Objectivism next to

Objectivism vs Marxism: value, and who made it

One of these two describes a real experience of work and explains it with a theory that does not hold. The disagreement is not about whether the experience is real.

Starts atEthics, and a theory of history. Two levels at once. At ethics, on what makes a thing valuable and therefore on whether profit is a return or a theft. And at a theory of history, on whether the unit that thinks and produces is a class or a person.

What it actually says

Two claims, and it is worth keeping them apart, because one is a theory of history and the other is a theory of value.

The history. What a society believes — how it organises law and family and religion — follows from how it produces and who owns the means of production. Change the mode of production and the rest changes after it. History is therefore a sequence of stages driven by conflict between classes, and the current stage contains the conflict that will end it.

The value claim, which is the engine. Labour is what makes a commodity worth anything, and the worker produces more value than they are paid for. The difference is surplus value, taken by whoever owns the factory. Profit on this account is not a return on judgment or risk; it is the retained portion of somebody else's work. Exploitation is therefore not an abuse of the system, it is the system working normally.

Around that sits alienation, which is the part most readers actually feel: work that belongs to somebody else, done on somebody else's schedule, producing something you will never see again, until a person is estranged from the activity that should be the most characteristic thing they do.

Where it is right

Alienation names something real. A great many people do work they have no stake in, cannot see the point of, and would stop tomorrow if the money appeared elsewhere. Objectivism takes productive work to be central to a human life, which makes this a shared complaint about the same fact, differently explained.

The observation that ideas travel with material interests is worth having. People do tend to find arguments for arrangements that suit them, and noticing that is a useful habit.

He was right that a system should be judged by how it works rather than by its own advertising, and he did the empirical work. The chapters on the length of the working day and on child labour describe what was actually happening.

And it is right that a person should not have to spend a life on somebody else's purposes. The disagreement is entirely about what causes that and what fixes it.

Where it collides: labour is not what makes a thing worth anything

The labour theory of value does not survive contact with the facts, and everything else rests on it.

Once that goes, surplus value goes with it, and profit stops looking like theft and starts looking like what it is: the return on having judged correctly what to make — with the loss charged to the same account when the judgment was wrong.

The deeper collision is about who does the producing. Marxism treats a person as a product of a class, holding the ideas their position generates. Objectivism holds that the unit of production is a mind, that thinking is done by individuals and cannot be done by groups, and that the industrial civilisation being argued over was made by people who thought of it. A theory with no place for that has no account of where any of it came from.

And the political conclusion follows from the first mistake rather than from evidence. If profit is theft, then seizing it is recovery rather than force. This is the rare case where a philosophical claim was tested at scale, repeatedly, with the result known in advance by its critics.

Free to start. No account, and no email asked for.