another way, if in one economy use-values (including
that of labor-power) are consistently produced by different combinations of paid and unpaid
work. Similarly, if one society changes over time, for example with women recruited to paid emp­
loyment, it would appear inconsistent to reduce the value of their labor-power, and thus value
theory, to capital’s hiring decisions. The value of labor-power, as Marx insists, “like that of every
other commodity, is already determined before it enters circulation” (1976: 277).
It therefore seems necessary to acknowledge that in a world incompletely commodified, domes-
tic (like state) labor can contribute to the value of labor-power. The nuclear family and women’s
absence from paid employment was always an idealization, but the presence of domestic labor
influences labor-power’s reproduction both qualitatively and quantitatively. The survival of the
next generation and the conditions of the present can be improved by unpaid work. If a worker
studies at home and increases her own skills, the value of her labor-power rises. State-funded
education and health, but also protective legislation which reduces working hours even while
reducing pay, can increase workers’ conditions and the value of labor-power. Labor-power is

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Dunn 501

reproduced through a changing mixture of paid and unpaid labor; to regard only some of which
as value producing seems arbitrary and inconsistent.
If unpaid work also contributes to labor-power that might appear to indicate its value always
exceeds its price. The former would be equivalent to that of the commodities consumed plus
domestic labor. However, domestic workers also consume commodities, and Secombe (1975)
suggests that the value of the housewife’s labor-power is simply compensated by the value of the
commodities, bought with the man’s wage, which she receives. Quick (2004) has similarly, if in
less explicitly gendered terms, argued that families make decisions about the work they do. How-
ever, not making them in conditions of their own choosing, capitalism imposes decisions on
household labor that brings it into conformity with wage labor as necessary labor (2004: 26-7).
Capitalism relies on the “freedom” of the workers from sufficient means of production to support
themselves and the consequent need to perform wage-labor. With the money wage, workers can
buy consumption goods, which it would have been impossible to consistently produce within the
home in the time available. An increase in real wages or a cheapening of consumption commodi-
ties allows the purchase of more commodities and domestic labor-saving machines, which fur-
ther reduce the necessary time spent in housework. The household can increase its leisure or work
longer and increase its money income. However, Quick suggests that with the household now
living above subsistence the capitalist can therefore cut wages (2004: 30). Both Secombe and
Quick thus accept Marx’s assumption that workers receive the wages just necessary for their
reproduction and show that this is entirely compatible with domestic labor producing value.
However, this assumption may be better relaxed. First, it is true that capitalism is ultimately
unsustainable unless workers earn enough to reproduce themselves. However, the unequal nature
of the capital-labor relation may allow capital to cut wages below their value, at least for a time.
Workers and their families can compensate by working harder at home. Capitalism might com-
pensate by drawing in workers from alternative sources, through processes of primitive accumu-
lation. It might also, as Marx thought was happening before the introduction of the factory acts
in the 19th century, reduce the supply of labor-power in ways that threaten capitalism’s survival
as a system. What is functional need not happen.
Second, there is no “internal market” to establish an equivalent exchange within the family
(Folbre 1982). The home can therefore be the site of exploitation (as well as oppression)
(Humphries 1977). This upsets doctrinaire models of “class,” implying that any extra family
resources may be “produced” as well as distributed unevenly between men and women and boys
and girls (Folbre 1982). Empirically it is hardly shocking. However, while it is imprecise and
may blur inequalities within the household, these assumption may be “near enough” in the sense
that domestic relations lack capitalism’s systematic competitive dynamic and it is hard to accu-
mulate its products. These are predominantly for immediate consumption in which the limits of
the husband’s exploitation are, so to speak, the limits of his stomach. Workers seldom become rich.
It is particularly hard to imagine them doing so through the exploitation of domestic labor alone.
However, the pressure for capital to reduce wages to a minimum is at best a tendency. Marglin,
for example, argues that a “rising wage makes leisure relatively more expensive to the worker,
to be sure [b]ut against this . . . a rising wage is like a windfall that makes the worker able to afford
more leisure. . . .   And the outcome is unpredictable” (1974: 92). Intergenerational reproduction
appears to confirm that domestic labor can add to the value of labor-power. Workers can,
however moderately, accumulate. In the commodity economy they can save by working over-
time. They can retrain in their own time. As a simple empirical fact, the value of labor-power has
increased enormously over the last two centuries. Certainly workers have been drawn from the
countryside at home and abroad. But the vast expansion of the proletariat in the leading capitalist
countries far exceeds this primitive accumulation. The working class in Europe and North America,
and subsequently in other places, did much more than simply reproduce itself. Individually, workers

