This book is unified by a concern to reassert the pivotal importance of Marx’s theory of labour value – ‘the labour theory of value’ as it is more commonly known – to an understanding of our social world and its historical development. The broad picture that I draw challenges the idea, more hegemonic in the early 1990s than at any time since the First World War, that ‘free-market economics’ (a euphemism for the set of socio-economic relations that form the basis of capitalism) are better suited to meeting human needs than any conceivable alternative. It does this by building a case for the proposition that the capitalist market economy has substantially exhausted its potential to further human progress, notwithstanding the collapse of ‘socialism’ in the former Soviet bloc and in spite of the triumphalist declarations of Francis Fukuyama and his ilk that liberal-democratic capitalism now stands at the ‘end of history’.

In brief, the principal thesis proposed here is that, while ‘value relations’ have played a role of paramount importance in the development of human society, the point has been reached where these relations need to be superseded by a new set of social arrangements that must, at a minimum, provide for a qualitative increase in the degree to which human social and economic affairs are governed by conscious decision-making at the level of the human collectivity as a whole. The individualistic rationality of Adam Smith’s fabled ‘invisible hand’, linked to the idea that the clash of economic interests individually pursued will produce the greatest amount of wealth and well-being for the largest number of people, must be definitively supplanted by a form of rationality that takes the social whole as its starting point and the ‘all-round development’ of each and every human being as its goal.

A secondary theme of the book, intimately linked with the latter point, is the book’s defence of Marx’s dialectical reason against both the ‘subjective reason’ invoked by the currently fashionable school of so-called Analytical Marxism and the ‘cynical reason’ promoted by poststructuralism and conservative postmodernism. Today, more than ever, a reassertion of the claims of Marx’s dialectical reason is indispensable to sustaining belief in humanity’s continuing potential for social progress and therefore to a worldview informed by ‘historical optimism’, an outlook that has been in rather pronounced decline in recent years.

In making these arguments I realise that I am swimming against some very powerful currents. The recent dismantling of the Stalinist administrative-command systems in Eastern Europe has strengthened the claims of neoliberals and neoconservatives that ‘planned economies’ are neither workable nor desirable. Yet the case against planned economies – while ideologically vital to legitimating policies that give freer reign to capital and that erode social gains previously won by working people in the West (in the ‘shadow’ of ‘actually existing socialism’) – is insubstantial and based to a considerable extent on impressionistic analysis, myopic ideology, and selective memory-loss. Impressionistic analysis because it attributes the failure of the administrative-command system to the ‘planning principle’ rather than to the real and intensifying contradictions of an order that was constitutively incapable of stimulating and harnessing the consciousness, creativity and intersubjectivity necessary for a rationally planned economy. Myopic ideology because it assumes that the ‘free-market economies’ of the West are not themselves characterised by significant elements of economic planning: for example, the ‘military Keynesianism’ of the Reagan White House and the large-scale planning of those few hundred corporate giants that accounted recently for some 70 percent of the industrial output of the global capitalist economy. And selective memory-loss because it ‘forgets’ that Soviet planning, for all its contradictions and irrationalities, permitted a rate of economic growth over a period of several decades that was well above that of the capitalist West.

The debate between proponents of socialist planning and corporate capitalism (tendentiously peddled as ‘free-market economics’) is far from over, despite the defeat that has been inflicted on a decrepit travesty of socialism beaten black and blue by a world capitalist order commanding many times its resources. Indeed, the endemic inability of world capitalism to satisfy even the basic needs of the great majority of the world’s population ensures that this debate will not only be re-engaged in scholarly discourse but will eventually be joined to a struggle of living social forces on a scale never before seen.

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The greater part of this book represents a substantially revised version of certain sections of my doctoral dissertation ‘The Value Controversy and Social Theory: An Inquiry into Marx’s Labour Theory of Value’ (Department of Anthropology and Sociology, University of British Columbia, 1989). The dissertation was written under the guidance of an advisory committee composed of David Schweitzer (supervisor), Bob Ratner, and Blanca Muratorio, all of whose criticism, good counsel, and insistence upon clarity helped me to hone arguments on a theoretical terrain somewhat remote from their own areas of specialisation. I can only now fully appreciate how rare a privilege it was to have been allowed the intellectual latitude and freedom afforded to me by this committee. They, and I, had the good fortune to rely on the specialised knowledge of Bob Chernomas of the Department of Economics at the University of Manitoba. Professor Chernomas’s conscientious critical review of several chapters pertaining to value theory, capitalist crisis, and the history of political economy – performed, it should be said, on an entirely unofficial and voluntary basis – contributed greatly both to a theoretical strengthening of the dissertation and to the peace of mind of the members of my advisory committee. I thank all four of these colleagues for their advice and friendship. Thanks are also due to Graham Johnson and Derek Sayer for their roles in the final examination of the dissertation. Professor Sayer, in particular, made several valuable suggestions that have been duly incorporated into the present work.

My dissertation and this work grew out of an intensive study of Marx’s critique of political economy that began in 1980. Since then I have been fortunate to receive fellowship support from the University of Manitoba, the University of British Columbia, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada; to each I express my gratitude. I owe my thanks as well to the many teachers, colleagues, and friends who have assisted me in my research, influenced my thinking, and critically reviewed my literary production since 1980. In addition to those already cited, I would like to mention Wayne Taylor, Mikhail Vitkin, Ken Campbell, John McAmmond, Ken Waldhauser, Don Forgay, Roy Turner, David Mole, Michael Lebowtiz, David Laibman, Grant Amyot, Gregory Albo, Leo Panitch, and two anonymous readers of the manuscript originally submitted to the University of Toronto Press. While few of the above are likely to be fully comfortable with all of the arguments developed in this book, I gratefully acknowledge that each has contributed something of importance to its general lineaments. I should also like to extend special thanks to Virgil Duff, the executive editor of the University of Toronto Press, for his advice and encouragement over the past two years; and to my family, for suffering with good humour the frequent petulance of a distracted academic author who has been juggling too many workloads for rather too long a time.

St. Catharines, Ontario

January 1994