Labor theory of value

Yet the precise grounds of the position he occupies among socialists is a more complex problem than is usually assumed.

His theory of value is no more than a formidable adaptation of a concept already worked out in full by a group of English predecessors.

Men like Harrington and James Madison realised, hardly less clearly than he, the significance of the materialist interpretation of history.

His appreciation of the fact of class antagonism had been anticipated in detail by Saint-Simon.

Authoritarian and materialist in both outlook and temper, there was no real contact between Proudhon and himself.

Marx, moreover, was a trained scholar, to whom the luxuriance of Proudhon's speculations was never an adequate substitute for fact.

he was able without difficulty to show that Proudhon understood neither the theory of value nor the process of production.

At bottom, as he insists, Proudhon had done little more than urge, first that labour was the source of value, and next that riches and poverty coexist.

This goes back to Adam Smith and to Ricardo.

They have a labor theory of value that they develop.

They don't have this notion of socially necessary when they say labor time, so we'll get into that.

And Marx is going to develop a whole other series of distinctions from a distinction between labor power, the capacity for labor, and labor, the actual concrete act, afterwards.