From Labor Value To Surplus Value

The meaning of the word"value"is changing in Economics, which is varying with the development of Economics. In the period of physiocracy, people treated wealth as value. In the period of classical political economy, people treated the expended labor as value. In the period of marginal utility, utility was treated as value.In nowerday's western economists' opinion, value was treated as the combination of cost and utility. In this thesis, we mainly discuss the labor theory of value, which is the centre of classical political economy. It arised in Britain and France in 17 century, and constructed by Adam Smith, developed by David Ricardo.Based on these two economists, Marx developed his labor theory of value. A certain theory of value implied certain distributive mode of value. Adam Smith and David Ricardo did not solved the problems of the source of value and its distribution totally. They were solved by two ways: one is that capital, labor and land are factors or elements of value in contemporary western economics; another is what Marx insisted that labor is the only source of value. Marx founded the theory of surplus value based on it. We can not to simply say whichone is certainly right or wrong, we can surely say that it helped us to understand our world from different ways.