ABSTRACT
Although classical economic theory had been able to recognize in labor the source of value, it was incapable of reconciling the production of surplus value with the exchange of equivalents required by the law of value. By failing to distinguish between labor and labor power, David Ricardo could not consistently apply the value concept in his investigations of the capitalist economy and its development. But then, Ricardo took capitalist society for granted; he was not so much concerned with the capitalist exploitation relations as with the distribution of the social product between the recipients of wages, profits, and rent, on which in his view the fortunes of capital accumulation depended. He saw the value of commodities as emerging out of the physical production process and not, as did Karl Marx, out of the specific social production relations of capitalism, which are what make a mere production process into a value-producing and value-expanding process.
