Critique of Heinrich’s Value-Form Interpretation of Chapter 1 of Capital

Abstract

The fundamental critique presented in this chapter of Heinrich’s interpretation of Chapter 1 of Capital is that Heinrich mistakenly argues that the subject of Marx’s analysis in Chapter 1 is not the commodity, but is instead an “exchange relation” between two commodities, which he interprets as the abstract end result of exchanges between the two commodities and money on the market. I argue, to the contrary, that acts of exchange on the market are not considered at all until Chapter 2 (“The Process of Exchange”). And I argue that there is no convincing textual evidence to support Heinrich’s unusual interpretation of “exchange relation” as the subject of Marx’s analysis in Chapter 1. This chapter also reviews Heinrich’s interpretation in each of the four sections of Chapter 1 and concludes that there is no convincing textual evidence to support the following key propositions of his interpretation: value does not exist in production, but exists only in exchange; the “common property” of commodities means that commodities possess the common property of value only in exchange; concrete labor is reduced to abstract labor only in exchange; commodities do not have a “dual character” in production, but acquire a dual character only in exchange; socially necessary labor-time depends not only on the labor-time required to produce commodities, but also on the relation between supply and demand in exchange. Thus Heinrich implicitly misinterprets Marx’s theory of value to be about disequilibrium market prices. This chapter concludes with substantial textual evidence that Marx’s theory of value is about normal equilibrium prices which are the “inner laws” of capitalist production and which are determined solely by socially necessary labor-time in production.