This critique by the German Marxist group GegenStandpunkt traces back the logical errors that marginalism allows itself in its reasoning, and shows how its tautologies become increasingly crass in the development from the theories of Menger, Jevons and Walras up to later concepts such as indifference curves.

In the free market economy everything has its price, from bathing water and cinema tickets to hospitalisation. The freedom given to everyone is that, in principle, money gives one access to all the necessities and pleasures that the market has to offer; its limit is, of course, the amount of money that one has at one's disposal. Poor and rich divide according to how much of that substance they possess, which represents wealth par excellence and is used to quantify their wealth even when it exists in the form of all kinds of material goods. As important as the characteristics of a house may be for its inhabitants, a machine for its user, a foodstuff for its consumer, as unimportant this quality becomes when all objects are estimated on what they contribute to the wealth of a private person or an institution. Then their usefulness becomes a self-evident prerequisite of the price they would achieve on the market, if their sale were pending.

This phenomenon, that all goods have their price and that this has its measure in money, is subjected to a peculiar appreciation in economic science. In rare unanimity, the theorists make use of the comparison with barter, in order to discuss money as a way of solving the difficulties in the distribution of social wealth. The confrontation with the "cumbersome" procedure of getting hold of things that one needs or wants to use in direct exchange of goods for goods makes use of the notion of a production based on the division of labour that is dependent on exchange but that does not have its means available at the moment. Instead of a determination of money and price, this notion without further ado aims at a plausible explanation of the advantages that money has for "economic" people - on the condition that everyone is dependent on exchange, he will hardly be able to close himself off from the services of money, the simple message is. "Money simplifies economic activity," announces Samuelson in his bestseller, and all textbook authors imitate him when they cannot imagine "a high-level economy based on the division of labour", "the functioning of the overall socio-economic process", or simply "markets and prices" without money. If, in addition, they adopt the contemporary comparison with an "authoritarian directed economy", which has taken on the "basic economic problem" of "distribution of scarce goods" with another "possibility", they do not notice that the explanatory character of their discussions cannot be too profound if the same problem, in which they want to have observed the reason of money, causes just as well that unsympathetic coercive management of human individuality. Rather, when looking at the certainly not contemplative matter money they officially give expression to their ideological preferences and interpret the choice of one or the other possibility as a consequence of individualistic or collectivist views of man.

When economists get over the trick of talking about markets, prices and barter, purposefully leaving money aside so that they can draw the "conclusion" that without this means some things would be "impossible", the question remains as to how money manages to fulfil its mission as a means of exchange and unit of account. Information of the following kind is then good scientific custom: "Money is used because others use it." "If a good gets endowed in such a way that it finds general acceptance, it is called money." That's not surprising at all: Whoever identifies the services of money with the need to get away from bartering by means of a general means of exchange and to conduct market economy, is also capable of the psychological continuation of his deduction. The willingness to treat a good as money then clears up everything; and to the well-informed "definition of money", which a German economist of reputation, Erich Preiser, like Samuelson, has mastered - "Money is everything you can pay with" -, the "Great Meyer" can confidently join in: "Money is everything that functions like money." Preiser is aware of the procedure he uses to deliberately avoid explaining money - and notes, in order to instruct his readers, that modern science itself makes an assumption out of the fact that its object exists. The reason: without money there is no market economy - so as before:



We simply assumed tacitly that it is there. This assumption is necessary, but (!) it is also sufficient. It is necessary because the market economy of course could not function without a general means of exchange. Quote:

(Like all other Preiser quotes, taken from "Economics today".)

Since such communications only express explicitly what is contained in the logic of (im)possibility - the means of exchange must exist - the experts of economics tend to constantly emphasize the achievements of prices, which are paid with money, in order to indicate besides the sheer presence of their object still another respectable service:

Stackelberg wrote:

In a market economy, prices have the important function of regulating the strength and direction of the flow of goods.

Thus, long before it is developed into a utility or household theory, economics announces that it appreciates the "market mechanism" or the "competition order"; for the well-known law of interaction, according to which the level of prices determines the relationship between supply and demand and conversely this relationship affects prices. In this law science pays the market the compliment, beyond and without a determination of price, that it leads to a distribution of wealth by subjecting the demand for goods to the solvency of its carriers; just as if economic mankind had encountered the problem of regulating its flows of goods and fell for money to distribute the goods equally by means of a price, economic theory allows itself the assumption of an equilibrium price. A hypothetical category of this kind summarizes the idea of interaction in one term and gives less information about the nature of the market than about the interest of an entire scientific discipline in its functioning. On the basis of the idealism which, in the purchase and sale of goods - whose prices can be measured by the money fortunately available - sees the interest at work to transport all elements of material wealth to where they belong, the realism of economics then arises: On the one hand, their representatives devote themselves to household decisions as factors of price formation, whereby they present "consumer behavior" in a faithful continuation of the dogma of the interaction between supply/demand and price once as the determinant of price (or its level), once as a reaction to price levels. On the other hand, they ask themselves the question of the conditions which would need to be met in the economic world in order to ensure the success of the market in accordance with the task assigned to it. And money also becomes such a condition - and this is because it was considered from the outset to be the means responsible for facilitating exchange and nothing else. The question: "What is money?" economists therefore always translate into a completely different one: "How must money be constituted to carry out its services?" - and by the functions of money they always mean those which they have intended for the means of purchase in the market economy. They present themselves realistically in their questions and answers insofar as they point to generally known phenomena of economic life - inflation, crises with unsaleable commodities, price increases, "imbalances" in other words - in which "problems" that seem to contradict their ideals and call into question the fine effects of the price mechanism come to light. Preiser manages to first discuss quite rationally the "condition" for money to be suitable as a means of purchase, namely with reference to the character of money, which makes it a means at all:



If it is to be used as a means of payment, especially for the purchase of goods, it must obviously have value itself. Because otherwise no one would be willing to give away a good for money - we have experienced such times. Quote:

Here, for once indeed, the "willingness" to accept money is not confused with the definition of money. And even more: Preiser also knows the notion of measurement, the unity of quality and quantity:



But then there's another. The unit of the means of payment is also the indispensable unit of account in which prices are expressed, costs calculated and incomes measured. But the value of economic goods can only be expressed in a measure that itself has the dimension 'value'... Quote:

However, this theorist also does not continue in such a way that he determines the dimension "value", the common measure of commodities and money, according to its quality. As soon as he has established that "money must have value", he remembers that it is also only the practical achievement of money that matters to him, its "purchasing power", which also troubles minds beyond theoretical efforts; therefore, he joins the practical considerations of a money owner, who is heartily indifferent to the "value" of money, but to whom his power to buy goods means everything. Without hesitation, he identifies the success of the purchase with "value":



...it is also clear that this value is not attached to money itself, but is derived from the goods that can be bought with money. In other words, money has a derived, a mediate utility. Quote:

And inspired by this "insight", he recalls the times that he has already experienced, in which the purchasing power of money left much to be desired; from which the "conclusion" can be drawn that at that time the relationship between goods and money, for whose success he strives, had got quite confused:



Whether one gets anything at all for money and how many goods one can buy depends on the amount of money facing the goods. An increase in the money supply with the quantity of goods remaining the same, we can also say: an increase in monetary demand with the supply remaining the same will increase prices, i.e. lower the value of money. This is the content of the so-called quantity theory, which draws attention to the quantity of money, and which is only another expression for the fact that its relative rarity determines the value of money. Quote:

The condition stated here for money to function as a means of exchange is simply: it must be there in the proper measure! This is a very frank farewell to the stage of monetary theory, which claims to provide information on the concept of money, through which the reason and purpose of this economic means would also be grasped. Because the right measure is just as relative as the definition of the monetary value that quantity theory allows itself - it is only in the functioning not only of the market, but of the entire market economy with its manifold conditions, factors and goals that it becomes clear whether money performs the services for which economics constantly congratulates it:



...the creation of money is part of current economic policy. Therefore, the theorist cannot even state what the 'correct measure' is... What is the right measure can therefore only be decided in connection with the overall economic development and all the objectives driven by economic policy, but not within the framework of a monetary theory pursued on its own. We can only say for certain that any deviation from the policy of stable prices is dangerous. Quote:

Thus, economics assumes a price mechanism that functions precisely through price changes and regulates the flow of goods - and casts doubt on this achievement of price if it demands "price stability" from the state in dealing with money. It certifies to money that it circulates the price-determined goods free of all temporal and local barriers, which are complained about in barter, and makes them commensurable - but denies that goods which are commensurable among themselves and with money have a common measure. That money is a means of circulation this science has noticed; to the question through what it is suitable as such, it gives the answer: by supplying the unit of account for prices and mediating exchange. From the fact that economic entities are confronted with the market, price-determined goods and money, it deduces its determination of money. It is needed for exchange - "so" it makes it possible, and that is its achievement. According to this logic, the reason and purpose of price and money is that they correspond to the necessities of an exchange which is imagined independently of them as a need. And as often as money is awarded this invented advantage as its purpose, the authors of this idea think of one or the other case in which this advantage does not come into force or in which "dangers" and "disadvantages of money" become apparent - sometimes prices and money precisely do not allow exchange, prevent it - so that economists are faced with the decision to understand the negative judgement, which is included in their logic of possibility from the outset, either as an argument against their positive deduction of money or the finding that one or the other purchase will occasionally be left undone for a thing external to money. They choose the second alternative and put the blame on the economic subjects, usually immediately the state, for wrong handling of the means of exchange. The success and failure of the transaction, which according to their theories is a matter of money and prices, is then not a matter of money, but of its handling - and this is decided: through the needs and the relationship that subjects establish between them on the one hand (utility theory and theory of "consumer behavior"), and through the quantitative relationship between money and goods on the other (quantity theory). Thus, contrary to all experience and despite the expression of the opposite, the assertion can still be saved that money and price are clever inventions to satisfy the needs which exchange in a society based on the division of labour serves.

