Value and Price after Ricardo: The Bifurcation
Three intellectual responses were possible to the Ricardian difficulty in combining a labour theory of value with capitalist competition and the equalization of the rate of profit.
The first was simply to abandon the idea that there was a competitive tendency towards the equalization of the rate of profit. Typically, this was not pursued. Not only did it appear to run counter to an evident empirical tendency; at a deeper level it ran counter to the notion of a decentralized economy that was (self-)organized by competitive behaviour rather than merely anarchic. The second was to separate the theory of value from its dependence on labour performed, a path taken by neoclassical economics after the 1870s. The third was to recast the labour theory of value, which was attempted by Marx.