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With the rise of classical political economy, Smith and Ricardo critiqued the physiocrats on the basis that burgeoning industry could not be accounted for within a framework that placed all productivity in the hands of agriculture.¹⁵ But this merely replaced the active agent in a similarly productivist appraisal of value. For Smith, value represented the time spent by workers in producing the object in which their labour is realized as productive. For Smith, labour was unproductive only when it did not result in an amount of value proportionate to that required to enable workers to subsist. The necessity of some other quantity through which this subsistence could be secured was what led Smith to conceptualize the role of the surplus in characterizing capitalist production. Workers who drew on the surplus to survive, as well as merchants who merely moved goods rather than created them, fell foul of this divide between the productive and the unproductive.¹⁶ Government, too, fell foul of this ideological distinction, the political consequences of which still cascade through capitalist societies today.

But Smith’s innovation was to retain an order-bestowing ‘substance’ embalmed in the product, associated not with direct labour itself but the cost of the inputs that contributed to a given thing’s production.¹⁷ Smith, for instance, demarcates unproductive labour that ‘consists in services, which perish generally in the instant of their performance’ – a live musician, for instance – from that which ‘fix[es] and realize[s] itself in [a] vendible commodity which can replace the value of the wages and maintenance’ of the labour expended in its production.¹⁸ For Smith, value comprised the so-called ‘natural’ prices of three elements: labour (wages), land (rent) and capital (profit). This has influenced political and sociological approaches to class which associate different classes with the different forms of capital or wealth they possess, and the relative productiveness and unproductiveness this implies. Smith’s approach forces us to question the social and political basis by which different groups benefit from the production of certain goods, undermining the apparent neutrality of economic value and ascriptions of worth. But this line of enquiry cannot overcome the circularity it conceals, almost fatal to its capacity to explain value. Wages, rents and profits are themselves prices expressing a value that must itself be explained, a requirement Smith tries unsuccessfully to absolve himself of with reference to the ‘natural’ value of labour, land and capital. Smith does not establish the ‘value structure’ behind the cost of production – the historical determination of the value of labour, land and capital, and the particular form in which this value is expressed in wages, rent and profit.¹⁹ In this way, Smithian approaches, right up to present-day pseudo-critiques of the inequities of class society, focus on the distribution of the different kinds of input and revenue drawn from by different actors and class, precisely without considering what needs to be explained: the underpinning, historically specific, class relations mediated in these forms of wealth.²⁰ Whilst Smith captured the class-oriented character of the constitution of value, the underpinning relations were situated not in any social or historical specificity, but rather in a state of naturalized and ahistorical eternity.²¹

Moreover, whilst acknowledging the stratification of society necessary to the system of commodity production, and recognizing the ‘significance of labour’ in his theory of production costs, Smith incorporated labour only insofar as it cast producers as simple owners of commodities who enter the marketplace eager to exchange commodified portions of their own embodied, objectified labour with others. This process was not contextualized within capitalist society, but seen as an expression of ‘direct barter, the spontaneous form of exchange’ intrinsic to the human experience.²² In this ahistorical and asocial fashion, Smith’s analysis centred on the commodity as its key principle, labour’s significance relating only to its role in commodity production and exchange. Hence, it is not as simple as saying a labour ‘substance’ determines value in exchange, but rather there is a two-way process in which the one depends upon the other. This introduces a profound ambivalence in Smith’s value theory.²³ The value of a commodity expresses the labour embodied in it, whilst at the same time positing the amount of labour its production commands from the labour marketplace – an apparent exchange of equivalent amounts of objectified labour Smith took at face value. Lacking an effective mechanism for explaining the ‘determining social matrix’ behind this state of affairs, Smith’s approach was ‘confused’ and ‘tautological’, and ultimately unsuccessful in its attempt to ‘overcome the problematic’ of value.²⁴ It was left to Marx to confront capitalist society as the ‘immense collection of commodities’ Smith describes, and to uncover the secret of labour power concealed within.²⁵

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Smith’s contradictions constituted productive contributions to the emergent field of political economy by spurring others to step in and solve them. The circularity of the cost-of-production approach acted as an effective heuristic for Ricardo, who was more successful than Smith in highlighting the potential political and social factors and consequences behind the appearance of value in price. Just as Smith’s value theory was based on an ahistorical natural propensity to truck, barter and exchange on the part of humanity, Ricardo also established a naturalistic basis for his theories in the eternal exchange-value-producing character of labour itself. As Marx writes, ‘Ricardo’s primitive fishermen and primitive hunter are from the outset owners of commodities who exchange their fish and game in proportion to the labour-time which is materialised in these exchange-values.’²⁶ But, in viewing industrial capitalism as a qualitative realization of these eternal tendencies, Ricardo at least recognized the historical specificity of how a surplus is produced at the level of the employment relationship. Whilst Ricardo holds to the conceptualization of labour as the source of value, by ‘conceding to capital a systematic influence on price … irreducible’ to labour, he introduces an antagonistic class basis to the value of the things around us, where Smith had only offered harmony.²⁷ Later, Marx picked up this thread and ran with it.

