Three essays on Marx's value theory

97 Pages·2013·0.401 MB·English

by  Amin, Samir

Three Essays on Marx’s Value Theory
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THREE ESSAYS on
MARX’S VALUE THEORY
bySAMIR AMIN
MONTHLY REVIEW PRESS
New York
Copyright © 2013 by Samir Amin
All Rights Reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Amin, Samir.
Three essays on Marx’s value theory / by Samir Amin.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 978-1-58367-424-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Labor theory of value. 2.
Surplus value. 3. Value. 4. Marxian economics. I. Title. II. Title: 3
essays on Marx’s value theory.
HB206.A45 2013
335.4’12—dc23
2013031467
Monthly Review Press
146 West 29th Street, Suite 6W
New York, New York 10001
www.monthlyreview.org
5 4 3 2 1
Contents
7
I. Social Value and the Price-Income System
65
II. The Surplus in Monopoly Capitalism
and the Imperialist Rent
79
III. Abstract Labor and the Wage-Scale
91
References and Complementary Readings
95
Notes
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i. Social Value and
the Price-Income System
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(cid:90)
. I first read Marx when I was
I BEGIN WITH A PERSONAL NOTE
twenty years of age and then reread him every twenty years at
moments that corresponded to major changes in the course
of history. I read him in 1950, when hidden behind the East-
West conflict and the first Southern awakening was taking
shape, revealed in the 1955 Bandung Conference. In 1970,
as director of the African Institute for Economic Develop-
ment and Planning (IDEP) in Dakar, I formed the project of
making Marx a focus for training and discussion that would
contribute to radicalization of the way forward opened by
the African and Asian peoples’ reconquests of their inde-
pendences. In 1990 the problem Marx could give guidance
to was to know what could be salvaged from the shipwreck
of the twentieth century’s historic socialism. In 2010, with
the implosion of the capitalist system that had declared itself
the “end of history,” Marx’s work opened possibilities for
new ways forward whose outcomes are yet to be discovered.
My readings at each of those moments were directed by my
concern to respond to the current challenge. And every time
I discovered that Marx was coming to our aid with incompa-
rable power, though obviously on the condition of extending
the radical social critique he had begun, rather than to be
content with exegesis of his texts.