ABSTRACT
The ‘radical’ opponents of capitalism (as it was developing in Britain in the first half of the nineteenth century) with whom Marx dealt in the ‘Theories of Surplus Value’ manuscript (TSV, III, 238ff. ) were those whose critical stance he thought to be founded on the premise of embodied labour as the essential source of exchange value and the surplus. The link with Ricardo's political economy in particular, apparently expressed by Marx in terms of the ‘opposition evoked by the Ricardian theory’ (TSV, III, 258) should not be exaggerated. The ‘radicals’ were opposed to political economy's treatment of labour under capitalism, including that in Ricardo's Principles, and were ‘Ricardian’ only in the very limited sense of pursuing the logic of the embodied-labour premise. 1 It will be recalled that Marx found Ricardo to have struggled hardest to retain this premise in spite of the apparent analytical contradictions to which it gave rise (see chapter 4, pp. 88ff. above). In interpreting Marx's critique of the ‘radicals’ under the heading ‘Based on the Ricardian Theory’, and in the light of his introductory remarks that in the works considered, the ‘opposition... takes as its starting point the premises of the economists’ and that ‘they all derive from the Ricardian form’ (TSV, III, 238), it is not appropriate to look beyond this essential premise. A reading of the critique makes it quite clear that Marx was not concerned with the doctrinal matters of what ‘Ricardian’ meant and to what extent the ‘radicals’ considered themselves to be ‘Ricardian’ or anti-‘Ricardian’. 2
