• Isaak Rubin ⋅ « Content and form of value » ⋅ Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value 12 04 17

    Can one find the concept of content of value in this sense in Marx’s work ? We can ans­wer this ques­tion affir­ma­ti­ve­ly. We remem­ber, for example, in Marx’s words, that « exchange-value is a defi­nite social man­ner of expres­sing the amount of labor bes­to­wed upon an object » (C., I, p. 82). It is obvious that labor is here trea­ted as the abs­tract content which can take this or that social form. When Marx, in the well-known let­ter to Kugelmann of July 11, 1868, says that the social divi­sion of labor is mani­fes­ted in the com­mo­di­ty eco­no­my in the form of value, he…

  • Isaak Rubin ⋅ « Content and form of value » ⋅ Essays on Marx’s Theory of Value

    Earlier, when value was trea­ted sim­ply as labor and was not given dis­tinct social cha­rac­te­ris­tics, value was equa­ted with labor on one hand, and was sepa­ra­ted from exchange value by an abyss on the other hand. In the concept of value eco­no­mists fre­quent­ly dupli­ca­ted the same labor. From this concept of value they could not move to the concept of exchange value. Now when we consi­der value in terms of content and form, we relate value with the concept which pre­cedes it, abs­tract labor (and in the last ana­ly­sis with the mate­rial pro­cess of pro­duc­tion), the content. On the other…