Abstract

The aim of the present paper is to provide a logical reconstruction of the Marxian Theory of Value. This reconstruction is based upon the concept of abstract as opposed to that of homogeneous labor.labour is a social relation that holds in a market economy, whenever the profit rate is uniform; it consists in a comparison of the different labors through the exchange relationship. The author proved in a different place that there exists a mathematical representation of abstract labor which is unique up to similarity transformations. The existence of this function -- which is none other than the value function -- is the basis of the present axiomatization, which includes detailed reconstructions of two of the most important models of the theory