This manuscript ties together and extends the work contained in five of my earlier papers. In 1971, I began working on the problem of concretizing and estimating basic Marxian value categories such as labor value, the rate of surplus value, and the organic composition through the use of input–output data. At that time, the two important theoretical contributions in the field were Francis Seton's “The transformation problem,” published in the Review of Economic Studies in June 1957, and Michio Morishima and Francis Seton's “Aggregation in Leontief matrices and the labour theory of values,” published in Econometrica in April 1961. During the course of my investigation, another major contribution to the theoretical literature appeared, Morishima's Marx's Economics in 1973. Between these three important theoretical works and the actual estimation of Marxian categories lay many unanswered accounting and other methodological issues.

In the early 1970s, I was working on a project developing two input–output tables for Puerto Rico for the years 1948 and 1963, the former year before a period of rapid industrialization and the latter after a period of significant change. This created the opportunity not only of estimating basic Marxian variables but also of seeing their movement over a period of major historical change. The results are contained in “The rate of surplus value in Puerto Rico,” published in the Journal of Political Economy in October 1975, and “Capitalist development, surplus value, and reproduction: an empirical examination of Puerto Rico,” published in The Subtle Anatomy of Capitalism in 1977.