Marxism and the Problem of Values: An Approach (1)

Abstract

The problem of the development of a Marxist-Leninist theory of value, and the need for a precise and rigorously scientific definition of the subject matter to be investigated, its conceptual apparatus and individual categories, and the determination of the place of these categories in the system of scientific knowledge, are matters which present themselves in connection with a number of pressing problems now engaging the attention of many Marxist philosophers. By no means of least importance in this regard is the fact that these questions occupy a very prominent place in contemporary bourgeois philosophical and sociological literature. The various bourgeois axiological theories that now exist, which include not only "value concepts" (theoretical systems) but "value approaches" (questions in the methodology of investigation), deal with a large range of social problems - political, economic, socio-psychological, ethical, esthetic, religious, and others. These problems are distorted by bourgeois ideologists in idealist fashion, while their interpretation increasingly acquires an anticommunist tone, and continues to exert a stultifying influence on millions of philosophically unsophisticated persons in capitalist countries.