Anti-Duhring, Part II, Political Economy. V – Theory of Value - Part 13 of 28

The use, by Duhring, of the phrase “overcoming of resistance” is, also, false, but serves a specific purpose for him.

“Why all this childish perversion and perversity? In order to pass by means of “resistance” from the “production value”, the true but hitherto only ideal value, to the “distribution value”, the value, falsified by force, which alone was acknowledged in past history:” (p 241)

What this means is this. Marx, building on the theory of Smith and Ricardo argues that the value of a commodity is equal to the socially necessary labour-time required for its production. Smith and Ricardo ran into a contradiction and dead end, because they did not distinguish the commodity labour-power from the value-creating process, labour. As a result, they could not explain why a worker who undertakes 10 hours labour, and so produces 10 hours of new value, receives as wages for that labour, only the equivalent of, say, 5 hours labour, i.e. their wages buy commodities/wage goods with a value of only 5 hours, leaving the capitalist with a surplus value of 5 hours, in the form of profit, which they share with the landlord as rent, the money-lender as interest, and the state as tax.

As Marx set out in Theories of Surplus Value, this led Smith to abandon the Labour Theory of Value, in favour of a cost of production theory of value, and its this that Duhring also advances in his own confused manner. Smith's argument is that the LTV applies up to the point where landed property and capital come into existence. At that point, in order to undertake labour, the labourer must have access to land, and that land is in the possession of landlords who will only allow its use in return for rent. (Note that Smith sees that the land – which has no value – does not add any value to the value of the commodities produced on it.)

Similarly, once capital exists, the labourer must have access to it, in the form of workshops, machines, materials, and so on, which are in the possession of the capitalist, who will only allow them to be used if the labourer pays to do so in the form of the capitalists' profit. As commodities, all of these elements of capital, unlike land, do have value, which is transferred to the value of the commodities they produce. But, the profit, then, still exists as a separate amount of value, in excess of the value of these commodities that form the capital. It is an appropriation of part of the value created by labour, as the price of the capitalist making it available for use.

The value of the commodity, then, becomes, for Smith, a summation of these different revenues – wages, profit, rent, interest – all of which are based on the “natural price” of these different factors of production, the amount the labourer requires to supply labour, the landlord to supply land, the capitalist to supply capital. As Marx notes, in fact, Smith moved between this cost of production theory of value and the labour theory of value. Unlike Smith, however, Duhring never recognises any period prior to the existence of landed property or capital, because his theory is based on the primary role of force.

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