ABSTRACT
If labour and work are considered as ends, need-satisfaction and subjective utility become mere by-products of work. Adam Smith shows ambivalence in this matter. He interrelates productive labour with the accumulation of capital. Adam Smith’s entire theory of value refers to goods and not to services. The choice of labour as the determinant of value was also influenced by the endeavour to find an absolute basis for economic values and for the fluctuation of market prices. In the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith offers not one but several theories of value and price. Private ownership of land and stock changes the character of the economic system and thereby the basis of value. Adam Smith assumed that there existed at first an ideal primitive state without private ownership of land and stock, in which labour values reigned supreme. In Adam Smith’s theory of actual market prices, the market system is finally seen as it is.
