BÖHM-BAWERK, Eugen von.

Karl Marx and the close of his system. A Criticism ... Translated by Alice M. Macdonald with a Preface by James Bonar ...

New York, The Macmillan Co., 1898. 8vo, pp. 221, [1] blank, [1] imprint, [1] blank; bookplate of Ralph M. Easley to the front pastedown; a very good copy, uncut in the original publisher’s cloth, slightly soiled, spine lettered gilt, sunned, rubbed at head. First American edition, using the sheets from the Fisher Unwin London edition of the same year. The work had originally appeared as Zum Abschluss des Marxschen Systems, published in 1896 in Staatswissenschaftliche Arbeiten: Festgaben für Karl Knies.‘According to Böhm-Bawerk, Marx had furnished no effective empirical or psychological grounds for his theory that labour constitutes value. Like Aristotle, he argued that as objects were exchanged they must possess some comparable, commensurate feature, and he arbitrarily assumed that this must consist in the labour input. In doing so Marx had made several errors. Firstly, he took into account only the products of labour; but the products of nature, such as land, were also exchanged, and accounted for quite a large part of the sum of transactions. Secondly, Marx entirely disregarded use-value, which was illegitimate since, as he himself emphasized, use-value was a condition of exchange value. Thirdly, Marx assumed that apart from use-value an object consists of nothing but crystallized labour. But this ignores its scarceness in relation to demand, the fact that it is an object of need, the fact that it is or is not a natural product: why then should only one of its properties be the basis of value?‘Moreover, Böhm-Bawerk continues, the category of value in Marx’s sense is useless because it cannot be measured quantitatively apart from price, and one reason for this is that complex labour cannot, as Marx would have it, be reduced to a multiple of simple labour: forms of labour differ in quality and cannot be expressed in units of labour-time. The proposition that value governs the terms of exchange thus cannot be empirically verified and affords no explanation of true economic processes’ (Kolakowski, Main currents of Marxism II, 291).

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