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502 Review of Radical Political Economics 43(4)

accumulated little; they still needed to sell their labor-power but the numerical expansion was
enormous. This increase, achieved by relatively high wages and social benefits, of course also
represents a successful investment for capitalism as a system (McDermott 2007: 314). But it can
also be understood in value terms.
Conversely, once we understand the dynamic relation between paid and unpaid labor, even an
increase in wages need not mean an increase in the value of labor-power. And the long-term
trend for an apparently endogenous increase in total labor power in rich countries appears to have
been reversed. For the conventional account, more paid employment, higher family income, and
greater consumer spending imply an increase in wealth and the value of labor-power. However,
evidence suggests this need not be the case. Additional paid work impacts on unpaid labor, the
diminution of which affects a real economic depletion (Hoskyns and Rai 2007). The relationship,
of course, is complex. Himmelweit (2002) suggests that each extra 100 minutes of paid work
reduces the time spent on domestic work only by 28. Women (and to a lesser extent men) con-
tinue to do all sorts of housework as paid employment increases. Women’s “double burden”
becomes heavier and capitalism apparently gets something for nothing. However, this precipi-
tates new struggles and contradictions. One aspect may be seen in declining birth rates and
“demographic crisis.” It seems plausible to associate these with diminishing time spent in domes-
tic labor and to understand them not simply as a matter of changing “lifestyles” and personal
choice, but as a product of the contested relation between capital accumulation and responses by
women (and their families) resisting the extra work, paid and unpaid, being pushed upon them
(Folbre 1982). The birth rate in the United States correlates strongly (and negatively) both with
the increase in women’s paid employment (0.89) and with the real level of family income (0.95)
(calculated from Census 2006). The decline in intergenerational reproduction is perhaps offset
somewhat by individually more valuable (because better educated and healthier) workers. How-
ever, despite buying and consuming more commodities, it seems apparent that less value than
before is going into labor-power’s reproduction. The source of this “missing” value is surely con-
nected to decreasing domestic labor.
Meanwhile, the commodification of domestic labor increases employment and changes the
employment structure, increasing the share of marketized services. Predictably, this is also strongly
gendered. Remarkably, the correlation between levels of service sector and women’s employ-
ment in the United States between 1947 and 2001 was 0.99 (calculated from Census 2006). Of
course, not all commodified housework becomes “services.” Food is manufactured. DIY becomes
construction. Nor, although they do so disproportionately, do women perform all the extra
“services.” Nevertheless, the association seems sufficient to suggest that a value theoretic analysis
of the commodification of domestic labor and women’s (re-)entry into paid employment would
contribute to understanding changes in employment structure and deconstruction of the hyper-
bole about the rise of services and “new economy.”
Unpriced, it would be hard to identify the presence of any value within the home were house-
work considered in isolation. However, domestic labor and, in particular, its product labor-power,
is never isolated but continually traded in a competitive capitalist system. This makes it possible
to discern the value of spent labor-power, albeit always after the event. If workers with similar
attributes sell their labor-power in the market, it is irrelevant to capital how this was produced,
whether in a hypothetical world of pure commodity production and consumption or to a greater
or lesser extent through domestic labor. The value of commodified labor reveals that of the
uncommodified. Work is reckoned comparable with that for capital, with how far capital has
gone, not how far (on a long and disturbing list) it might go in commodifying “private” labor. It is
a social and historical construction. Work spent reproducing labor-power can be acknowledged
as value producing without imputing a price to things now considered leisure or done for plea-
sure that might potentially or exceptionally be marketized. Capital tends to transform everything

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Dunn 503

into its business and in doing so reveals value; but this is a process that need not be anticipated,
that can be resisted, even reversed.
Capitalism, strictly defined, co-exists with other systems. Marx indeed dismissed unproduc-
tive labors as “not capital’s concern” (1973: 272). However, capital continually makes many
apparently autonomous realms its concern, but it operates “blindly” and in ways that may be
contradictory rather than self-sustaining. It provokes resistances. To understand the whole pro-
cess, at least to open it to empirical investigation, Marxists need a consistent theoretical vantage
point and concept of value, including that of labor-power itself.

5. Conclusion
The point of theory is to help understand the world and ultimately to inform social practice. This
article accordingly articulates a concept of value that is at once removed from the messy concrete
reality of the money form in contemporary capitalism and from the abstract truism that people
must work. Value is not simply a quantity of work but an objectification of one aspect of labor-
time (Elson 1979: 132); a reflection of the social equivalence of different forms of work, that
becomes epitomized in, but is not confined to, the money economy under capitalism. Capitalism
is an incompletely commodified system. Commodities, and in particular labor-power, are pro-
duced in different ways, using dissimilar monies and commodity inputs in their production and
reproduction. Even the cursory treatment here suggests that interrogating the relationships between
different forms and transformations of work produces fruitful lines of enquiry, which remain
concealed if value is conceived as simple presence or absence, as required by market measures,
whether of liberal or Marxist origin. Value’s basis in notions of “average social labor” remains a
more plausible starting point, and better reflects the centrality of social labor in Marx’s episte-
mology. This average social labor is certainly now substantially determined by capital, even in
all sorts of spheres where a great deal of work actually occurs elsewhere. However, only by rec-
ognizing the similarities and interactions, as well as the differences, between various labors can
Marxists begin to decipher the contradictory dynamics of the concrete capitalist economy.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of
this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.

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Bio
Bill Dunn teaches international studies in the Department of Political Economy at the University of
Sydney. He is the author of Global Political Economy: A Marxist Critique (2009) and Global Restructuring
and the Power of Labour (2004). With Hugo Radice he edited 100 Years of Permanent Revolution: Results
and Prospects (2006).

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