Marx's Theory of Value, the "New Interpretation" and the "Empirical Law of Value": A Recap Note

This note is a recapitulation of the present state of the art in the debates on Marx’s labour theory of value. It summarizes the main reasons why this theory is problematic. At the same time, it claims that the theory of exploitation does not depend on a labour embodied valuation and can be expounded by resorting to the theory of production prices. Almost all Marxists have now accepted this truth. Most of them have been convinced by a ‘new interpretation’ which has been able to translate the labour commanded by net output into an amount of living labour and the rate of surplus value into a ratio between unpaid and paid labour. What produced such a result is the use of labour productivity as a numeraire. However there still are Marxists who retain allegiance to the labour theory of value, reinterpreted as an empirical law. Although the results of their econometric research do not seem wholly convincing, they contributed to question the historical appropriateness of the level of abstraction in Marx’s value theory.