Jean-Marie Harribey
But humanity draws from nature riches that cannot be reduced to economic value. By reformulating the distinction between wealth and value, this book shows that what escapes market quantification is inestimable. This leads to a proposal for escaping the trap of the infinite accumulation of capital.
Biographical Note
Readership
This book is for economics professors, students, and anyone interested in the theoretical and political transformations involved in sustainable development.
Table of Contents
Preface to the English edition ix
List of Figures and Boxes xv
Introduction: Value Does Not Equal Wealth 1
1 Contemporary Economic Transformations 1
2 Epistemological Ruptures 5
part 1
A Long-Running Debate
1 The Problem Posed by Political Economy 16
1 The Place of Labour in the Concept of Value 16
2 Ricardo or That ‘Obscure Clarity’ 26
3 The Epistemology of Political Economy 28
2 The Critique and Overcoming of Political Economy 41
1 The Critique of Political Economy 41
2 Value and Social Relationships 46
3 Productive Labour and Capital Accumulation 53
4 Profit and Income 64
5 The Theory of Value and the Crisis 69
3 Debating the Law of Value 74
1 Marx’s Value and Prices of Production 74
2 From Value to Price, the End of a Debate? 77
3 The Critique of the Critique of Political Economy 100
part 2
Disappearance of Value and Evanescence of Wealth: From
Neoclassical Vacuity to New False Leads
4 Neoclassical Vacuity about Wealth and Value 119
1 Worthless Prizes 120
2 Without a Theory of Value, There Can Be No Theory of Profit or
Capital 125
5 Value of Nature 139
1 Values without Prices or the Impossible Neoclassical Economy of
Environment 140
2 The Futile Attempt to Commercialise a Non-economic Wealth 165
3 For a Critical Return to the Critique of Political Economy 174
6 The Knowledge Economy and Value 190
1 Do Changes in Capitalist Production and Accumulation Alter the
Source of Value? 191
2 Do Changes in Capitalist Production and Accumulation Alter the
Nature of Social Relations? 205
part 3
Redefining Wealth and Value
7 Labour, Value, Money, the Market and the Crisis 225
1 The Social Nature of Money 225
2 Labour and Money as Social Relations 248
3 From Labour to Money, to Market and to Crisis 260
8 The Debate on Measuring Wealth and Value 271
1 Biased Conceptions of Value and Wealth 275
2 Conditions for Well-Being and Quality of Life 281
3 The Untenable Assumption of Substitutability between Different
Kinds of ‘Capital’ as a Basis for Sustainability 293
9 Towards New Conceptions of Wealth, of Value and How They Are
Shared 309
1 Wealth Growth and Human Development 310
2 Productive Labour in the Non-market Sphere 324
3 Public Goods, Collective Goods and Common Goods 344
4 From Wealth and Value to Social Justice 357
Conclusion: The Price of Things and Expensive Things: Wealth and Value
Turned Upside Down 381
1 Wealth and Value, Two Spaces That Are Partially Conjoined, Partially
Disjointed 383
2 Incommensurability 386
3 The Status of Value Based on Labour 388
Appendix to Chapter 1 395
1 Ricardo’s Enigma 395
Appendices to Chapter 2 397
1 Circuit Analysis 397
2 The Rate of Profit 400
Appendices to Chapter 3 402
1 Production Prices and Sraffa’s Standard Merchandise 402
2 Marxian Double Equality 404
3 How Do We Go from Sraffa to Marx? 408
4 Taking Fixed Capital into Account: Towards the Vincent Laure Van
Bambeke’s Solution 422
Appendix to Chapter 5 426
1 Elasticity of Substitution between Factors of Production 426
Appendices to Chapter 7 427
1 Exploitation of Labour-Power and Ecological Tax 427
2 The Choice between Economic Instruments for Managing
Nature 428
Appendices to Chapter 9 432
1 The Macro-Economic Loop of a Market and Non-market
System 432
2 Exchanging Quantities of Work 438
Bibliography 440
Index 483
