Marx's "Phenomenology" Of Value

Abstract

One of Marx's Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of lBIM is a short paper entitled Private Property and Labor in which Marx attempts to account for the realization that labor is the subjective essence of private property and labor. In brief, what Marx attempts is a history of the emergence of the labor theory of value. Both Marx's persistent claim that what he is talking about is a subjective essence and the curiously neat division into three stages by which he discusses that emergence (Mercantilism, the Physiocrats, and Adam Smith) led me to suspect that there was something of an Hegelian dialectic at work here, and, more specifically, that an analogy could be drawn to Hegel's use of dialectic in The Phenomenology of Mind. The claim I wish to make is that the Mercantile system of economics corresponds roughly to the state of mind described as consciousness in Hegel's The Phenomenology of Mind in that the mercantile economists 1) were unaware of themselves as doing economics, but nevertheless 2) fostered a general policy that served the purpose of social unification (that is, no policy of that period was justified by appeal to a general theory of Mercantile economics; in spite of that, there was policy, and it was economic). The Physiocrats represent the position Hegel called self-consciousness in that 1) the Physiocrats were the first writers on economic topics who were aware that what they wrote was economic theory, and 2) they were aware of the role of labor in producing wealth but did not fully understand it. Adam Smith, then, would correspond to the third general position in Hegel's Phenomenology, reason, in that he was fully aware of labor as the sole source of wealth; his identification of labor and wealth corresponds to Hegel's identification of subject and substance. Thus, what I am attempting in this article is, first, an interpretation of an article by Marx, and, second, an exercise in the application of dialectic to the history of ideas.