Input–output and value accounting

Under this formidable heading one might reasonably expect to find discussed some of the most abstract, complex, and at the same time purely scientific issues of economic science. If by purity is meant political purity, however, this is, quite frankly, not of our world. The Marxian economics avows its political impurity and seeks only to deal with it honestly, for instance, in determining whether or not exchange values measured in units of labor time can and should be used as guides to price planning. Evidently, this is a matter closely related to the old socialist ambition of eventually eliminating the market and its pecuniary categories of money and price, of merchandising and huckstering, from every department of social life.

The project of an eventual eradication of the market and all its mechanisms has long been stoutly resisted by those opposing all administrative setting of prices, preferring instead the market system of free competition, and by those monopolists and their spokesmen who would themselves control prices with a view to reinforcing property claims in the furtherance of appropriate activities. So strong has the opposition been to socialist planning, in fact, that the very question of whether or not this planning can utilize effectively a system of labor value accounts has suffered from a lack of direct analysis, not to mention practical application.