Salaire, concurrence et surtravail: Une contribution classique à l’explication du profit

This paper proposes a reconstruction of one of Torrens little unknown piece of work on the making and the distribution of income among the social classes. The framework assumes a single-good economy with fixed production coefficients. It differs from the contemporary Ricardo theory (that is,Sraffa’s) in three ways: 1) real wage are pictured as the economic outcome of competition in the labour market, 2) the allocation of the net product between wages and profits is determined with no obligation to fix exogenous variables of distribution, 3) the model suggests an innovative concept of surplus labour to define the profit apart from the labor theory of value. Finally, the Torrens’s approach lays the foundations of an original conception of profit explained by a specific transaction of capitalism economy.