Justice & Law Quote by Rudolf Hiferding

Hilferding’s line reads like a calm methodological note, but it’s really a stake in the ground: value theory isn’t an abstract parlor game, it’s a weapon for describing how capitalism actually moves. “Elucidate” signals a forensic ambition. The law of value, in this framing, isn’t a moral claim about fairness or a metaphysical claim about what things are “really worth.” It’s an explanatory engine meant to map the concrete ratios by which commodities trade hands, the quotidian mathematics of a society that pretends prices are neutral facts.

The subtext is polemical. Hilferding is writing in a Marxist tradition that was being tugged in two directions at the turn of the 20th century: toward academic marginalism that treated exchange as the outcome of individual preferences, and toward revisionist social democracy tempted to treat capitalism as administrable rather than structurally coercive. By insisting on “actual exchange relations,” he’s defending Marx’s core move: start with the commodity, because the commodity is where domination becomes legible as ordinary life. People don’t experience exploitation as a philosophical category; they experience it as wages, rents, interest, and the price of bread.

Context matters: Hilferding’s broader project (most famously in Finance Capital) tracks how markets become organized by banks, cartels, and state power. So “actual exchange relations” is not a folksy nod to the real world; it’s a reminder that even when capitalism looks “managed,” the law of value continues to operate - sometimes through prices, sometimes through credit, sometimes through crisis. The sentence works because it narrows the mission: don’t romanticize value; use it to decode the deal.