ABSTRACT
The mistake common to most theories of value is that of too intimately relating value to price, to the point even of identifying the two. But the concept of value transcends the realm of economics, even if, as etymology does not suggest, economics was the source of the concept of value. The exchange value of things, and of money in particular, increases therefore in inverse proportion to their possessors' urgency of need. The legalized right of property, and the existence of a propertyless class, the proletariat, who cannot enjoy that right, is but a mitigated, sometimes an exacerbated, form of slavery. Wealth is thereby invested with an extrasubjective value. Prices in a capitalist economy are an index of the exploitation of needs that things satisfy, not an index of the value of things. In State capitalism or communism, of course, exploitation of the consumer is at its worst.
