The law of value is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy, first expounded in his polemic The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with reference to David Ricardo. Most generally, it refers to a regulative principle of the economic exchange of the products of human work: the relative exchange-values of those products in trade, usually expressed by money-prices, are proportional to the average amounts of hu...
more
The law of value is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy, first expounded in his polemic The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with reference to David Ricardo. Most generally, it refers to a regulative principle of the economic exchange of the products of human work: the relative exchange-values of those products in trade, usually expressed by money-prices, are proportional to the average amounts of human labour-time which are currently socially necessary to produce them.
Thus, the exchange value of commodities (exchangeable products) is regulated by their value, where their value is a quantity of human labour (labor theory of value). In Das Kapital Marx normally thinks of that quantity as the ratio between the amount of labour required to produce a reproducible good, and the corresponding amount of labour required to produce a unit of gold.
While Marx used the concept of the law of value in his works Grundrisse, A contribution to the...
less
