ABSTRACT
The opposition between objective forms of labour in the sphere of circulation and living labour that produces value calls for the division of the exchange between capital and labour into two totally distinct phases: the buying and selling of labour power as potential living labour and the consumption of the labour power in the process of production (1). But the difference between these two phases, as far as it covers the difference between the labour in activity and the labour materialised in wages, does not only allow one to penetrate the mystery of surplus value and profit of capital. The recognition of the specifically living nature of the labour in the sphere of production also explains how the value of existing capital is preserved in the value of the labour product. Conversely, if one equates living labour to the value spent for acquiring labour, i.e. to wages, and if one considers the objective means of production and labour power as mere elements of value in the capital advanced, not only does the origin of profit remain mysterious and appear to proceed from a factor distinct from labour, but the means of production functioning as capital seem to possess a property of self-reproduction. It is these two postulates that inspire the doctrine of factor productivity which presents itself as their scientific formulation (2). However, this conception of capital as an autonomous factor to which a proper return and thus a specific income apply is common to the two sides of the Cambridge controversy (3). We will see that the issue at stake in this controversy is not the so-called problem of capital value measurement, but the method for determining prices of production (4). While the Neoclassics responded by elaborating new versions of Ricardo’s corn model (5), the Postkeynesians, particularly the Neoricardians, re-launched Ricardo’s quest for an invariable measure of values. This search proceeds however from the basic confusion between living labour and labour as represented in the worker’s wages (6). Furthermore, the presupposition of a general rate of profit applying to each capital, whatever its labour composition, both consolidates and results from this confusion. Therefore the general rate of profit, which apparently contradicts the law of value and actually led Ricardo to search for an invariable measure of value, is precisely what has to be explained. For Marx, the tables of values transformation into prices of production were not aimed at all at proving the reality of the value law, as all the attempted solutions since Samuelson’s article claim, but to introduce the 82intermediate links that go from the general rate of profit to the production of surplus value by living labour.
