Ricardo’s Theory of Value

In his first essay of 1898, entitled “The theory of value of David Ricardo. An attempt at a rigorous analysis”, Dmitriev made important contributions to classical economics. In particular, he demonstrated that (1) prices can be decomposed into wages and profits via a “reduction to dated quantities of labour”; (2) relative prices are proportional to relative labour values only with zero profits or with “equal organic composition”; (3) Ricardo’s concept of the inverse relationship between the general rate of profits and the real wage rate, given the technical conditions of production, that is, the wage-profit relationship, can be given a precise analytical expression; (4) the data of Ricardo’s approach (that is, the real wage rate and the technical conditions of production in the wages goods indus­try) suffice to determine relative prices and the general rate of profits simultaneously.