ABSTRACT
This chapter deals with alternative approaches to the problem of value and distribution in systems in which commodities are produced by means of commodities. The attention focuses on the classical economists and Marx; on whether and to what extent the exchange ratios of commodities can be explained in terms of ‘substances’ embodied in, or reflected by, commodities, especially ‘labour’; the objections Vilfredo Pareto levelled at what he called ‘literary’ as opposed to ‘mathematical’ economists; the necessity to treat the problem of value and distribution in terms of simultaneous equations; and Piero Sraffa's reflections upon and responses to views on these matters in his early papers written in the late 1920s.
