ABSTRACT
This chapter analyzes Karl Marx's productive-labor theory of value and its corollaries. The 'productive-labor theory of value' affects nearly every aspect of Marx's grandiose project of social analysis. Marx says he throws in his lot with Smith's first, profitor surplus-value-earning, 'capitalist' definition. The chapter explores Theories of Surplus-Value that the Moscow editor subtitles 'Manifestations of Capitalism in the Sphere of Immaterial Production', Marx dismisses teaching factories and hack encyclopedia writing in half a page on the ground that they are atypical, 'a transitional form'. Both Marx's surplus and transfer mechanism and his base-superstructure materialism require a capitalist mode that is perfectly 'basic' and self-contained; it must generate all its own inputs and ensure the reproduction of its own labor. But for Marx the scholar, ambitious to work out a system able to account for the grand and commonplace phenomena of economic history, the factory paradigm is more of a liability than an asset.
