The “Quantitative Approach” to the Marxian Concept of Value

This paper is concerned with what I call the “quantitative approach” to the “transformation problem” of chapter 9 of volume 3 of capital, very widespread in the literature. I call it so because it conceives the “transformation of value into competitive price” as a relationship between quantities of labor-value and quantities of money price. Such a conception of the transformation of value into competitive price presupposes that value has quantitative determination. My central contention in this paper is that this presupposition contradicts Marx's idea that labor is the substance or immanent measure of value. In Marx, labor cannot be money, which means that value as such does not have a quantitative determination apart from price expressed in some product of labor. Accordingly, there are no such things as “labor-values” and the transformation of value into competitive price does not contradict the determination of value by labor or Marx's “law of exchange”: it is the process through which labor-value becomes objectified as money price in such a way as to equalize the profit rate of capitals of a nonuniform composition. With the “transformation” of value into competitive price, Marx refutes Ricardo's refutation of the labor theory of value in principles (chap. 1, sec. 4).