"If the quantity of labour realized in commodities, regulate their exchangeable value, every increase of the quantity of labour must augment the value of that commodity on which it is exercised, as every diminution must lower it"
About this Quote
Ricardo is doing something deceptively bold here: turning value from a matter of taste, prestige, or merchant bluff into a measurable residue of work. The sentence has the clipped, almost mechanical confidence of early political economy, and that tone is part of its persuasive force. If you grant the opening “if” - that labor embodied in goods regulates exchange value - the rest follows with the clean inevitability of arithmetic. It’s an argument designed to feel like physics.
The specific intent is to stabilize the concept of value amid the chaos of industrial capitalism, where prices swing, speculation proliferates, and new machines scramble old hierarchies of production. Ricardo wants a baseline that can explain relative prices across goods and over time. “Realized in commodities” is doing heavy lifting: labor isn’t just exerted; it is congealed into the product, made commensurable, tradable, legible to markets.
The subtext is disciplinary. By anchoring value in labor quantity, Ricardo implicitly sidelines other claims to worth: tradition, monopoly power, sheer scarcity, or the romance of luxury. He also quietly naturalizes a world in which human effort is the ultimate metric - a move that makes distributional questions (who gets what share of that value) look like secondary disputes after the “real” economics is settled.
Context matters: Ricardo is writing in the wake of Adam Smith, during wartime inflation, the Corn Laws fight, and rapid industrial change. His labor theory of value isn’t a warm tribute to workers; it’s a tool to analyze profits, rents, and the pressures that push wages toward subsistence. The cool certainty of the formulation is the point: capitalism, he implies, can be decoded.
The specific intent is to stabilize the concept of value amid the chaos of industrial capitalism, where prices swing, speculation proliferates, and new machines scramble old hierarchies of production. Ricardo wants a baseline that can explain relative prices across goods and over time. “Realized in commodities” is doing heavy lifting: labor isn’t just exerted; it is congealed into the product, made commensurable, tradable, legible to markets.
The subtext is disciplinary. By anchoring value in labor quantity, Ricardo implicitly sidelines other claims to worth: tradition, monopoly power, sheer scarcity, or the romance of luxury. He also quietly naturalizes a world in which human effort is the ultimate metric - a move that makes distributional questions (who gets what share of that value) look like secondary disputes after the “real” economics is settled.
Context matters: Ricardo is writing in the wake of Adam Smith, during wartime inflation, the Corn Laws fight, and rapid industrial change. His labor theory of value isn’t a warm tribute to workers; it’s a tool to analyze profits, rents, and the pressures that push wages toward subsistence. The cool certainty of the formulation is the point: capitalism, he implies, can be decoded.
Quote Details
| Topic | Money |
|---|---|
| Source | David Ricardo, On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817). Passage appears in Ricardo's discussion of the labour theory of value asserting that changes in the quantity of labour embodied alter a commodity's exchangeable value. |
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