And Man is forced to acquire new productive forces, precisely because of that operation of The Law of Value as a Natural Law that drives him to raise productivity, so as to expand the quantity and range of use values produced with any given amount of social-labour-time. Yet, its clear that Roberts does not understand this fundamental basis of the theory of historical materialism residing in The Law of Value, as a natural law, driving on this continual search of human societies for higher levels of labour productivity, which brings about these technological changes that produces new productive forces, which, in turn, creates new social relations arising upon them. Instead, Roberts wants to restrict The Law of Value solely to the realm of capitalism. Indeed, he wants to restrict the categories of value and surplus value themselves solely to capitalism, which undermines the whole basis of Marx and Engels theory of Historical Materialism! He says,
“In my view, there are two great scientific discoveries made by Marx and Engels: the materialist conception of history; and the law of value under capitalism - in particular, the existence of surplus value in capitalist accumulation.”
Firstly, Marx makes clear that The Law of Value is a natural law, and so not at all restricted to capitalism. To do so, would itself limit the theory of historical materialism to being merely an explanation for capitalism. That was the argument that was made by Mikhailovsky, for example, that Marx's theory had not been “proved”, because he had only applied it to an explanation of the development of capitalism, rather than any other social formations. Lenin demolished that idea, in his response to the Narodniks in “What The Friends of the People Are”, demonstrating that, whilst it was true that Marx, in Capital, had only devoted his attention to showing how the theory makes it possible to explain the evolution of capitalism, on a purely materialistic basis, this does not at all change the nature of the theory as a means of analysing the evolution of all human societies. It is simply up to others to utilise it, to analyse, in similar ways, the development of slave society, the Asiatic Mode of Production, Feudal Society and so on.
Secondly, if value is a category only applicable to capitalism, how then do we explain Marx's analysis of the commodity production that took place for seven thousand years prior to capitalism? That commodity production and exchange is premised upon first products – produced by tribes and communities – having individual value, that is subsumed within the market value of those products, when different communities bring them to market, in competition with each other, and that this market value, then becomes the basis of the exchange value of those products, as each type of product, is brought into an exchange relation with others, in the process, thereby, transforming the product into a commodity.
As Engels put it,
“We all know that at the beginning of society, products are consumed by the producers themselves, and that these producers are spontaneously organized in more or less communistic communities; that the exchange of the surplus of these products with strangers, which ushers in the conversion of products into commodities, is of a later date;”
(Engels, Capital III, Supplement on Law of Value)
And, he quotes Marx's analysis,
"The exchange of commodities at their values, or approximately at their values, thus requires a much lower stage than their exchange at their prices of production, which requires a definite level of capitalist development.... Apart from the domination of prices and price movement by the law of value, it is quite appropriate to regard the values of commodities as not only theoretically but also historically antecedent (prius) to the prices of production. This applies to conditions in which the labourer owns his own means of production, and this is the condition of the land-owning working farmer and the craftsman, in the ancient as well as in the modern world. This agrees also with the view we expressed previously, that the evolution of products into commodities arises through exchange between different communities, not between the members of the same community. It holds not only for this primitive condition, but also for subsequent conditions, based on slavery and serfdom, and for the guild organization of handicrafts, so long as the means of production involved in each branch of production can be transferred from one sphere to another only with difficulty and therefore the various spheres of production are related to one another, within certain limits, as foreign countries or communist communities."
(ibid)
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