Metamorphoses: The Concept of Labour in the History of Political Economy (Report‪)‬

Introduction In his autobiography, J. R. Commons (1934: 131) writes that 'from John Locke to Adam Smith, to Ricardo, Proudhon and Karl Marx, it is possible to build a whole system of political economy on the one foundation of labor.' It was only with the advent of neoclassical economics in the late 19th century that labour was dethroned as a basic analytical category, and relegated to the status of just another commodity. This article begins by outlining the variety of analytical treatments of the concept of labour in different systems of political economy, from the ancient Greek authors to classical political economy and Marx. It then discusses how the classical labour theory of value was eventually displaced by a political economy in which the very concept of labour became analytically superfluous.