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The law of value (German: ''Wertgesetz'') is a central concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy, first expounded in his polemic ''The Poverty of Philosophy'' (1847) against Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, with reference to David Ricardo's economics.〔Takahisi Oishi, ''The unknown Marx: reconstructing a unified perspective.'' Foreword by Terrell Carver. London: Pluto Press, 2001〕〔See Marx, ''The Poverty of Philosophy'', chapter 1 part 2 () where Marx refers to Proudhon's own "law of value" and chapter 3, titled "Application of the Law of the Proportionality of Value".()〕 Most generally, it refers to a regulative principle of the economic exchange of the products of human work: the relative exchange-values of those products in trade, usually expressed by money-prices, are proportional to the average amounts of human labor-time which are currently socially necessary to produce them.〔John Eaton, ''Political Economy: A Marxist Textbook''. Rev ed. 1963 reprinted 1970. p. 29.〕〔Karl Marx, ''Capital, Volume I'', Penguin, pp. 676-677; Marx, ''Capital, Volume III'', Penguin ed., p. 522.〕 Thus, the fluctuating exchange value of commodities (exchangeable products) is regulated by their value, where the magnitude of their value is determined by the average quantity of human labour which is currently socially necessary to produce them (see labor theory of value and value-form). In itself, this theorem is fairly simple to understand, and intuitively it makes sense to many working people. Theorizing its implications is, however, a much more complex task; it kept Marx busy across more than two decades. When Marx talked about "value relationships" or "value proportions" (German: ''Wertverhältnisse''), he did not mean "the money" or "the price". Instead, he meant the value proportions that exist between products of human labour. These relationships can be expressed by the relative replacement costs of products, as labour hours worked. The more labour it costs to make a product, the more it is worth, and inversely the less labour it costs to make a product, the less it is worth. Money-prices are at best only an expression or reflection of Marx's value relationships - accurately or very inaccurately. Products can be traded above or below their value in market trade, and some prices have nothing to do with product-values at all (in Marx's sense), because they refer to tradeable objects which are not regularly produced and reproduced by human labour, or because they refer only to claims on financial assets. ==Theorizing the value of labour-products== The "law of value" is often equated with the "labour theory of value" but this is strictly speaking an error, for five reasons.〔Peter C. Dooley, ''The Labour Theory of Value''. New York: Routledge, 2005.〕 *The law of value only states a general regulative principle about the necessary and inevitable relationship between the trading values of commodities, and the socially average labour-time required to supply them. It is simply a law governing commodity exchange. *The labour of value in economics aims to explain that determination actually works, what kinds of causal relationships are involved, how the law of value interacts with other economic laws, etc. *For Marx himself, the "labour theory of value" referred only to the theory of value upheld by some of the classical political economists from William Petty to David Ricardo, who regarded human labour as the real substance of product value. *Marx's own value theory is not a theory of value, but only of the value-system involved in commodity production and commodity trade. *Marx never referred to his own theory as a "labour theory of value";〔Mike Beggs, "Zombie Marx and Modern Economics, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Forget the Transformation Problem." ''Journal of Australian Political Economy'', issue 70, Summer 2012/13, p. 16.()〕 his own critique of the political economists was, that they all failed to explain satisfactorily the determination of product-value by labour-time actually worked – they assumed it, but they did not explain it consistently (see below). Thus, Marx often regarded himself as perfecting a theory which had already existed for a long time, but which had never been consistently presented before.〔See for example Letter of Marx to Engels, 9 August 1862. in: Marx/Engels Selected Correspondence. Moscow: Progress, 1975, p. 125.〕 Nevertheless, in the Marxist tradition, Marx's theory of product-value is conventionally labeled "the labour theory of value" – while controversy persists about how much Marx's theory actually differs from that of the classical political economists.〔Isaak Illich Rubin, ''A History of Economic Thought''. London: Ink Links, 1979.〕 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Law of value」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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