Money, the Postulates of Invariance and the Transformation of Marx into Ricardo

Thanks to a Ricardian concept of the magnitude of value, the participants in the controversy on the transformation of values into prices can separate the capitalist economy into two different spheres, price and value. This is a procedure completely foreign to Marx. The main consequence of this separation is the misunderstanding of the money form of value, a problem that arises in two ways. Firstly, money is a commodity like all others and there is thus an essentially contradictory relationship between its value and its exchange value, that is between its value and the expression of this value in the use-value of another commodity. This contradiction is neglected in the controversy, and therefore money becomes a simple numéraire, exactly as in the Ricardian and Walrasian traditions. Second, two juxtaposed standards of price are allowed to co-exist -one in the sphere of values and the other in the sphere of prices- whose relationship constitutes the only external link between the two realms. The transformation of values into prices becomes an external problem of reconciling two systems of accounting.