ABSTRACT
The chapter will have a close look at what the discussions in the 1970s and after about value and labor in Marx might mean for the anthropology of labor. Diane Elson in 1981 made the eloquent case (against Sraffa) in the famous value debates that while Ricardo had a labor theory of value, Marx in fact worked with a ‘value theory of labor’. Her reading was later supported by the ‘value form’ school of Marxism (Heinrich, Bonefeld etc.) and was taken up in anthropology by Terence Turner, who therewith brought Marxism, labor, production, and reproduction back into the core anthropological concept of value, which, within the discipline, had always had a heavily idealist overhang (see Kroeber and Herskovitch, for example). This ‘value theory of labor’ supports the move within anthropology to develop a broad and political category of labor (versus just ‘work’, ‘the workplace’, the factory etc.), an expanded idea of class, and an expanded notion of capitalism beyond ‘the economy’. In conjunction with such perspectives as ‘combined and uneven development’ it also helps to understand the highly varied and differentiated nature of labor within the various hierarchical tiers of the global system, and the (possible) politics of segmentation, differentiation, race, gender, and solidarity that (might) arise from that.
