Value-form

The value-form or form of value (German: Wertform) is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. Marx's account of the value-form is differently adopted in later forms of Marxism, in the Frankfurt School and in post-Marxism. When social labor is split up into independent enterprises and organized capitalistically, its products take the form of an ensemble of commodities of diverse types, which face one another on the market.

Production and exchange are governed by ideas and facts expressible in the forms like:

• 20 yards of linen are worth one coat
• 20 yards of linen have an equivalent in one coat
• 20 yards of linen = one coat
• 20 yards of linen cost $100
• The price of 20 yards of linen is $100
• 20 yards linen = $100

The formulae above are 'expressions of value' (Wertausdruck). Worth, price, and equivalent are said to be categories of bourgeois life. Items that enter on one side or the other, here linen, coat and dollar, are said thereby to have different specific value-forms. A thing may have a value-form in the imagination – e.g. in the reasoning of a weaver who weaves 20 yards of linen with a view to getting a coat, thinking "20 yards of linen are worth one coat" or in a firm's attaching prices to its products (prices that may or may not be accepted). (An item with a price tag attached has thereby entered the price form in imagination.) But things can also be said to enter these forms objectively, as when it is simply a fact that e.g.

• About 20 yards linen are worth one coat
• The price of 20 yards of linen is about $100

The value-forms are social forms of a product of labor as organized asocially, privately and capitalistically. If the breakfast menu of a capitalistic restaurant chain reads:

• Toast (two slices) = $1

then toast has assumed a value form as a product of capitalistically associated labor. But in a household, e.g. when feeding the children, the work of making toast – the same 'useful labor' – is associated differently. No such thought will enter the mind of the toast-maker, who will think directly of the children's needs. Toast will not assume a form of value.

The value forms are also 'forms of appearance' (German: Erscheinungsform). The agents work with them, judge in terms of them, and in a sense measure things with them. The capitalistic organization of life operates through this 'appearance' of itself to its bearers. The value-form of a commodity contrasts with its physical features as a 'use value' or good – e.g. as a means of (further) production or as a means of life. The physical characteristics of a commodity are directly observable, and they enter into its direct use, but its social form is not thus perceptible nor inherent in the thing.

Narrating the paradoxical oddities and metaphysical niceties of ordinary things when they become instruments of trade, Marx seeks to provide a brief morphology of the category of economic value as such—what its substance really is, the forms which this substance takes, and how its magnitude is determined or expressed. He analyzes the forms of value in the first instance by considering the meaning of the value-relationship that exists between two quantities of commodities.