What Ricardo highlights is the analytical potential of the cost-of-production approach once its circularity is broken. The cost-of-production approach posits no metaphysical abstract order behind value; its virtue is that it takes at face value the price of inputs and relates them to the value of their output. By leaving open the huge logical blindspot of how the inputs acquire their value to begin with, this perspective leaves the field free for inquiries into the constitution of the value of inputs through historical, social, political and ethical processes and modes of contestation, including hierarchies, tastes, laws and customs. The value of the cost-of-production approach, therefore, lies in its circumvention of abstract inquiry in order to root value in a ‘skeptical empiricism that looks no farther than those social relationships of power, morality, and perhaps even reason as the basis on which social continuity is grounded and persists’.²⁸

Ricardo, more so than Smith, held to a labour theory of value whereby ‘the value of a commodity was strictly proportional to the amount of labour time necessary to produce it’. Around this central position, Ricardo, like Smith, set up a productivist divide between nascent industrial production and apparently anachronistic rent-seeking activities, much along the lines of those today who criticize the purportedly ‘false’ economy of the finance sector in favour of the so-called ‘real’ economy represented by industry, or the ‘rentiership’ of platform firms upon the commonwealth of online sharing and cooperation.²⁹ For Ricardo, rent-seeking noblemen did not produce or reproduce value but merely acted as an unproductive drain on the surplus, or, at best, where merchants and financiers were concerned, redistributed existing value between themselves.³⁰ On this point, Ricardo is a good example of where value theory has a real political impact. His critique of ‘unproductive’ sectors of the economy was influential in the transformation and development of the British state away from aristocratic remnants of the feudal mode of production towards the increased power and dynamism of industrialists.

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The substantialism of Smith and Ricardo is open to critique on several fronts. Well-worn objections note how the value of ‘old furniture’ and ‘old masters’ is entirely independent of labour.³¹ Indeed, even freshly manufactured products on the market cannot have their value read-off from the amount of embodied labour-time expended in their production, because otherwise ‘the capitalist who employed the most workers and the least machinery would make the most profit’.³² A similar argument is wagered on the basis of utility theory. If twice as much labour contributes to the killing of a beaver than that of a deer, then the beaver will exchange at twice the price of the deer. But this can only hold in the presence of ‘maximizing behaviour’ in the first place, ‘whether imposed by scarcity or social conditioning’, and the necessities of social reproduction inherent in this behaviour impose certain structures of value regardless of the labour expended in the production of the good at hand. Moreover, for the ‘deer–beaver exchange rate’ to function at all requires ‘a prevailing disutility of labor’, insofar as labour is experienced not as a ‘positive pleasure’ but an ‘onerous task’ that must be rewarded in exchange.³³

Searching deeper into the foundations of embodied labour theories of value, institutionalist Thorstein Veblen associated the flawed ‘conservation principles’ that informed substantialism with the role of scientific developments in the intellectual life of contemporary society. Veblen sees substance as akin to a kind of ‘economic energy’ that underpins the ascription of ‘equivalence’ and ‘equilibrium’ to the ratio between the expenditure of force in production and the return achieved in the market. This rests on the inappropriate assumptions that ‘the orderliness of natural sequence’ bestowed by energy conservation in the natural sciences can be applied seamlessly to the social world, and that the scientific principles in themselves capture the reality of the natural world – when they themselves were in fact surpassed by a relational ‘field’ understanding of energy.³⁴

The flaws of applying conservation principles to the relationship between value and embodied labour as an order-bestowing force become clear when one considers the issue of price. For substantialist theories of value, labour acts as a means by which things are moved from the natural sphere of pure use value to the market sphere of exchange. But the price its products attract in the market is the only means by which the purported ‘order’ that labour grants becomes clear. This price can only become apparent with the buying and selling of the goods labour transforms as commodities. Thus, the basis of value in labour is revealed only through a sequence of circumstances that have little to do with labour itself and everything to do with ‘the adventitious circumstances of relative scarcity and utility, in which labour plays no role’.³⁵ Whilst, according to this reasoning, Ricardo was correct to exclude from his considerations of the labour theory of value scarce, rare and non-reproducible items, the wider substantialist tradition has tended to advocate a metaphysical approach to value as something embalmed in objects, regardless of price.³⁶ But the notion of labour somehow ‘embodied’ in an object is itself an abstraction, a ‘mental convenience’ that renders labour ‘homogeneous when plainly it is not’. In this way, Ricardianism, in common with all substance theories of value, ‘impose[s] upon empirical “facts”’ theoretical models that bring order, coherence and plausibility to the immediate appearances of phenomena, rather than engaging in the ‘theorization of real-world processes’ themselves.³⁷ In so doing, the surface appearances are taken to represent the entirety of the phenomena itself.

This is not to diminish the considerable impact of substantialist approaches to the labour ‘embodied’ in commodities. The ‘calculation’ of exchange ratios and rates of profit using input–output figures owes its conceptual foundations to some notion of a substance of value embodied in things themselves. Such a mathematics of value relies upon the judgement that ‘the value of a commodity [is] determined by the physical data relating to methods of production rather than vice versa’, focusing on ‘the determination of value rather than the determination by value’. But, ultimately, this fundamentally misinterprets the directionality of the relationship between labour and value, insofar as ‘it is only through the exchange of products that individual labours are commensurated’ and the labour-times socially necessary for their production established. The substantialist embodied-labour perspective, when channelled through the formulas of input–output, ‘understand[s] values as mere derivatives of physical quantities required for production’. However, as we will go on to see, ‘the social quantification of production requirements’ is in actual fact ‘posited in the value abstraction’ itself.³⁸