Value Form Quotes

“This is what the bourgeois political economists have done: they have treated value as a fact of nature, not a social construction arising out of a particular mode of production. What Marx is interested in is a revolutionary transformation of society, and that means an overthrow of the capitalist value-form, the construction of an alternative value-structure, an alternative value-system that does not have the specific character of that achieved under capitalism. I cannot overemphasize this point, because the value theory in Marx is frequently interpreted as a universal norm with which we should comply. I have lost count of the number of times I have heard people complain that the problem with Marx is that he believes the only valid notion of value derives from labor inputs. It is not that at all; it is a historical social product. The problem, therefore, for socialist, communist, revolutionary, anarchist or whatever, is to find an alternative value-form that will work in terms of the social reproduction of society in a different image. By introducing the concept of fetishism, Marx shows how the naturalized value of classical political economy dictates a norm; we foreclose on revolutionary possibilities if we blindly follow that norm and replicate commodity fetishism. Our task is to question it.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1

“The physiological homogeneity of human labour was a necessary presupposition of the social division of labour, but only at a determined level of social development and in a determined social form of economy does the labour of the individual have the character of a form of manifestation of human labour in general. We would not be exaggerating if we said that perhaps the concept of man in general and of human labour in general emerged on the basis of the commodity economy.”
― Isaak Illich Rubin, Essays on Marx's Theory Of Value

“Every commodity has value in so far as it incorporates
socially necessary labour time, and is the outcome of a social process
of production. It enters the process of exchange as a bearer of value.
This is the sense of Marx's remark that, `the act of exchange gives to
the commodity converted into money, not its value, but its specific
value form'. /Capital, /vol. I, p. 103. [MECW 35, p101]”
― Rudolph Hiferding, Finance Capital: A study in the latest phase of capitalist development