Political economy of economic value

Sinha, Ajit (2018) Political economy of economic value. In: The Palgrave Handbook of Political Economy. Palgrave Macmillan UK, London, pp. 235-258. ISBN 978-1-137-44254-3

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Abstract

This paper analyzes two conceptual aspects of the theory of value in Classical Political Economy. The one aspect is to find a scientific scale to measure the value of a commodity and the other is to find the cause of its existence. It argues that these two aspects got entangled with each other, which was later disentangled by Piero Sraffa. Adam Smith confronted the problem of a measure of value in the context of comparison of national income at two points of time. This led him to look for the ‘original’ cause of value in the ‘sacrifice’ of the laborer in the primordial production relation with nature and its measure in the ‘command of labor’ by commodities. Ricardo postulated the cause of value in labor but not as ‘sacrifice’ but as ‘technique’ of production. He confronted the need for an invariable scale to measure value as he found himself unable to establish labor as the sole cause of changes in values of commodities. Marx wanted to prove that the cause of profit is exploitation of labor. This led him to relate value to labor and profits to surplus value. In this context, Marx needed a scale of measure that remains invariable as one translates values to prices and surplus values to profits. Sraffa showed that the problematic of the cause of value is irrelevant and there always exists one and only one scientific scale of measurement of value embedded in the technique of production itself, which is invariant to changes in the distribution of income.

Item Type:	Book Section
Authors:	Sinha, Ajit
Editors:	Editors Email ORCID Cardinale, Ivano UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED Scazzieri, Roberto UNSPECIFIED UNSPECIFIED
Document Language:	Language English
Subjects:	Social sciences > Economics > Production Social sciences > Economics > Production > Economic policy, economic development, economic growth Social sciences > Economics > Macroeconomics & related topics > Factors affecting income and wealth
Divisions:	Azim Premji University - Bengaluru > School of Public Policy and Governance
Full Text Status:	None
URI:	http://publications.azimpremjiuniversity.edu.in/id/eprint/7240
Publisher URL:	https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-44254-3_8

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