Economics tells of a homo oeconomicus who appreciates money because it enables exchange. The physical citizen of the economy gets to know money in a completely different way. He is unlikely to notice the "supply of liquidity" in the coins and banknotes issued by the state. No one is given gifts of money to trade because everything has its price - not even the well-known social benefit in the course of the opening of the FRG, the 40 new German marks bounty, could be misunderstood in this respect. It was clear to everyone that from now on it was important to get as much money as possible, i.e. to obtain "purchasing power". How this was not to be done was made quite incidentally clear by the state in the text of the law which it had printed on the banknotes: "Anyone who imitates or counterfeits banknotes... " That is hardly in keeping with the rumour about those notes which ascribes to them the innocence of a welcome means of assistance. If a state uses its power to make money suitable as a means of exchange, then it certainly does not raise individual needs to the purpose of economic life - rather, it subjects their satisfaction to the solvency of their bearers. On the quantity of the publicly supervised substance that one owns, one's activity in the world of pleasures depends - and in this respect, one may add a small correction to the economic wisdom that money enabled cheerful buying on the bazaars of the market economy. This measure of wealth also calls into question the availability of it a little: After all, the means of exchange which has been forcibly put into operation separates all needs from the objects corresponding to them and allows them to come into play only on condition that the price is paid to the person to whom the objects belong. Admittedly, a theorist who is in love with the "law" of supply and demand and who puts much emphasis on the wisdom that says, "If price is high, don't buy", overlooks very confidently the hard law of private property, which is put into effect with price and money.

This law is very familiar to an ordinary mortal who feels the exploitation of his solvency. In his experience, there is no consolation in the fact that a "price mechanism" in a textbook fashion forces the impertinent seller of a commodity to lower the price as soon as demand leaves something to be desired. In any case, the economic doctrine of harmony with its ideal of balancing interactions cannot help him to get over his limited solvency, just as little as advertising with its ever-same message of cheap commodities: He must ration himself in the purchase of useful goods and services, and he cannot rely on the fact that his forced austerity will come to an end because the suppliers of business articles are fighting over his budget. The fact that there is a contrast between the interests of the seller and those of the buyer is safeguarded precisely by the majority of economic entities, which always use money only as a means of exchange. Even in cases where the buyer is also a businessman and the commodities to be sold are not a means of consumption, no joy about the "equilibrium price" arises. The "result" of supply and demand, the price of the commodities traded, in no way automatically fulfils the economic purpose of those who act as suppliers and buyers. They may not regard the "price mechanism" as a "central control instrument" for the successful distribution of goods, if only because the respective price is intended to guarantee proceeds in excess of costs already spent on the one hand, and is included as a cost in the calculation, which is calculated on the basis of future surpluses on the other. Here the practical question of those involved as to whether they can afford the price that is achieved has nothing to do from the outset with whether the beautiful machines and raw materials also end up where they are needed. Conversely, they are only considered useful if they correspond to the business interest through their price - that is, if they prove to be a means of profitable investment.

As long as the prices of commodities meet this criterion, "the market" is also fine for its beneficiaries and for the theorists who idealize it - and concerns about the dwindling "purchasing power of money" are not raised. Many years of prosperous economic activity come along without complaints from national and economic quarters against the increase in the means of circulation, which is noticeable in the upward movement of prices. Such "merely nominal" increases are registered as a natural consequence of the fact that local and temporal restrictions on solvency by credit are declared insignificant via the banking system operated under state directives; the same applies to the "creation of money", which comes about through the debt of the state: Nobody likes to simply and fundamentally consider the transformation of circulating debt instruments into money and capital as reprehensible. On the contrary: the interested business world approves - like the national economic expert guild - the responsibility of the state for expansion and contraction of credit. The use of sovereign power, which sets and maintains the rules of the "free market economy", naturally also extends to "influencing" the amount of credit available. That the state also covers its financial needs by converting its bonds into business means of banks and private individuals is also something that nobody wants to prevent. The fictitious alternative - "interventions" in the "economy" versus "freedom", from "unhealthy state control" - is a constant hotchpotch in the dispute between the (economic) political camps, but never affects the "elementary" services of power for business. On the contrary, the controversies over the degree of sovereign "interference" compatible with the "economy" and state "misconduct" assume that economic policy - i.e. state action by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, the Ministry of Finance and the Bundesbank, etc. - is constantly taking place and is necessary to support the business.

The complaints about inflation, which is said to have suddenly destroyed a "balance" that does not appear as an end in the calculation of any economic entity, do not deny the right of the authorities, which take extensive care of "money creation" - but the usability of the means they have thrown onto the market. However, this occasion is appreciated in a manner that leaves no doubt about what the dear money fails for. Although the lawyers of the "fight against inflation" like to quote the little man's wallet, they consistently refrain from the obvious call for wage increases. Nobly, they connive over the consummated use of the ever-expanded credit according to state needs; that the inflation they condemn was only caused because the business world made ruthless use of the "liquidity" provided by the state-licensed, offered and controlled credit system is not considered worth mentioning. The practical interest in the market rather puts the warning into the mouth of the disputants against the arch-evil of "inflation" that for the sake of God and the market economy a compensation of the lost purchasing power of "lower incomes" should be omitted. Such a thing, they argue, would be a decisive obstacle to the use of money that is already inflationary for profitable investments. In their sermons on the "factual law" called "wage-price spiral" they openly anticipate the "reaction" which they are authorized to practice. And this without fear that the theorists of the market economy reproach them for the incredibility of the broadly hypocritical concern about inflation. None of the economic teachers likes to claim that neither state authorities nor banks or entrepreneurs exercise the cyclically conjured up consideration for a constant purchasing power of money, that on the contrary they cause the inflation to which they so gladly refer when in their beloved market economy, the much-vaunted "functions" of price and money turn out differently than their idealistic images.

All the more reason for economics to dwell on a "concept" of inflation that is not at all suitable for giving rise to fears. In any case, the change in the level of prices resulting from an increase in the means of circulation, the sheer increase in the numbers that are on the tangible "purchasing power" that must be paid for a commodity, does not in itself disturb a single act of exchange. Nevertheless, the quantitative theoretical accusation of inflation discovers in the changed "purchasing power" of the unit of measure not the fair correction for the increased number of circulating means of exchange, but a danger. This theory reveals a mismatch between a "mountain of goods" and a quantity of money available for purchasing. The inflation made plausible in terms of quantity theory, that balance between number and unit of the means of exchange, does not take place in this way after all: "Improper" exploitation and uneven enforcement cause a disturbance in the "mechanism" of the "unit of account", which theory postulates and "in practice" misses at the same time.

In this "realism", however, the theorists of the market economy do not want to take the oath of disclosure regarding their "statements of laws" concerning money, but rather emphasize that they are committed to the practical concerns that arise for the relevant actors of the market. In any case, scientists do not break with the ideal of the steering mechanism when they turn to competitive behaviour and find that business-minded entrepreneurs calculate with something other than a "healthy" money supply that guarantees an equally "healthy" price level:

Geigant, The Economy wrote:

The insidious thing about price level changes is that they disrupt the market economy steering mechanism itself in an uncontrollable way. Thus, for example, inflation helps areas that are first covered by them to achieve temporary benefits and generate profits that have no steering function. This is because the flood of inflation is always breaking into production periods that have not yet been completed. In this case, the revenues are higher than the costs incurred at the beginning of the production period. Of course, the entrepreneurs register this difference as profits. Only in the following period, when higher costs have to be incurred, do these 'profits' become apparent as fictitious profits. In the meantime, however, the unexpected (?) revenue surpluses may have long since been spent or - as is likely - used up for expansion investments, which turn out to be malinvestments at the latest when the wave of price increases subsides: After all, nothing has changed in the original demand relations. One would have to be blind if one did not see inflation chanting real profits to different people...

