It is commonplace today, even among people who have never read Marx's Capital, to believe that Marx shared a broadly similar theory of value to that developed by classical political economists; namely, that which has come to be known as ‘the labour theory of value'. However, I wish to suggest that this is not the case and that any such interpretation which presents Marx's view as a labour theory of value (or even as a more sophisticated version of this) is a very bad misreading of what Marx has to say in the first few chapters of Capital, Vol I. In making this claim I am basing my argument on the reading I have just presented in the previous chapter of this study. In trying to explain the difference between labour and labour-power Marx is forced to discuss the value of labour itself. This then gives the impression that his is a sophisticated labour theory of value when in actual fact he was a critic of this theory. The argument that labour is the source of all value (i.e. a crude labour theory of value of the kind presented by Adam Smith and David Ricardo) depends on an equally crude antithesis between nature and labour.