Two controversies concerning Marx’s theory of value were of particular importance during the 1960s and 1970s. The first is well known and has attracted most of the attention of Marxian scholars during these decades: I allude to the celebrated ‘transformation problem’ and to the spirited debates that followed the publication of Sraffa’s Production of Commodities by Means of Commodities. The second one, however, is much less well known among economists but is also of fundamental importance: it was more methodological in character and centred mainly on Marx’s ‘logic’ and the relationship between Marx and Hegel.

At first sight these two considerations are disconnected and involve very different problems in Marx’s writings. The first controversy seems in fact to be mainly technical and mathematical in character, and the second chiefly philosophical. However it has become more and more evident that the fundamental problems they raise are linked and this is precisely what I have tried to do (Faccarello, 1983a, 1983b). My line of argument is simple. As a result of the Sraffian controversies it is obvious that the ‘transformation problem’ is destined never to find a solution, since the theory of production prices is ‘self-sufficient’. But it is also evident that what is traditionally ‘transformed’, that is, the system of ‘labour values’, can no longer be considered as an unproblematic starting point for the entire theoretical construction; old questions have again been raised in this new context and such central concepts as ‘abstract labour’ or ‘socially necessary labour’ have proved to be unclear and in need of unambiguous definition. The problem thus faced is that of reinterpreting Marx’s statements on value and of trying again to grasp, possibly in a new way, the definition(s) and significance(s) of the related concepts.

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