Theories of Surplus Value, Part III, Chapter 20 - Part 79

Money, therefore, arises naturally, as a physical manifestation of the third term, the thing that all commodities have in common. i.e. value, or a quantity of social labour-time. 

“Mr. Bailey, with his queer way of thinking which only grasps the surface appearance of things, concludes on the contrary: Only because, besides commodities, money exists, and we are so used to regarding the value of commodities not in their relation to one another but as a relation to a third, as a third relation distinct from the direct relation, is the concept of value evolved—and consequently value is transformed from the merely quantitative relation in which commodities are exchanged for one another into something independent of this relation (and this, he thinks, transforms the value of commodities into something absolute, into a scholastic entity existing in isolation from the commodities). According to Bailey, it is not the determination of the product as value which leads to the establishment of money and which expresses itself in money, but it is the existence of money which leads to the fiction of the concept of value.” (p 145) 

Historically, the search for value is based on money, hence the theories of the Mercantilists and Monetary School. And Smith, in going beyond those theories, attempts to discover a definition of value in some invariable commodity, which can act as its measure, much as a definite length of metre was sought to act as a constant unit of measurement. Bailey has, in fact, shown that such an invariable measure is not required. If exchange-values are measured in grams of gold, it does not matter that the value of a gram of gold varies, because it varies in equal proportion to every commodity whose value it, in turn, measures. 

But, having shown this, he thinks he has, thereby, done away with the question of the search for a definition of value, and measure of value itself. Bailey elaborates this argument over hundreds of pages. The basic line is that value is exchange-value and nothing more than the relation between commodities, is the same as was set out in the “Verbal Disputes”. However, this idea that value only exists as exchange-value, and only comes into existence with commodity production and exchange, or worse, only with capitalism, put forward by Bailey, can also be found amongst some modern Marxists. 

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