That is a cause for concern for a scientist of the 20th century when his highly esteemed steering mechanism is shattered. All the more carefree he reports a discovery that throws a completely different light on the market from which he had created such a coherent picture. Suddenly a measure of economic success appears, which has nothing to do with satisfaction about the successful "exchange of goods" and the wondrous services of money anymore. The fact that purchase and sale have taken place and useful stuff has come into people's possession seems quite naturally a prerequisite and means for certain people to recount their money. At the same time, it is noticeable that they count their money - in other words, do not dream of distributing it among the people so that it can fulfil its function as a convenient means of transporting goods. They even want to keep it, because money constitutes their wealth. If they use it to participate in the market, it is not to get rid of it and to indulge in consumption until they have nothing more of the noble material. Rather, to earn more of it. And because the general buying and selling of goods of all kinds is exactly the right means for that, the respectable businessmen are not angry at the economists either, if they praise the market with nothing but unfounded arguments, without mentioning anything of private property. They are happy to accept the stories of money as a servant of the commodity world, which allows everyone to work their way buying through the mountain of goods. And from a democratic point of view, it also does quite well if the handling of commodities and money, which most maintain, is also presented as the determining purpose of the market. Once it has been made clear, both scientifically and popularly, how useful money is for the change of hands of goods that "one" needs but does not have; once economic expertise has explained its custody of the great steering mechanism and tables up the problems of its functioning; then the theoretical attorneys of the market economy also remember, quite incidentally, that money is important in a very different way than in their hymns of praise for the means of exchange. In the event of market disruptions and complaints about a lack of purchasing power in one household or another, they always know how to identify a "problem" whose solution has to lie close to the hearts of the world as a condition. The "growth of the economy" must succeed, the monetary success of the business must be right if the ordinary exchange is to work. Of course, economists do not want to understand such wisdom as a denial of the unlimited possibilities that money would have made actual. Their transition from an inverted, because plausibilized in the quantity of goods and money, theory of inflation to a disturbed course of business was not meant as farewell to the ideas with which they complimented the means of exchange. Instead of the truth that with money other purposes enter the world of business than the regular supply of man with good things, they want to proclaim something of instruction that reminds of obligation: If the in itself useful steering mechanism, including the distribution of goods organised by it, depends on the growth of money that is privately disposable and reusable for growth - then it is also in the general and economic interest to promote this type of growth.

What economists do not take from exchange, from the price of goods, from money, they are nevertheless aware of. They cite what matters in their beloved world of supply and demand as a condition and aid - for the smooth turnover of money and goods. They reject the thought that it might be the other way around as often as they say it. It is as if it would appear reprehensible to them to admit what everyone knows: that money is not the slave of the turnover of goods, but the master of the world of commodities, and that the market has to take responsibility for the utility of money.

Modern economic theory has prepared a strange guide for itself in its general observations of the market. Its decision to present money as a completely suitable institution takes the task of explaining something from the outset as the task of certifying the functionality of the object of theory. Such a way of thinking pleases itself in the question of what would not work without the thing discussed, considers exchange, as it takes place universally in the market economy, to be impossible without the use of money - and thinks it is already possible to know something with this "demonstration". It even thinks itself very "realistic", as it has been able to refer to a "practical" meaning of money, a plausible "why" that everyone can understand. At least everyone who is as interested in the functioning of exchange as he knows practically that he depends on it. The continuation of this method of pursuing theoretical economy happens very consistently. The whole economy, like exchange with its "pricing", consists of nothing but conditions under which it functions. By this, economists mean "theoretical" (as the saying goes: "only imagined") ratios between economic variables that would have to occur in order to ensure the success of exchange, circulation and growth. The fact that the mathematically constructed models do not correspond to reality is made just as clear as it is insisted that this idealism is on the trail of the practical necessities of the market economy. The dull enterprise of ascribing a "functional" meaning, with its manifold "problems" of theory building, indeed always testifies to the confession to necessities; such problems exist with every function for someone who confuses the explanation with the confirmation of the desirability of his object. Information about the "why" of the matter, about its necessity and thus about its peculiar purpose, however, does not come about in this way. Such a thing is superfluous from the outset, since minds intent on discovering useful services consider any actual or imaginary utility to be a concept. How economists "deduce" utility as the quintessence of money is explained in the following chapters. What they purposefully ignore when examining exchange and reproach others as a metaphysical hypothesis, however, is worth a few extra remarks. They concern the difference between whitewashing and explanation - here first the question whether money is a harmless unit of account or not rather the object of enrichment.

The idea of attributing the "function" of a helpful unit of account to money, which makes the various goods comparable and chargeable against each other via their prices, is in itself a rather dull matter. After all, it makes use of the necessity of a commensurability without wasting an argument on it. The self-evidence with which it is pleaded for is only a reference to the practical requirements of exchange. And the occasionally appreciated procedure of giving a reason with "division of labour" is intended to make the proportions enforced via money plausible, but is only suitable as an argument for a proper transport and communication system within the framework of a plan. In the actually consummated exchange, where not only a money name makes available the sum, which a good is to obtain in case of its change of hands, but is bought and sold, the idea with the unit of account embarrasses itself again. The seller wants to realize his offer, and he is poorly served with the comforting information that the unit in which he, like others, states the price of his stuff, has already been found and fixed. Rather, this unit must be in sufficient possession of the one who is interested in the use-value of the goods offered. Conversely, unlike an economic theorist, the joy of a buyer is not in the fact that commodity prices measure their level in money; for him, the decisive factor is whether the purchasing power he has in his wallet is sufficient to acquire the goods of his choice.

Marx, like his classical predecessors in political economy, has not overlooked these interests and their opposites practiced in ordinary exchange, in the thousands of purchases and sales that make up "the market". And he has corrected two dogmas of the political-economic tradition.

Since the emergence of the discipline, two considerations have been recurrent in the scientific examination of the "market economy", but always in the guise of clues that value the market as an extremely useful institution and the performance of money as indispensable for a speedy economy. Both considerations - the talk of the "invisible hand" that steers the market, such as the keyword "division of labor" - have also occupied Marx, only slightly differently. He did not accept them as justification arguments.

Marx was not as enthusiastic about the compliment Adam Smith had already offered the market as its author and his emulators. It did not make sense to him at all that an "invisible hand" should direct supply and demand and bring about an overall satisfactory result in the social division of labour without the conscious intervention of those involved. On the one hand, already at that time it was not the best "socially" with the excellent results of the market. On the other hand, he did not like the election of a now truly metaphysical subject purely scientifically. From the to and fro of the market he had been able to see that the subjects of exchange endeavoured to buy as cheaply as possible and to sell as dearly as possible; he had also noticed that they were - with varying success - concentrating on keeping and earning as much money as possible. This seemed neither admirable nor surprising to him, since money is characterized by its direct and universal exchangeability compared to the other objects of exchange. And this excellent quality makes it certainly advisable to meet the compulsion for exchange in a world where everything is private property and has its price, with the need for money. That money does not satisfy a single need except for exchange, was as clear to Marx as to those modern citizens who come up with the meaningful slogan that money cannot be eaten. In return, it ensures access to every need for those who have it, and that is why it is the object of enrichment. The concentrated materialism of private property is directed at it, because it represents wealth in a ready witted form.

All this, of course, was and is no reason to make the assumption - even if only figuratively - that a rather unknown subject must be at work in the cooperation and competition of exchange, in which making money is success, which reliably regulates the business. Nor is there any reason to conclude that the relationship of mutual use, as it is maintained in exchange, is of all-round utility.

For Marx, in any case, the question of what it is in the wealth of the world of goods, whose production is calculated on money and whose distribution takes place via money, so that in this general form of wealth it is confronted abstractly with its own measure - separate from the specific utility in each case, from the useful objects of needs. He regarded it as quite crucial for economic science to know what is actually measured and according to which rules, when commodity quanta of the most diverse kind are considered equal to each other through the mediation of money. He did not have two problems in the first place. One was invented by modern scientists. It consists in the doubt that an exchange - the replacement of a quantum of useful stuff by a certain quantity of other "goods" - is a practiced equation in which a measure - the unity of quality and quantity - comes into application. The other concerns the name of the matter to be understood. That was already there, although it does not have anything to do with it. The idea of wealth present in a number of monetary units or in the form of useful things and measured in money was called value.

In examining value, Marx could not overlook the observation to which the idea of the quietly acting but otherwise not quite perceptible subject owed itself. The lovers of the market had only noticed that in exchange God and the world, with their advantage in mind, constantly bring about certain exchange ratios and orient themselves to them; but that no instance can be identified which determines the respective valid proportions. In their actions, the subjects of purchase and sale are constantly dependent on the decisions and means of a myriad of other people, but each of them proceeds in his "business" without any regard for the needs and expectations of the others. A market participant knows that he depends on their "purchasing power" and their offers - but how, and with what consequences, modern and independent private individuals, who take great pride in being so free, leave to the market. It is no coincidence that this has become a decisive authority in modern parlance, to which one can and must always leave something.

