This article shows that the law of value is axiomatic and constitutes the necessary foundation of the prices of production. Giving up this foundation means to break with the self-found principle of science, to abandon the unifying principle of classical economics in favor of unsystematic theories based on ad hoc hypotheses and to give up on a general theory of market economies. The neo-Ricardian proposal to determine prices and the profit rate directly from "technical coefficients" and the real wage omits the length of the working-day and the intensity of the labor process, concealing the sociologic contents of those variables.
Marxian economics; Standard of value; Value and distribution; Theory of value
