ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the interrelation between the economic value complex and classical value theory. The dichotomy of value in use and value in exchange reflects the conflict between the precapitalist attitude and the economic value complex. By rejecting the concept of value in use, the classical economists declared themselves implicitly as partisans of the new mode of life and the economic value complex. The main problems of early capitalism were related to production: how to increase the production of physical goods through technological and mechanical improvements and how to procure a sufficient surplus of capital to put new inventions into effect. The labour theory of value has, for centuries, presented to its students a series of puzzling problems which could not be resolved merely by taking the theory at its face value and by criticizing it from the point of view of logic and factual verification.