Where the idealists of the big picture marveled at the functioning of "the economy", Marx first came to the simple conclusion that the independence with which buyers and sellers set to demanding and offering is based on a factual dependence. Factual, in so far as agreements on needs and their objects, let alone the proportions in which they exist or are necessary, do not determine traffic on the market; rather, the exchangers determine whether and to what extent their decision to buy or sell is successful through the confrontation of money and goods. A subject controlling this process is precisely not discernible, although the results of the confrontation are anything but arbitrary determinations of the parties. In the prices of commodities, a social compulsion asserts itself that sets a measure for the economic interests of the exchangers. Through the market they learn about how much wealth they dispose of; the money they get and which gives them access to any object of their needs becomes the content and measure of their success.

In addition to the story of the "invisible hand", Marx has also paid the attention to the argument "division of labour", which is due to it. Unlike his later critics, he did not really see why an explanation of money should culminate in its praise for the fact that it helps to cope with the due distribution in "an" economy that is divided by the division of labour. After all, in what is sometimes called the "money economy", the necessity of obtaining money determines the way in which people engage in a "labour division". Where exchange mediates the distribution of social wealth, where payment does not manage transport, but does manage a change of ownership, everyone preferably carries the commodities to the market, which mobilise a solvent need. There was no sign of a division of labour that was set up after more or less meticulous consultation and then required money as a calculation aid for regulating distribution, neither in the days of Ricardo and Marx nor today.

Strangely enough, however, modern microeconomics in particular omits its own reference to the connection between the division of labour and the "money economy". For it, the idea of the conspicuous specialisation of the trades, of the resulting "problems", which are thankfully solved by money, is enough. It is not aware of any other necessity that combines the division of labour and money in the "market economy" which it visits; not least because it thinks money and the market away in the division of labour it presents, and then considers labour to be insignificant in the analysis of exchange, even if the market is equipped with nothing else but labour products.

It is not because of Marx's writings, ancient or Hegelian "figures of thought" and the like, if today's economics has so little understanding of the so-called "labour theory of value". The considerations that the critic of capitalism, who is classified as both outdated and harmful, has made with regard to the market are crystal clear; by those who reject them, however, they do not even tend to be reproduced correctly. And this is not the fault of Marx's effort to clarify the peculiarities which wealth exhibits in capitalism, in the determination of the labor product, the commodity.

Firstly, he did not consider it necessary to mention that - if "division of labour" is the great fashion and achievement - the disposal of money can only be secured if one continuously carries saleable goods to market. For the success of market-based dealings cannot be achieved by accidental surpluses through gathering and hunting, which are otherwise concerned with self-sufficiency. An occasional sale of useful finds ultimately has only the result that the quantity of money conquered for it and converted into other goods ends in simple consumption. This raises the question of how participation in the market would be possible again for people concerned with self-sufficiency. Marx preferred to find the correct solution to this "problem" right away and to refrain from Robinsonades. His answer was: If money is already in circulation, production will also be carried out for sale. The beautiful goods were born from the outset for the purpose of acquiring other things that others bring about and offer. They are business articles, use-values for others, which are available with their usability to the needs which can be found in a solvent prospective customer.

Secondly, with the express purpose of producing for exchange, it is also clear that the "goods" mentioned in microeconomics are a rather unworldly invention. They are by no means use-values which offer their manufacturer the alternative of either consuming or using them for himself - or leaving them to others. For him, his own product is essentially non-use-value, a means of acquiring the things whose production constitutes the speciality of other areas of the social division of labour. And whether his commodities perform this service is a question of the price he achieves with them; if there are problems in this area, then so much for the utility of his commodities. But that means nothing else than that the independent producers expose their private productions to a social test on the market. This test concerns exactly the interest that drives the owner of commodities to produce them. He learns from the exchange relationships whether his efforts have paid off - because only the purchase of his commodities decides whether his efforts were also socially necessary labour. This is always the case and to the extent that they are allowed to acquire the products of foreign labour mediated through exchange.

Thirdly, Marx was able to state that when commodities are exchanged for each other, their use-value, the utility they provide to a need, plays only a limited role: Its existence is the condition that others want to acquire a commodity with the results of their labour - whether they actually do it has not yet been clarified at all with this condition of any purchase. They must first have successfully passed the test for their commodities and see what they can do. Working harder and bringing more usable business items onto the market to attract more purchasing power in the form of money - this is advisable, but does not solve the problem that this test creates: Will the commodities also be needed in the quantity, and will they be paid for - with the proceeds from a production that follows exactly the same calculation and usually even takes place simultaneously with several market participants? It was precisely this practical question and its answer by the market that Marx had in mind when he did not even hypothetically state that even the simple exchange of goods is based on a thorough divorce of value and utility; that the name "value" refers to what is considered wealth in the "market economy" and proves itself as such; and that the corresponding test does not weigh up the utility of the "goods", which must always be measured in terms of the need of bodily people, but rather a usefulness which is completely absorbed in the interchangeability with money. This measure compares commodities among themselves according to the effect their proprietors achieve with them and attributes to them as a characteristic what they bring in exchange. The price they have shows what they are worth. And this value determined on the market, determined by competition, makes the ex post judgement about the effort that the labour-divided producers have made to obtain money, the mediated and general product of their labour. They assume that their part of the labour serves the purpose of creating a product transformed into money, so that they get the material wealth they need and want. However, the subjective measure of their performance is only objectively "confirmed" or "corrected" by the market: Thus their labour is the measure of their share in value, this abstract form of wealth that is separate from the usability of commodities, but only to the extent that it proves its social necessity in the interchangeability of its products.

Fourthly, this explanation of fairly well-known market phenomena, which is comprehensible to every newspaper reader (the fact that not only in crises but already in the ordinary competition a lot of use-values are sacrificed to the criterion of value, that thereby some working hours are ranked as a waste of time is a fact with which modern citizens are made just as familiar as with the demand for labour, which is the recipe due for the internal and external competition of the nation, for the upswing as for the recession, because of the order situation and for the "prosperity"), includes a determination of labour, which is important in capitalism with its obligatory quotation marks. It is not a measure of value because of the special processes employed to make a product from all sorts of natural materials with all sorts of auxiliaries which, because of its properties, serves well for consumption or production. This concrete activity is again only the precondition for the products to become interesting for exchange. What is measured when the objective measure of values, money, is used, is labour par excellence; independent of its more or less complicated procedures, of the tools and techniques of the producers. Marx in turn "derived" abstract labour from the equation of labour products in exchange, which earned him much incomprehension. Yet even the truth about the measure, which records quantitative differences of qualitative equals, is not necessary to understand what banality Marx had in mind: Where the genuine purpose of labour is money, it is neither the preference for an activity nor the traditional roots in a trade that matter; change in production, in the industry - or, to put it in terms of workers: conversion, mobility - is the most self-evident "production decision" for any enlightened connoisseur of the market; when it comes to determining which labour is profitable, each is as good as the other or one is possibly nothing at all despite the useful fruits it may bring. In the case of labours that are suitable for the production of value, it is important that they take place as extensively as possible. When the interest in the exchange of labour products, commodities, is directed towards exchanging as many foreign products as possible for one's own, the proportions in which the commodities are finally exchanged compare the socially necessary labours according to the only difference that they are capable of as being abstract - according to time. And that Marx came along with the argument, familiar only to scientists today, that time is the "measure of movement", one may forgive him confidently. Firstly, it is true, and secondly, even the economic expertise of today considers the conscientious allocation and organisation of labour time to be the most important thing.

In the interest of the greatest possible number of commodities for sale, the absolute labour time is decisive for the success on which the production for exchange is aimed. At the same time, it is important to the commodity producers to reduce the relative labour time; whether they have spent, exceeded or undercut the socially necessary labour time per unit becomes apparent in a price comparison of competing offers that are confronted with a quantitatively defined solvent need. The necessity to prove oneself with one's products as beneficiary of the social division of labour therefore includes a tangible contradiction in dealing with the "source of money labour": The value of a commodity increases with the labour time expended on it, but only to the extent that it is socially necessary. In an effort to meet this condition of acquisition, productivity increase, which lowers the value of commodities, is the means in competition to increase the appropriated value - or a compulsion experienced by commodity producers at the constraints of the market.

