Marx on Ricardo

Abstract

To compare Ronald Meek’s long Introduction to the second edition of his Studies in the Labour Theory of Value (1973) with the unchanged original text (1956) is to see at once how greatly the discussion of Marx’s economics has changed over the last quarter of a century. For both intrinsic and extraneous reasons, the debates during this recent period of changed emphases have often touched on the relations — of similarity and of contrast — between Marx’s economics and that of Ricardo. The purpose of the present essay is to contribute to the clarification of those relations by drawing attention to a number of issues on which Marx’s mature criticisms of Ricardo appear to have been less than fully justified and on which the differences between Ricardo and Marx have, perhaps as a result, been somewhat exaggerated. Since the matters at hand seem to prompt some discussants to ringing declarations, rather than to close study of the texts, I should perhaps emphasise that the essay does not attempt an over-all assessment of the relation of Marx to Ricardo, does not argue that Ricardo was always right and Marx always wrong, does not imply that Marx was merely a Ricardian economist, etc., etc. In brief, the reader is asked not to read into what follows more than is really there.

That Diane Elson’s reading of Marx is quite different from mine has made her comments on this essay all the more helpful. I am also grateful to Michael Evans, Heinz Kurz and Alessandro Roncaglia for interesting comments. I should like to draw the attention of readers of German to Kurz’s Zur neoricardianischen Theorie des Allgemeinen Gleichgewichts der Produktion und Zirkulation, which, amongst other things, arrives at conclusions close to those of the present essay concerning Marx’s criticisms of Ricardo.