An Axiomatic Approach to Marxian Political Philosophy

Over forty years ago, Joan Robinson (1942, p. 22) wrote: no point of substance in Marx’s argument depends upon the labor theory of value. Voltaire remarked that it is possible to kill a flock of sheep by witchcraft if you give them plenty of arsenic at the same time. The sheep, in this figure, may well stand for the complacent apologists of capitalism; Marx’s penetrating insight and bitter hatred of oppression supply the arsenic, while the labour theory of value supplies the incantations. In particular, Robinson’s point applies to the theory of exploitation, which was the centerpiece of Marx’s analysis of capitalism. He developed the theory of exploitation in Volume I of Capital, with a model postulating the labor theory of value. (It was there assumed that prices of commodities are proportional to their embodied labor contents, their ‘values’) But exploitation of workers by capitalists, in the Marxian sense, remains true even in more intricate models where prices are of the usual market clearing sort, and are not proportional to embodied labor values. While Robinson understood this in 1942, the point has now been accepted by all but the most dogmatic writers, due to its elaboration in a series of mathematical models developed in the last fifteen years.1