It is perhaps not pointless to let the statements of "objective value theory" referenced here have their say in the original; for what Marx is criticized for has little to do with his claims about commodities, value, price, money and labour:

Marx, Capital Volume I, Chapter 3, Section 2a wrote:

Today the product satisfies a social need. Tomorrow it may perhaps be expelled partly or completely from its place by a similar product. Moreover, although our weaver’s labour may be a recognized branch of the social division of labour, yet that fact is by no means sufficient to guarantee the utility of his 20 yards of linen. If the society’s need for linen – and such a need has a limit like every other need – has already been satisfied by the products of rival weavers, our friend’s product is superfluous, redundant and consequently useless. Although people do not look a gift-horse in the mouth, our friend does not frequent the market to make presents of his products. Let us assume, however, that the use-value of his product does maintain itself, and that the commodity therefore attracts money. Now we have to ask: how much money? No doubt the answer is already anticipated in the price of the commodity, which is the exponent of the magnitude of its value. We leave out of consideration here any possible subjective errors in calculation by the owner of the commodity, which will immediately be corrected objectively in the market. We suppose him to have spent on his product only the average socially necessary quantity of labour-time. The price of the commodity, therefore, is merely the money-name of the quantity of social labour objectified in it. But now the old-established conditions of production in weaving are thrown into the melting-pot, without the permission of, and behind the back of, our weaver. What was yesterday undoubtedly labour-time socially necessary to the production of a yard of linen ceases to be so today, a fact which the owner of the money is only too eager to prove from the prices quoted by our friend’s competitors. Unluckily for the weaver, people of his kind are in plentiful supply. Let us suppose, finally, that every piece of linen on the market contains nothing but socially necessary labour-time. In spite of this, all these pieces taken as a whole may contain superfluously expended labour-time. If the market cannot stomach the whole quantity at the normal price of 2 shillings a yard, this proves that too great a portion of the total social labour-time has been expended in the form of weaving. The effect is the same as if each individual weaver had expended more labour-time on his particular product than was socially necessary.

What the "objective" value doctrine of Marx does not represent is already easy to infer from this section.

First of all, the political economist Marx has not allowed himself to praise labour, especially not with the argument that labour is the "only" source of value. That his statements about value, its creation and its growth were misunderstood to the effect that he wanted to pay a compliment to the working people and their toil, he unfortunately had to experience with his admirers himself. In his "Critique of the Gotha Program" of 1875, he had no other option than a harsh rejection of his false friends. The comrades immediately took "value" as "wealth" including "culture", thus, despite extensive use of words such as "social" and "historical", they refrained from recognizing the peculiarity of wealth, which presents itself as value - and celebrated labour(ers) statesmanlike. Thus the political economist from the department "labour theory of value" had to clarify several things at once. On the one hand, that nature plays a bit of a "source" for the wealth, and on the other hand, that the idolatry of the labour effort is more in the hands of its beneficiaries than of those who stage themselves as partisans of the workers. Today he would also have to teach ecologists what it means when value as valid wealth has become the maxim of production and business. Maybe he would have quoted himself – "Capitalist production, therefore, only develops the techniques and the degree of combination of the social process of production by simultaneously undermining the original sources of all wealth – the soil and the worker." (Capital Volume I, Chapter 15, Section 10), - maybe he would have just said that it is wrong to make nature an ideal value just because the effect of real value makes it useless for many things.

So Marx did not contradict himself by being an opponent of a way of production that is about value and nothing else, and then worshipping its source, because it is "its only one". Conversely, it has not remained hidden from him that labour does no good to those who do it for the purpose of creating and increasing value. But it was precisely the misunderstanding of his epigones, or contemporaries with a great sense for justice, that the apologists of the best of all societies then attacked. In the certain assumption that criticism of a world where money "reigns" is always based on an enthusiasm for the "value of labour", which does not exist at all, they set about denying labour the sole authorship of the wealth they favor. And lo and behold - people who think value to be huge and malicious fake news have advanced to "factors" that are at least as much responsible for what we love as labour is. As if Marx had not expressed himself adequately in terms of the natural and social conditions "labour" has and must fulfil, old and new smart alecks, all of them filled with affection for the "unit of account" money and the "market mechanism", have come across sources of value: Technology, science, innovation, progress, above all capital and real estate, but also abstention and time have been included in the circle of value-creating substances. And all this only to show that the "market economy" is based not only on labour but also on completely different things! As if Marx had never told anything about abstract, socially necessary and private labour, generations of economists now deny something that "objective value theory" has never claimed, because it is not "subjective": that the effort of an individual determines value, so that commodity prices would result from the daily effort of a worker. Such scholars lecture on Marx according to the criteria of their intentions, accuse him of the most weary "paradoxes" by using the obvious difference of utility and value against the theorist who insisted on their opposition, and bring themselves into play as the scientifically problem-conscious alternative:

Woll, General Economics, Munich 1981, p. 126 wrote:

Some classics, especially David Ricardo, but also his intellectual legacy Karl Marx, claim that the value of a good is wholly or predominantly determined by human labour, because all factors of production go back to labour and can be expressed by it (?). At least these classics saw that the market price does not correspond to the labour value in many cases. They therefore used supplementary interpretations for value formation. Besides "arbitrarily reproducible" there would be "rare" or "unique" goods. In addition (?) a good would have to have a use-value (utility) if it were to have an exchange value (price) on the market. However, not all phenomena could be explained by such constructions (ad hoc statements), especially not the great divergences between use and exchange value. How is it that goods of high use-value, such as bread and water, have a relatively low exchange value? Why, on the other hand, do diamonds have a high exchange value but low use-value? Between both values there is an antinomy (paradox of value), which could not be sufficiently clarified by the representatives of the labour theory of value. In this respect, the marginal utility analysis is a useful tool for brightening up the paradox...

There is nothing true about the representation of the views of Ricardo and Marx. But that doesn't matter. The moral defenders of a market that always helps maximize a very limited marginal utility suspect a moral attack in the "labour theory of value". They consider the discovery that a certain kind of wealth is based on a very peculiar kind of labour to be the beginning of a dispute about who deserves praise, honour and prize according to the costs-by-cause principle. Scientifically, they are completely wrong, because Marx wanted to explain value as it takes place in the equation of commodities and money. Nevertheless, a certain sense of reality cannot be denied in their anti-critical theory. Despite all his lack of a sense of justice, Marx has claimed a discovery with his "labour theory of value". Value and its explanation showed him that money defines a relation of production that is no good. For most people.

Although the market creates the "inclination to money", it does too little to satisfy the need for abstract wealth as a simple exchange in which everyone tries to realize his labour products. The fruits of one's own labour are simply unsuitable for enrichment, which has as its object the general equivalent. The money acquired through their sale is first of all only means of circulation, i.e. it is spent again for the purchase of the required goods, which populate the market as foreign products and foreign property. Its multiplication is only possible through more labour and/or reduced consumption. And these two procedures are clearly at odds with their purpose: The increase in one's own efforts and abstention of all things present themselves as the path to wealth! By saving, the "household", as it is called in microeconomics, seeks to acquire abstract wealth, but precisely without using it to help itself in the world of commodities. And an increased labour performance does not open up the realm of freedom, which should ultimately come about with the disposal of as much money as possible. Quite apart from the fact that solvent demand always makes its weighty judgement about the effort to sell more products. After all, unsaleability or falling prices remind us that the socially necessary labour time makes up value; Increased productivity of labour, which allows "inexpensive" and in this way superior products compared to the competition to be manufactured, is based on the purchase of means of labour, so that the good simple commodity producer struggles with his property in order to maintain himself - but is far from comfortably disposing of money…

Such alternatives and their failure are not only theoretical constructions. They take place and the calculation never works out because they have nothing to do with the real purposes of the market. There is no such thing as a "market economy", in which exchange is worth the trouble. It is precisely in this kind of economy, which makes labour the sole source of the wealth which it accumulates in the form of value - with money as its general representative - that there are by no means only identical, free and secret owners of commodities and money who alternately buy and sell what they have created and call their property. All the measures and "practical constraints" defined by the law of value are in force, but only because labour and property are thoroughly separated.

In substance, it is completely irrelevant whether this separation is presented as a logical consequence of the explanation of value - as with Marx - or whether one theoretically accounts for how the increase of wealth takes place in a society in which even its most ardent supporters identify "socially weak people" in the shadow of corporate balance sheets, the latter being seen as the success criterion of economic development. In any case, there is no need for a flaming confession to Marx's "labour theory of value" to state that

the market includes a large number of extras working to get money;

these people are obliged and willing to produce something saleable, but do not dispose of the means of production themselves;

so that they sell their services for a fee to others who, as proprietors of a business, also call the products their own;

the sale of which secures or is intended to secure an increase in their wealth;

which makes the "non-independent" workers reliant on the business success of their users for their livelihoods

and get to feel the contradictory determinations of the law of value: Extending of labour time, intensification of labour, changing productivity through new means of labour - and above all making their services superfluous, because they are not suitable for any socially necessary labour...

