ABSTRACT
The priority of the theory of value and of the connection between value and labor are both results rather than starting points of the development of Ricardian economics. As the results of Ricardo's theoretical development they are implicitly accountable to that development. Within the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, however, both the theory of value and the labor principle are simply posited in abstraction from any systematic deduction and argumentation. To that extent both positions take the form of arbitrary judgments. In other words there is no explicit argument for the labor principle, but at the same time the emergence of that principle within the development of Ricardian analysis reveals the existence of an implicit, unstated, argument for such a connection. This property of Ricardian thought is the source of the inability of the interpretations of the classical theory of value to uncover any systematic necessity that would lead Ricardo to the labor principle. Beginning, on the other hand, with the development of Ricardo's value theory the possibility of a necessary link between labor and value emerges in the form of a driving force behind the movement of Ricardo's thinking in the direction of the labor theory of value. This is a force which drives towards the theory of value in the sense that it is a movement in the direction of a consistent grounding of the exchange relation which will remove the latter from the external determination of nature and the individual. The notion of a theory of value taken in this more rigorous sense excludes necessarily both the treatment of exchange in modern economics and the peculiar form of the analysis of exchange presented in classical economics. Within the former the analysis of value seeks to account for exchange without establishing it to be a necessary element of an ongoing social process within which it is grounded by its systematic connection to the totality of social relations. The classical analysis, while on one side adopting the same procedure as that adopted by modern economics, at the same time articulates a conception of exchange which involves it in the implicit grounding of the latter in a social substance - labor. In this respect classical analysis emerges as the product of the simultaneous activity of the theoretically adequate conception within which exchange comes to be accounted for by a social process, and the activity of a methodology which derives exchange as the expression of given natural forces outside of any social determination. In the case of Ricardo, the absence of any
systematic deduction of the relation of value to labor expresses the arbitrary element in his conception of the value relation. At the same time the existence of the labor theory, and the process by which it comes into existence, reveals the workings of a real theory of value which ties the latter into the selfdetermination of the system of social relations.
