ABSTRACT
Marx's discussions of value and price of course draw upon prior traditions in political economy, but they also represent the application of a more general materialist approach to the analysis of social class. Every distribution of income, and product, is simultaneously a redistribution of labor, and value, and Marx's theory of value with its juxtapositioning of the categories of value and price is the accounting language designed to make this understanding of class visible and quantifiable in a consistent fashion. Value is created by current labor, and value and surplus-value are then "conserved" even as they are redistributed via the pricing of commodities in exchange. The neo-Ricardian critique has provoked various Marxian responses, all of which, in one way or another, emphasize the crucial contribution made by Marx's focus on labor as the source and substance of value and the basis for a class accounting of the quantitative dimensions of capitalism.