Strangely enough, not only practitioners of the "market economy" but also their scientific interpreters at the universities not only perceive these circumstances, but also take sides for them without further ado. They generously renounce the explanation of their necessity by declaring them to be a necessity. That labour must be profitable, that this profitability appears in the balance sheets of a company and is not to be confused with the usability of the products is loosely proclaimed as a "practical constraint"; what follows from this for wages and performance is a matter of course to them as lawyers of the "economy", and they discuss the inevitable consequences in matters of poverty, health, environment, etc. as "problems". Their mature ideas become entirely social in the face of unemployment. Via this misery of their contemporaries, who depend on wage labor but are not needed for lack of profitability, they become aware of the misery of the welfare state funds on the one hand, and the virtue of those they call "employers" on the other. From the dependence on property they only deduce obligations for "employees" and "unemployed" towards the iron measures of the "economy", whereby they provide its only " argument " - money - completely (un)impudently with the dignity of a quasi-technical requirement.

Where such conceptless partisanship passes as science, the theoretical conclusions Marx presents from the analysis of commodity and money appear rather dull. However, the good man meant to criticize political economy into the ground when he made the following considerations:

If the purpose of exchange, as well as the production that supplies the market, is value; if the concrete wealth and its production, use-value and its consumption are subordinate to the realisation of value, then money also commands labour.

The circulation of commodities-money-commodities, which simply ends in consumption, testifies in two respects that it is not about providing necessities of life. First, the indifference of the labours and products towards the needs of the individual is an indication that a "market economy" has made nature subservient in all possible forms, i.e. has emancipated itself from natural necessities in the sense of "mere provision", of survival; on the other hand, payment is a condition and a barrier to consumption. And yet this exchange of commodities mediated by money does not offer a means of enriching oneself with the money that makes all the abundance available.

The ideal of the market has its banal reality in the circulation of money-commodities-money, through which money owners make the market subservient by spending it in such a way that it multiplies. One thing, of course, is indispensable for this: they must buy the source of value itself, so that labour creates value, but not for the one who does it. Then the one who has enough money to buy means of production and labour-power comes to a growing fortune. According to this, Marx baptized his book "Capital", which logically also describes how the separation of labour and property came about. Only so much can be revealed here - the production of surplus value really has nothing to do with microeconomics - that the need to serve foreign property for lack of own means of production for a wage has not arisen from wastage. Just as little as capital is a fruit of abstention.

That the market is a means of capital, that money defines a relation of production that somehow gives rise to all those things which "socially critical" thinking, both right and wrong, complains about, modern economics teachers do not want to discover, although they are vehemently in favour of it. As long as they concern themselves with commodities and money, before they enter the "production theory" and devote themselves to "factor analysis", they do everything to praise price as the most exemplary of all means of distribution. Their doctrines about value do not become very objective by this, but their rejection of Marx becomes all the more subjective.

Häuser, VWL-Funkkolleg, p. 152 wrote:

With the new theory based on marginal utility, the doctrinal building of economics was put on new foundations and the subjectivist theory of value was founded. The school of marginal utility has replaced the value and price theory of classical economics, which until then had almost dominated the field alone, and has relegated the works from A. Smith to J. St. Mill and K. Marx to the older departments of the libraries. Only the convinced Marxists did not participate in this development.

Provenly independently of each other, Stanley Jevons in England, Carl Menger in Vienna and Leon Walras in French-speaking Switzerland made this fundamental change in a short period of time starting around 1870, reinventing principles of a teaching that a then completely forgotten Heinrich Gossen had drawn up 30 years earlier, ignored by the scientific community. In 1840 the need for a "subjectivist value doctrine" seems to have been small, in 1870 it was so urgent that every economist could and had to create it for himself, so to speak.

The nature of this need is not only no mystery to today's economics teacher: If Häuser knows today that the question of Marxism is decided by this conversion and the willingness to do so, the first advocates of the school of marginal utility, some of whom had not even taken note of Marx' economic writings, had opposed English classical economics, whose analysis of commodities and price, capital, interest and ground rent had led to criticism of the market economy not only by Marx. Especially theorists, who by no means saw themselves as critics, had provided arguments of criticism of the capitalist mode of production with an unbiased investigation, which were actually used by their students with critical intent.

All classical attempts to explain what the "wealth of nations" (Adam Smith's subject and book title), which is measured in money, consists of and how it functions, dealt with the peculiarity of the goods produced as commodities determined for exchange, i.e. to create in a certain proportion the disposal of other commodities and services. This "ability" of the commodity, the purchasing power placed in it, was unanimously explained by the labour expended in commodity production, which as a common quality makes the different and thus non-comparable consumer goods commensurable and in certain quantitative proportions equal to each other.

What remained quite unnoticed at first was what this insight contained: a wealth that has its measure in the labour expenditure grows only in the degree of effort that was spent on producing; it precisely does not consist in the ease with which working humanity obtains the necessities and pleasures of life, but requires exactly the opposite; it is that society that is the richest, where as many people as possible work continuously - at the most modern level of production, of course. At the same time, increasing the productive force of labour on a social scale makes neither the working day easier nor the working people richer; because where the use of labour becomes superfluous, the value of the commodities produced decreases; their producer has - on average - won nothing. Thus the absurd law applies that man, whose labour effort is embodied in the created product, does not become richer if he achieves more in less time; at best he is temporarily better off in competition with his peers. He is not the beneficiary of his productivity; he makes himself the servant of the value that exists in the commodity and is absorbed therein.

However, this criticism of capitalist wealth only became clear to Marx. To the classics of political economy, commodity value and money appeared to be a form of social wealth that was as natural as it was harmless; for precisely this reason, however, they could not avoid a "problem" that they did not completely evade: If value consists entirely of expended labour, where does entrepreneurial profit, interest and ground rent, which are also paid from the commodity value, come from, as well as the wage? Is it possible that the worker is being scammed from of the full profit of his labour there? This problem made a lot of sense to the socialists. They saw themselves scientifically confirmed in their suspicion that the working class was being treated unfairly and did not receive the appropriate remuneration for its performance. This was not an objection to a social wealth that consists and counts in objectified labour; they wanted to have a civil-moral fight over its distribution. That is why they did not take the insight from Marx' value doctrine that labour, if it is the substance of the measure of wealth, is then a means to be exploited by a foreign wealth, but they read the law in reverse and announced programmatically - the SPD for example in the Gotha programme of May 1875 - with some pride: "Only labour creates value!" or "Labour creates all value!"

In "Capital" Marx has explained to what extent objectified labour and wages are two different things and how and with what necessity the limitation of the worker faces a growing wealth distributed among entrepreneurs, lenders and landlords. His criticism of capitalism is therefore somewhat more radical than the call for a "fair wage for a fair day's work". Capitalism did not occur to him as fraud; that is why he did not - as the socialists, who seem to have taken up the claim to the full commodity value in political practice - consider the fight against and state containment of capitalist fraud to be the correct response of those affected to capitalist relations of production. But this difference didn't interest the scientific and political opponents of the entire socialist "swamp" as much as it does today.

In any case, in their "refutations" the innovators of economics felt no need to distinguish anything or even to distinguish Marx and the classics he criticized. They already thought it was completely intolerable that the scientific explanation of commodity value should already mean a theoretical questioning of all important institutions of their splendid mode of production and could justify doubts about the legitimacy of bourgeois wealth. The identity of explanation and criticism did not let them rest as responsible producers of understanding. There had to be a view of the economy that did not immediately lead to criticism.

The methodical postulate of the new theory was the separation of criticism and theory. Theory should "understand" its object on the basis of basic principles, i.e. present it as "reasonable" in principle; criticism was the assertion of a position which had nothing to do with explanation, i.e. which could only owe its existence to a prior and inappropriate partisanship. Where they notice criticism as a consequence of a theory, the innovators simply denounce theory as a product of a willingness to criticize:

Böhm-Bawerk wrote:

"Smith and Ricardo, the great authorities, as was then at least believed, had taught the same doctrine…

(the "favourite philosophical thought of labour as the true source of value")





and as an ardent socialist he Quote:

(Marx)





willingly believed in them. It is not surprising that he did not take a more sceptical attitude with regard to a view which was so well adapted to support his economic theory of the world than did Ricardo, to whom it must have gone sorely against the grain. Quote:

Clear case: If the theory of "labour as the true source of value" was "suitable" to support socialist "worldviews", then people who do not like socialism must look at the matter the other way around! Even 20 years before Böhm-Bawerk, Jevons, who did not know Marx, knew how to justify his work with a commission: Only

Jevons wrote:

when, casting ourselves free from the Wage-Fund Theory, The Cost of Production doctrine of Value, the Natural Rate of Wages, and other misleading or false Ricardian doctrines…

, we will





arrive at a true doctrine of wages. Quote:

- a wage theory that finally knows no difference between wages and profits anymore.

The accusation of previous partisanship, which Böhm-Bawerk so gladly distributes, he himself does not seem to fear: He openly argues against a theory because of the politically undesirable consequences. Since then, the school of marginal utility has explicitly understood itself as a weapon against Marxism; since then, attempts to explain the commodity value have also been considered socialism in economics and justify incompatibility decisions.

