THE "NEW ORDER"
301
Capitalism, Fascism, and the Law of Value
The classical economists, in distinction to the modern price
theorists who do not care to find an objective basis for their reason–
ing, did not stop at the description of the supply and demand
mechanism. They said that its existence proved the relevance of a
" law of value" that regulated society as the law of gravity regu·
lates the known universe.
The "law of value" means that the "value" of a commodity
is determined by the labor-time socially necessary for its produc·
tion. Thus the "law of supply and demand" realized an exchange
of labor-time against labor-time.
It
saw to it that this exchange
was a more or less equal one, for if one seller should succeed in
getting more for less, and another should be forced to accept less
for more, these occurrences were only deviations from the general
rule which would not invalidate this rule. In the long run some
sort of equilibrium should be observable. This equilibrium would
also realize the necessary distribution of the available labor-time
betwen the different branches of production that were engaged in
satisfying human needs.
The Marxian critique of bourgeois economy began with a
challenge of its "law of value." Marx pointed out that this law was
not at all working in the manner in which the
bour~eois
theore–
ticians thought it worked. Rather, in the midst of all the accidental
and ever-fluctuating exchange relations, the law of value asserts
itself "like an over-riding law of nature just as the law of gravity
does when a house falls about our ears.m
5
It is obvious, Marx
once explained,
"that the mass of products corresponding to the different
needs require different and quantitatively determined masses
of the total labor of society. That this necessity of distributing
social labor in definite proportions cannot be done away with
is self evident. ... What can change, in changing historical
circumstances, is the
form
in which these laws operate....
The form in which this proportional division of labor oper–
ates in a society where the interconnection of social labor is
manifested in the
private exchange
of the individual products
of labor, is precisely the
exchange value
of these products.m•
"Capital.
Vol. I;
p.
86.
..Letters to Dr. Ku1el11U1nn;
pp. 73·74.
