Speaking out: How organizations value and how value organizes

Abstract

‘There is no alternative!’, declared British prime minister Margaret Thatcher three decades ago. The bald statement, repeated ad nauseam, became neoliberal mantra. It seeks to universalize and naturalize an ethical framework that privileges market value to the exclusion of other values. This ethical framework—or value system—determines the way in which organizations value human actions and, hence, the way that (market) value organizes human relations—or labour. Value is the form that labour takes within the capitalist mode of production. So claimed Diane Elson in an essay published in the year of Thatcher’s election. ‘The value theory of labour’ (Elson, 1979) was an intervention into a lively Marxist debate on the ‘labour theory of value’ and the ‘law of value’. Elson was criticizing on the one hand, those who suggested that Marx’s theory of value was a proof of exploitation and, on the other, so-called Sraffians or neo-Ricardian Marxists, who sought to explain exchange-value or price magnitudes according to some quantity of (abstract) labour ‘embodied’—or ‘congealed’—within the commodity. Marx’s value theory was not a theory of price, she argued: labour magnitudes do not determine price (and nor do they determine explotation). In contrast, Elson’s approach runs not from labour to value, but from value to labour. Thus we should understand Marx’s theory as a theory of labour, a value theory of labour, a way to help us understand the way that work in capitalist societies tends to be organized and indeed imposed.