Labour Theory of Value

The Labour Theory of Value, as mobilized in this corpus, is not merely Marx's economic hypothesis that the value of commodities is determined by socially necessary labour time. Rather, it is repositioned as the theoretical hinge through which a genuinely materialist, immanent critique of capitalism becomes possible. Drawing on the Hegelian method of immanent critique — whereby a system is judged by its own internal contradictions rather than by an external moral standard — Marx's labour theory of value exposes the gap between labour as concrete, particular human activity and labour as abstract, quantifiable exchange-value. This distinction is the formal site at which capitalism's own self-undermining logic is legible from within.

In this context, the Labour Theory of Value is inseparable from the concept of exploitation: the extraction of surplus-value from the worker is not a moral injustice appended to an otherwise neutral economic system but is structurally inscribed in capitalism's value-form itself. The return to this theory is proposed not as an antiquarian gesture but as a political necessity — a way of "carving out" the space of genuine indetermination within capitalism, the place where contingency (and therefore the possibility of communist transformation) remains open. This aligns with the Lacanian-inflected Marxism operating throughout the source, where Real abstraction (labour stripped of its concrete content and rendered fungible) is not merely economic but ontologically productive of the subject's alienation.

In slavoj-zizek-frank-ruda-agon-hamza-reading-marx-polity-pres-2018, the Labour Theory of Value appears at the opening of a chapter whose declared aim is to justify a return to Marx's critique of political economy as a living resource for communist politics. The concept is positioned as the theoretical core of that return, coupled explicitly with exploitation. It stands as a specification of the cross-referenced concept of Critique of Political Economy — the method by which capitalism is analysed using its own categories — and is enabled by Immanent Critique: because Hegel's dialectic allows a system to be criticised from within, Marx can use capitalism's own value-logic to reveal its instability rather than appealing to an external moral standpoint.

The concept also draws on the cross-referenced notion of Abstract: abstract labour, the reduction of all concrete, qualitatively distinct human activity to homogeneous, quantifiable labour-power, is precisely what the value-form accomplishes and what the Labour Theory of Value theorises. This connects it to Ideology (the value-form operates as real abstraction, structuring social reality independently of anyone's conscious beliefs) and to Dialectics (the contradiction between use-value and exchange-value, concrete and abstract labour, is the dialectical engine Marx inherits from Hegel). The invocation of the Concept is equally relevant: the Labour Theory of Value treats value not as a static property of objects but as a self-moving relation, immanent to the commodity-form, that contains its own contradiction. Finally, the reference to Misreaders and Real in the cross-references suggests the chapter situates itself against readings of Marx that domesticate or distort the radical, contingency-affirming core of his project.

Reading MarxSlavoj Žižek, Frank Ruda & Agon Hamza · 2018 (p.111)

The aim of this chapter is thus to propose a return to Marx, by way of rethinking the labor theory of value and exploitation.

The phrase "return to Marx" signals a move analogous to Lacan's own "return to Freud" — not nostalgia but a reclaiming of a repressed theoretical core against its domesticated readings; coupling this with "rethinking" signals that the Labour Theory of Value is not to be applied mechanically but dialectically re-opened, while the pairing with "exploitation" insists that the theory is not merely economic description but the analytical key to a political critique of capitalism's structural injustice.