The Value of Everything: Making and Taking in the Global Economy

by Mariana Mazzucato

Meanwhile, the labour theory of value which, fully developed by Marx, rooted productivity firmly in the concept of the production of ‘surplus value’, was either disputed or, increasingly, ignored altogether in assessments of national income. By the early twentieth century it was associated with a revolutionary programme and therefore could not, by definition, sit easily with official statistics in the very nations of which Marxists were so critical. Things were of course different in the countries where Communists came to power: first in the Soviet Union after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution and later in Eastern Europe after the Second World War (though in justifying their construction of a ‘material product system’ that valued only material goods they should technically have been invoking Smith, not Marx). With the exception of these socialist states, the idea that assessments of national income should be based on the sum total of all incomes, thus forming a ‘comprehensive’ production boundary, spread rapidly to many countries.7