As with most definitional debates or what seems futile hairsplitting and mere semantics, the hope is that clarity as to definitions will help prevent confusion and mutual incomprehension at a later stage in the debate. For example, I think much of the debate in value theory could be more productive if participants were clear about how surplus value is defined.
Let me try this definition (open to revision of course): Value is the socially necessary abstract labor time which potentially objectified in a commodity has as its only and necessary form of appearance units of money. I believe that this definition follows from the simple fact that in an atomized bourgeois society in which social labor is organized by private money-making units social labor time relations can only be regulated in and through the exchange of things, however value is in fact misrepresented by this mode of expression. In capturing Marx's quantitative and qualitative sense, one should probably build money and fetishism into the very definition of value. This will help to clarify that Marx is not simply qualifying Ricardo's definition of value but stipulating a new meaning. This definition of course does not capture the systemic and dynamic features which Chris B is attempting to build into his definition. Of course a serious problem with my definition is that it may imply that units of money come to define the objectified social labor time that is socially attributed to a commodity, rather than money price being an expression of the socially necessary abstract labor time objectively needed for the reproduction of the commodity. While I would agree that monetary measurement is not merely a passive ascertainment of a preexisting attribute and specifically that value is not actualized without successful money sale--that is a value must prove itself to be a social use value--the value that is expressed in exchange value is based on the objective social labor time that is in fact needed to reproduce the bulk of such commodities though as Marx emphasizes this value is in fact necessarily mis-represented in exchange. rb
