My exploration of the concept of value was sparked by disappointment and wonder as I listened to various people mention the word “value.” Wonder at the sheer ignorance or indifference of what value was supposed to mean, and disappointment at what it ended up meaning. The word value, as in values, always seemed to me to be far more important than what was often implied in phrases like “value proposition” or “value added,” i.e., a path to profitability.
However, historical research has proved my expectations wrong. The search for a comprehensive theory of value in political economy soon leads to Adam Smith and the so-called labor theory of value. The theory has been widely criticized and has long been considered obsolete by today’s mainstream economists, especially since Karl Marx used it in his analysis. Reading through the original formulation of Smith’s theory in “The Wealth of Nations,” however, one striking revelation is that, name aside, it is not about labor at all. It is about commodities.
In Smith’s own words, “The value of any commodity,” which was the subject of his inquiry, “to the person who possesses it, and intends not to use or consume it himself, but to exchange it for other commodities, is equal to the quantity of labor which it enables him to purchase or command” (emphasis mine). Smith documented the emergence of a new mode of production in which goods were produced not to be used or consumed, but to be exchanged. In this system, capitalism, the value of commodities in their exchange for other commodities equals, to put it bluntly, the amount of labor their owner can exploit. In this sense, value in capitalism is, by definition, nothing more than an avenue to valorization.
The pitfalls of this worldview are twofold. First, the exploitation of people’s “toil and trouble,” in Smith’s terms, no longer raises any ethical concerns. It is a rational act, perfectly in keeping with the logic of the system. Second, it makes other forms of exploitation less visible. Most importantly, since trees and air particles rarely strike or protest (at least in the conventional sense), the exploitation of nature is not even considered a worthy factor of production. The results of this rationality and selective blindness, two centuries later, are loud and clear. Our sense of value remains trapped as we run out of people and natural resources to exploit. First, we need to understand how value is created through the common exploitation of workers and nature that unites them.