The Negation of “Negative Values”

This article provides a rebuttal of one aspect of the neo-Ricardians’ claim that Marx’s theory of value is inconsistent. Out of the several areas in which this claim of Marx’s inconsistency was advanced, the one in which no one, to our knowledge, refuted the neo-Ricardian criticism was the intriguing concept of “negative values”. Ian Steedman, the main spokesperson for neo-Ricardianism, had put forward a set of equations which generated negative values under certain assumptions in the framework of the Marxist theory of value. As “negative values” were pure nonsense, Marx’s theory was to be consigned to history. This article shows, following a very strict logical chain of arguments, that Steedman’s equations simply did not represent Marx’s procedure for determining values under the circumstances defined by Steedman. Thus “negative values” were a fiction and at least on this score Marx’s theory of value could not be deemed to be inconsistent.