The rejection of an entire finished science for anti-critical intent presented itself with good reason as a problematization of the classical explanation of the commodity value: Here, the fundamental attack on doubts about the integrity and philanthropy of the capitalist "market economy" was to be led. For the renewers of political economy, this was, of course, an imperative of pure critical research spirit - even if they give a clear insight into what actually annoyed them when they were annoyed by the doctrine of price:

Menger wrote:

It was mainly the inadequacy of the prevailing price theory and the closely related theories of wages, ground rent and interest on capital that challenged reform efforts in the field of economic theory. The explanation of the price phenomena by the theory that the quantities of labour expended on the goods respectively (!) their production costs regulate the exchange ratio of the goods had to prove to be contrary to experience and incomplete in the face of more serious criticism. There are a large number of things which, despite the labour expended on them respectively the high production costs which they have caused, only achieve low, possibly no prices, while conversely high prices are often obtained for goods which nature offers us without cost.

a)

"Contrary to experience and incomplete": This is the "factual" objection of the founders of modern economics against the classic explanation of prices. Triumphantly they discover a lot of deviations from the price catalogue, which in their opinion should follow from the "labour theory of value". And they do not even notice how embarrassingly this argument contradicts their intention of proof.

Their love is firstly for prices that result from exceptional situations and their business exploitation:

Jevons wrote:

Bread has the almost infinite utility of maintaining life, and when it becomes a question of life or death, a small quantity of food exceeds in value all other things. But when we enjoy our ordinary supplies of food, a loaf of bread has little value…

It is precisely this explanation which an economic theory would have to deal with; and with examples that are expressly outside economic normality, little can be found out about it. The fact that in Shakespeare someone wants to give an entire kingdom for a horse is not only due to poetic freedom, but above all because the good man was not on a horse market. The same applies to the second favourite of the old microeconomic polemic: Products that are not produced for the market, not from an economic point of view, not reproducible in any quantity, and attain their price on enthusiast forums:

Jevons wrote:

The mere fact that there are many things, such as rare ancient books, coins, antiquities, etc., which have high values, and which are absolutely incapable of production now, disperses the notion that value depends on labour. Even those things which are producible in any quantity by labour seldom exchange exactly (!!) at the corresponding values.

Hint number three - "seldom exactly" - almost equals the admission that the derivation of the prices from the labour expended on the product actually does justice to the empiricism of the critic, which is polemically brought into play: "mostly pretty much" is, among empiricists, already quite a lot! And what, fourthly, is put forward as the reason for very numerous, serious and above all necessary "deviations" merely illustrates the moral aphorism that things usually turn out differently from what man thinks, and polemicizes against a position that really no classic of political economy has ever defended, namely against the invented view that chance would have lost its right in speculation and in the spheres of competitive vulture of all things:

Böhm-Bawerk wrote:

Value and effort are not ideas so intimately connected that one is forced immediately to adopt the view that effort is the basis of value. That I have toiled over a thing is one fact, that the thing is worth the toil is another and a different fact… It is proved by all the labour which is daily wasted on valueless results, owing either to want of technical skill, or to bad speculation, or to simple misfortune.

If errors and misfortune do not allow the equivalence of "effort" and "value" to come about, then it is not the invalidity but the validity of this connection that is proven; because where the disproportion is explained by economic failure, economic success and the right balance of effort and return obviously belong together. This is the contradictory thing about the "empiricism" in which the critics of the "labour theory of value" feel so strong: The enumeration of necessary deviations between "labor value" and price cannot prove their disparity in principle, because the correspondence of both quantities is assumed, namely as the normal case from which "deviation" is made. The contradiction of taking the "empirical" exception as a rebuttal of the rule without further ado testifies only to the will not to accept the claimed rule and, taken seriously, means the anti-scientific rejection of any economic law of prices, their level and their movement.

b)

However, the attempts of modernization do not even affect classical, let alone Marxist, theory. With their "empiricism" they do not refer at all to the explanation of the commodity character of the goods produced and to the scientific deduction of the wealth measured in prices to objectified labour. With their references to a frequent discrepancy between paid price and "actual" value, they rather pretend as if their predecessors had wanted to determine the justified, true amount of each commodity price with the argument of labour expenditure and present a price list - of which a Jevons can then triumphantly say that it is "seldom exactly" fulfilled.

This attitude to the cognitive efforts of the classics is a document of the fundamental decision not to get involved in scientific studies of the category "price" in the first place; but it has a second, almost tragicomic side. What they are running against is the idea of prices that are well-founded – in whatever way - by the production process; Menger explicitly equates "the quantities of labour used on the goods" with their "production costs". Here, however, they no longer polemicize against the theory they want to refute; they strive against an economic triviality that is neither a correct nor an inexperiential one, but not an explanation of anything at all, but the calculative practice of entrepreneurs and merchants: The costs must at least come in and a surplus too, otherwise the business has not been worthwhile, and the sale at an unrivalled low price is not made. In this way, production costs are included in the setting of prices without any theory whatsoever; and the modernists also know this fact as the normality to which they always refer with their discoveries of numerous deviations - it is familiar to them in this way from the business calculation. But because they cannot distinguish it from the "labour theory of value" of the old, they would rather immediately deny the - conceptless - fact itself, the explanation of which they are so annoyed by, and do everything to present the prices, around which the whole "market economy" revolves, first of all as the most unfounded economic date conceivable at all, as a measure without any content and objective reason.

Thus Jevons fights against the word in which classical theory and also Marx have expressed the social reason of prices and their movement, the peculiar content of the wealth of commodity-producing societies. For him, "value" is an "ambiguous" and "unclear concept; the "misleading power of the term"

Jevons wrote:

thus led to speak of such a nonentity as intrinsic value.



The only thorough remedy consists in substituting for the dangerous name value that one of three stated meanings which is intended in each case. In this work, therefore, I shall discontinue the use of the word value altogether. Quote:

Of course, this language hygiene is of no use to him at all, especially since he does not adhere to it himself at all. Jevons' attempt to show that the value is nothing more than an external relation of one product against another, that there can be no intrinsic value to the product, turns into pure self-refutation: So one should not

Jevons wrote:

speak of such a nonentity as intrinsic value"; but "the word Value, so far as it can be correctly used, merely expresses the circumstance of its exchanging in a certain ratio for some other substance.

If the exchange ratio is purely random, then it is also not a characteristic of a commodity to exchange itself in a certain ratio; but if it is a characteristic that determines its "purchasing power" versus other commodities, then one would have to ask what this characteristic consists of, which, as Jevons also knows, must be different from its properties as use-value:

Jevons wrote:

Thus it is scientifically incorrect to say that the value of the ton of iron is the ounce of gold… The more correct and safe expression is, that the value of the ton of iron is equal to the value of the ounce of gold…

Here Jevons himself says correctly and aptly that gold and iron have value, which is different from gold and iron properties and which determines their exchange ratio to each other - only: What is this value? Jevons says it immediately afterwards:

Jevons wrote:

Value in exchange expresses nothing but a ratio, and the term should not be used in any other sense.

Where Jevons moves from the appearance of exchange ratios to the interesting question of how it is determined, where he arrives at the statement of a "power" of the commodity, on which depends how much other commodity it buys, he goes back to the starting point: He sees a ratio - it must not be explained. Menger goes to work even more thoroughly. He denies the obvious: the equivalence of various useful goods realized in exchange, which Jevons at least acknowledges - and which had brought the old political economists to think that in an economy of commodity exchange the material wealth - value - would probably have to be determined somewhat differently than by the concrete goods as such. Menger thinks this is a mistake:

Menger wrote:

But this led to the unpredictable disadvantage for our science that researchers in the field of price phenomena focused on solving the problem of tracing the alleged equality between the two quantities of goods appearing in exchange to their causes... while such an 'equality of value' of two quantities of goods (an equality in the objective sense) does not exist in reality at all.

Menger argues that if the goods exchanged were in fact equivalents, purchases and sales could be reversed at any time and with the same right,

Menger wrote:

whereas experience has shown that in such a case neither of the parties would normally agree to the cancellation of the transaction.

The learned man really noticed that buyers and sellers always pursue conflicting interests: One wants to realize his commodity - dearly - the other wants for his money - cheaply – use-values; he has found out through diligent observation that both "counterparties" usually do not switch sides immediately after the transaction has been completed and carry out the same transaction in the opposite direction; and that is enough argument for him to deny the triviality that there is equivalence in the price demanded and in the amount of money given. He is acting as if the equivalence of exchanged goods had to be seen as such a nonsense of identity that a difference between buyer and seller could no longer be established and a completely pointless merry-go-round of exchange and re-exchange would have to be the rule; as if not exactly the economic equation of services and products that were not identical at all had made the old price theorists think.

c)

This sophism cannot be excused by stupidity; Menger wants to focus on a fundamentally new kind of problem for his discipline, which safely avoids critical thoughts about social wealth from the outset.

