Value theory as a scientific imperative

In explaining the growth and change in composition of exchange values in capitalist development, the very meaning of exchange value was temporarily shunted aside. It must have been evident, even so, that the analysis always assumed the existence of certain values that, within the market economy, become manifest as prices in the course of their exchanges. Market prices and aggregate money values, such as aggregate demand, were assumed to approximate these values in exchange; long-run prices were “at their values,” as Marx phrased it. Now even among the Marxists there are and have been many who would let it go at that; or perhaps deny the need for such assumptions. There are revisionists who, perhaps fearing that value analysis will throw open Pandora's box, have tried to keep the lid on, avoiding as much as possible formulations in the theory of value. Others, for the usual, and sometimes for unusual, reasons, have sought to discredit Marx's analyses of values. On the value as on other questions, however, we must plumb to the bottom and build from there, if that is possible. It turns out that the bottom is solid enough.

For Marx it was a matter of both scientific and political necessity, a matter of political economy, in brief, that the determination and measurement of values be analyzed. According to this conception of labor values, at a given level of development of the productive forces definite value magnitudes of exchange values are the real substance of the flows of inputs and outputs within reproductive processes.