Michael Roberts' Fundamental Errors, I - Value, Labour and Labour-power - Part 1 of 4

Michael Roberts' Fundamental Errors

In an article in The Weekly Worker, Michael Roberts makes a series of fundamental errors, which go a long way to explaining the other errors he has made, over the years, in relation to his understanding of Marx's theory, and his application of it to the analysis of capitalism, today. 

Unfortunately, my letter to the WW, in response to Roberts was severely butchered, out of all recognition, but that gives me the opportunity to significantly expand on it, here, which I will do in a series of posts over the next few weeks.

Roberts' article is a review of a book by Ahmet Tonak and Sungar Savran. I must begin, by saying, therefore, that I have not read their book, and this critique is not in relation to their book, but only of Roberts' errors elaborated in his review of it.

I - Value, Labour and Labour-power

Roberts' first error, for a Marxist, is a school boy howler, and if you can't get this right, then you cannot get anything else right that flows from it. He says,

“... the classical economists recognised that value in an economy was created by human labour-power”.

I have set this out in my book.

This is wrong on numerous levels. First of all, the classical economists did not recognise that value is created by human labour-power. Indeed, they had no category of “labour-power”, only of “labour”, which is why, as Marx demonstrates, they ended in an irreconcilable contradiction. They recognised that value was created by human labour. The Classical economists did not distinguish between labour and labour-power, and this failure to do so led to the fundamental contradiction in their theory, which led them in to a dead-end, which resulted in Smith abandoning the Labour Theory of Value, and adopting a cost of production theory of value. Ricardo did not follow him, but failed to address the fundamental contradiction in which that left him. It also led to further contradictions in his theory, which, in turn, led to the dissolution of his School, as his followers such as McCulloch, attempted to resolve those contradictions, by essentially ditching his teachings, to do so, as Marx sets out in Theories of Surplus Value.

Marx's great advance in economic theory was, precisely, in making this distinction between labour, and labour-power, which resolves the fundamental contradiction faced by Classical theory, which meant that it could not properly explain the existence of surplus value, or, more correctly, of profit. So, secondly, Roberts' in claiming that value is created by “labour-power”, rather than by “labour”, makes the same error as Smith, Ricardo and the Classical economists, but in mirror image, because they correctly claimed that it was created by “labour”, whilst failing to distinguish it from “labour-power”. If anything, Roberts' version, is, therefore, worse than theirs. It is, basically, the same position that was put forward by Proudhon, and addressed by Marx in The Poverty of Philosophy, and by Duhring, and tackled by Marx and Engels in Anti-Duhring.

The Classical economists, at least, understood that value is created by human labour, i.e. the act of labour, itself. As Marx and Engels note, they had the ingredients required to, also, explain the existence of surplus value, had they put them together, and made the distinction between that act of labour, which creates value, as against the labour-power of the labourer, which is, itself, a use-value/product/commodity, and, consequently has its own value, quite separate from the value created by the act of labour. Had they just followed through on their argument, Marx and Engels note, and realised that the specific labour-power of each labourer is a use-value/product/commodity, and so has its own value, determined by the labour-time required for its reproduction, the contradiction in their theory would have disappeared.

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