Menger wrote:

A correct theory of prices cannot therefore have the task of explaining that alleged 'objective' 'equivalence' between two qualities of goods which in reality does not exist anywhere, but must be aimed at showing how the concrete goods have a certain (subjective) value for each economic subject, how the relationship in which the individual goods stand in this subjective appreciation is very different, depending on the diversity of the economic situation of the particular economic individuals, how, furthermore, as a result of this circumstance, the basis for economic exchange operations between different persons arises and how, finally, in their quest to satisfy their needs as fully as possible, economic people are led to actually give up goods, and certain quantities of them, against each other.

A "correct price theory" must therefore first and foremost ascertain the uneconomic nature of its object, the unobjectivity of the measure of social wealth, which the - demanded and paid - prices are after all, by putting the most universally subjective, the individual's arbitrariness dependent on all kinds of circumstances, at the beginning of its considerations. Everything in the "market economy" revolves around the price - precisely for this reason it is by no means meant to mean anything for labour, which creates wealth, but, taken quite fundamentally, represents a free, unsubstantiated heart-flow of the people striving for satisfaction of needs, namely derives from their taste and appreciation. The polemic against the old "labour theory of value" is thus also elevated to the factual starting point of economic science and the programme is designed to derive the principles of commodity production from the desires of the people involved in it. In its most primitive elementary form, the apologetic lie that in capitalism, in principle, everything is done according to the wishes of those involved, is presented as if science had found its first and most fundamental object in this moral dogma.

Well, then nothing can go wrong anymore.

The intention to derive prices and market-economy exchange from the subjective evaluations of the participants presents itself as a transition to psychology and also wants to be understood as such: Modern microeconomics aims at a "perfectly natural way of testing and proving, viz., the psychological" and

Böhm-Bawerk wrote:

investigate the motives which direct people in carrying on the business of exchange and in determining exchange prices on the one hand, and on the other hand which guide them in their co-operation in production.

a)

Now it is undoubtedly possible to find out which situation assessments and interests business people and wage earners develop in dealing with the "market economic" institutions and customs, which morals and which crude sorts of materialism fill their thoughts, how they fall for speculation or overtime as a "solution" to urgent financial problems, etc - when there is the production of commodities for the market, the all-round dependence on money and a system of prices for everything and everyone once. The other way round, however, nothing ever comes of it: The arts of civilized opportunism, which deliver the material to psychology, are not the reason for the conditions in which the various subjects have to prove themselves. They allow a great deal of conclusions to be drawn - and thus prove that wages, price, profit and other beauties of modern commodity production are anything but the natural, appropriate instruments of an individuality completely at its own discretion.

In fact, the innovators of economic science do not even make the promised change of subject to an analysis of the subjective motives that motivate a contemporary to participate; to an examination, which is different from researching the matter, of what people think and expect when they participate in "market events" depending on their economic position. They certainly want to conduct political economy, in other words, they want to teach the reasons and laws for the known achievements, means and "practical constraints" of modern economic activity. Their reference to the rules of the exchangers is dictated and guided by the intention to "derive" exchange as the original need of man acting casually according to his very own values. This intention is the whole idea - and it is therefore a single circular conclusion of the most embarrassing kind.

"Man", who is driven to exchange, is constructed by the inventors of microeconomics with the aid of the trick of presenting a figure from the picture book of bartering, but as if bartering does not even exist yet, which at best produces such ridiculous creatures:

Jevons wrote:

Imagine that there is one trading body possessing only corn, and another possessing only beef. It is certain that, under these circumstances, a portion of the corn may be given in exchange for a portion of the beef with a considerable increase of utility.

Now it is clear from the outset with a "trading body" that it wants to exchange and thus wins; otherwise it would not have procured its grain quantities at all in such a one-sided way and overshooting quantity. So more extreme examples are needed to prove that basically everyone, no matter under what economic conditions he grew up, is a Jevonsian "trading body":

Menger wrote:

Let us now decide (!) that a hunter would have a large surplus of animal skins, i.e. fabrics for clothing, but only a very small supply of food, so that his need for clothing would be fully provided for, but his need for food would only be provided for in a very inadequate manner, while the opposite relationship would prevail for a farmer next to him.

Really idyllic: Each of them needs something he doesn't have and has something he doesn't need; and this out of a whim of nature or a carelessness of one's own distribution of labour, because exchange should precisely be invented, production should not have been carried out in advance for exchange. What could be more obvious then than - to exchange?

With this downright silly reflection , the fathers of microeconomics want to have discovered and derived nothing less than the essence and the true content and purpose of exchange as such.

Menger wrote:

The above case in which the reciprocal transfer of goods of value to one of the two exchanging parties, i.e. without any economic sacrifice, can better satisfy the needs of the two than would be the case without such a transfer, is, however, suitable to bring the essence of that economic relationship to our consciousness in the most illuminating way. However, we would take a much too narrow view of this relationship if we only wanted to limit it to those cases where a person has at his disposal quantities of a good that are greater than even his full needs…

The "essence of that economic relationship" is the stupidest compliment imaginable to exchange: With it, both sides are better off than before - if the interest of exchange partners has been attributed to them beforehand! And this "determination of essence" should not suffer at all from the additional reflection that many feel compelled to exchange without having a surplus, a possession beyond their needs: The idea of mutual advantage is broad enough to cope with any blackmail as a subset of the idyll of market economy.

Jevons wrote:

Every person whose wish for a certain thing exceeds his wish for other things, acquires what he wants provided he can make a sufficient (!) sacrifice in other respects. No one is ever required to give what he more desires for what he less desires, so that perfect freedom of exchange must be to the advantage of all.

Jevons wrote:

He who pays a high price must either have a very great need of that which he buys" (look at that!!), "or very little need of that which he pays for it; on either supposition there is gain by exchange. In questions of this sort there is but one rule which can be safely laid down, namely, that no one will buy a thing unless he expects advantage from the purchase; and perfect freedom of exchange, therefore, tends to the maximising of utility.

The pure fact of the exchange economy becomes proof of the usefulness of exchange and the correctness and conformity of prices with people's wishes. Exchange must be advantageous - would people otherwise exchange?

b)

In their circular "derivation" of exchange from its usefulness - for people who are underhandedly determined as character masks of exchange - modern economists refer quite freely to what they are familiar with from the market economy and its commercial transactions. On the one hand, they exploit the "matter of course" that useful goods are produced as private property, but not for the concrete needs of the proprietor, but for his business interests, which are only fulfilled in exchange on the market - or not. For commodity producers the principle applies - with exceptions... -, that they gain by selling their commodities; because this realizes the sole and only purpose that the commodities have for them. On the other hand, the naturalists of human exchange behaviour do not want to know anything about this very special determination of the purpose of commodities - and a production of private property for exchange. They present the matter as if there were still nothing else at all in the middle of the most modern exchange trade than the primal human need for useful goods, and as if there only constantly arises the complication that one wants what the other has, perhaps even has left. They pretend that the 100 pairs of shoes that the shoemaker produces each month are considered to be his means of consumption, but are of little use as such, because he needs at most a pair of them; so that he always gives them with advantage for the sausage, which he did not procure and which therefore enjoys his greatest appreciation. That the 99 pairs of shoes would also have been useful to the shoemaker as footwear, but unfortunately only little: this is the fiction with which the dogma is to be confirmed that in principle all those involved can only benefit from exchange and that this is its purpose and "essence". Unfortunately, this fiction "proves" actually a little too much, namely the advantageousness of every exchange; the shoemaker also wins when he gives up his monthly work for a sausage and only starves to death a week later. However, the utility theorists do not yet admit that production for exchange is something else than a rather one-sided individual satisfaction of needs and exchange as they know it, something other than a balance of useful goods between many private individuals who have gone far beyond their aim at work to meet their needs in an article. Acknowledging that commodity production has its own specific purpose in exchange would mean acknowledging that general exchange does not have its reason and purpose in private needs as such, i.e. it simply emerges from the primal "motive" of satisfying needs.

The circular reasoning from the individual, which in the teaching of microeconomists naturally begins with the attributes of the exchange partner, to exchange as an intelligent, absolutely useful natural product of the individuals thus only comes about through a contradictory picture of exchange and of the exchange partner: Commodity production, as it is, is overheard the dependence of all parties involved on exchange as the supreme purpose of the whole matter; but it should precisely not be a matter of dependence on the market and the business purpose governing it, but rather of striving to satisfy one's own needs better with useful goods than these goods themselves could provide for their owner. And this calculation certainly works on the basis of the absurd idea of a rather small usefulness of the goods in private property which were actually not produced for one's own concrete use but for sale and thus indirectly as a means of purchase.

c)

The fathers of modern economics in any case are happy and proud of their results: the grandiose proof that the balance of plus and minus, of renunciation and profit, is always positive in exchange. As if they had examined 