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The law of value is a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy, first expounded in his...

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 critique of political economy, Theories of Surplus Value and Das Kapital, he did not explicitly formalise its full meaning, and therefore how it should be exactly defined remains to some extent a