The view that value is a substance goes against Marx's views. I wrote a 3-part article about whether the labor-hour (or the value of a product) is the natural unit of socialist economic calculation. I pointed out that this is not so. The value or labor-content of a product is a market concept that loses its overriding significance in socialist society.
Also, this article shows that Marx did not believe that value was a substance. The view that the value is a substance (which is basically the view that value is "something innate in a product, as real and material as the height of a building or the color of a shirt") is "what Marx called the `fetishism of commodities': the value of a product appears to be something inherent in it, while its actual physical properties fade away and appear merely incidental....[In a market economy] the exchange-ratios, which describe a social relationship between people, appear as something material, as a material relationship between two objects, while the material properties of objects, which really are innate in them, appear as something accidental, something that, as use-value, appears only in the eye of this or that beholder."
And, the article says,
"Whether it is a material good which comes in a package, or a service such as a haircut or a concert, its value appears [in the marketplace] as its true or real measure. In reality, it is only the social relation of market exchange that results in a product being measured by a single number, whether this number be its price or cost or value. Otherwise its real `cost' would be regarded as composed of several distinct components which cannot simply be added together (the amount of direct labor needed to produce it, this itself being divided according to what skills are needed, the raw materials needed, the equipment needed, the effect the production process has on the environment, etc.), and its real `worth' would be regarded as its various useful material properties. But the reality, that value expresses a social relation, is hidden under the appearance that value is a material property of a commodity."
Part 3 of this article deals in detail with those quotations from Marx about labor-time under socialism that have been widely taken to mean that value is a substance. It shows how this ignores Marx's distinction between abstract and concrete labor. This distinction is central to Marxist economics and Marx returned to it repeatedly.
Part 2 of this article contains, among other things, an analysis of this question in light of 20th century experience with the Soviet planning method of "material balances" and the Western method of "input-output economics" (championed by the late Prof. Leontief). It also shows how Marx's discussion of the annual circuit of the total capital of a country in volume II of Capital undermines the view that value is a substance, and that Marx foreshadowed the later development of "material balances" and input-output economics.
Part one of the article traced the views of the early socialist movement on value. It discusses the belief of some socialists (many inspired by their interpretation of Ricardo's labor-theory of value) and some anarchists (such as Proudhon and Josiah Warren) that, if only products were priced at their "true value", exploitation would be ended. (Some activists still believe this.) It points to the fact that the economic theory of Marx and Engels was developed in direct opposition to this view. According to Marx and Engels, the law of value is the law of the subjugation of labor, not the law of its liberation. The article went on to critique the views of Kautsky, Duhring, and Soviet economists on value, and their quest for the Holy Grail of the natural economic unit.
This article can be found posted in full on the "Communist Voice" website at www.communistvoice.org. In particular, part three can be found at www.communistvoice.org/27cLaborHour3.html part two at www.communistvoice.org/26cLaborHour2.html and part one at www.communistvoice.org/25cLaborHour1.html
--Joseph Green comvox at flash.net