‘What is it?’ Marx’s theory of exploitation and the closure of the transformation problem

In this work, the authors first critically discuss key contributions from Michael Heinrich, Isaak Ilyic Rubin and Claudio Napoleoni to emphasize the essential categories of Marx’s critique of political economy and lay the ground for an original assessment of the transformation of values into prices. Moreover, the authors give a sketch of Marx’s monetary value theory of abstract labour in the early chapters of Capital I, highlighting the crucial challenges to be addressed. In particular, the authors propose a reconstruction based on the ‘method of comparison’ Marx presented in Chapter 5 of Capital I. Exploitation is there defined as the ‘consumption’ of workers as human living bearers of labour power, giving foundation to the identity between the money value added in the period and the direct labour as the objectification of the fluid of living labour. The authors also stress that, in Part 7 of Capital I, Marx viewed capitalist reproduction as a monetary circuit. Taking inspiration from Augusto Graziani, the authors claim that ‘labour’ is monetarily ante-validated by money as finance to production and that in this macro-monetary perspective, the real wage of the working class must be taken as given. It follows that the individual price determination can alter the allocation of the direct labour exhibited in the money value added but cannot affect neither the constitution of the new value by living labour nor the macro-class division of surplus value. Accordingly, the transformation problem turns out to be a misconstruction due to a misunderstanding of the very content of Marx’ value theory.