Certainly, all those arguments which have any claim to an independent source.
Böhm-Bawerk starts out by stating that all the predecessors of Marx who have adhered either in whole or in part to the labor theory of value, including such great lights of the science as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Rodbertus, have really "assumed" the labor theory of value without even as much as attempting to prove it. It was pure assertion on their part, without the semblance of an argument to support it. Karl Marx was the first who not merely asserted the labor theory of value but also attempted to prove it. In this Böhm-Bawerk recognizes Marx's superiority to the great luminaries of the science of political economy who have preceded him. But he does not like the way Marx did it, and is not convinced by the proof offered by Marx in support of his theory. Böhm-Bawerk, like the good professor that he is, instructs us as to how Marx should have gone about the job of proving his theory of value and puts his emphatic disapproval on the way Marx is supposed to have actually gone about it. He says that there were two ways open to Marx: first, to analyze the "psychological motives" to which the process of exchange is due; or, second, to examine the actual "experiences" of the relations of exchange. Instead of adopting either of these two courses, he says, Marx adopted a third rather peculiar one for the subject of this inquiry, namely, that of purely logical deduction and dialectic argumentation.
That Marx did not go about the task of discovering the true laws of exchange-value by way of an analysis of the "psychological motives" of exchange is perfectly true. And we have already seen in the preceding chapter the reason for it. The problem by its very nature showed that its solution lay in some social phenomenon and not in any attribute of the individuals entering into the relation of exchange. The "psychological motives," therefore, of exchange, could not possibly have anything to do with the problems that confronted Marx. Aside from that, it was
