The Controversy Between the Neo-Ricardians and the Marxists

This article was written as a contribution to the Elgar Companion to Marxist Economics, edited by Ben Fine and Alfred Saad-Filho (2012). It is an overview of a very complex set of debates between, on the one hand, the so-called neo-Ricardians and, on the other, Marxists that took a more “orthodox” attitude on the validity of the Marxist theory of value. This controversy raged among left-wing economists throughout the decades of the 1970s and 1980s. Although it has now subsided, each side going their way without any conclusive results commonly acknowledged, it is nonetheless important for several reasons. The most important is that it is full of lessons as to how the Marxist critique of political economy should be taken up. It became clear, in some of the more “orthodox” Marxist interventions, including ours, that this critique is much broader in scope than any school of economics can cover and thus the abandoning of the Marxist theory of value and surplus-value would lead to a loss of immense insights into the dynamics of capitalism. The conclusion of our overview is that, in fact, there is no need to abandon the Marxist theory of the capitalist economy.