Basics,
Part 8
Value, Price and
Profit
By 1865 Karl Marx (pictured) had long since
solved the theoretical problems of his work on Surplus Value, “Capital”. In
that year he gave the well-known address to a gathering of leadership,
including worker-leaders of the First International, which was in danger of
falling apart very soon after it was founded. That address afterwards became a
popular publication under the name “Value, Price and Profit”(attached).
The first volume of “Capital” was published two years later.
This short book has served the labour movement well. Among
other things, it debunks the argument, still attempted by employers and their
apologists in South Africa today, that wage rises will cause
unemployment (or that wage drops will cause employment, for that matter). In
2013, there has been a concerted effort to bring back this argument via the
bourgeois media, involving such disreputable right-wing propagandists as Leon
Louw, Paul Hoffman, Ann Bernstein and Loane Sharp, together with some formerly
more respectable ones like Jeremy Seekings and Nicoli Nattrass.
The book shows how commodities, including commodity
Labour-Power, are normally sold at their full value, yet how, at the same time,
the worker is getting swindled every day. It explains this apparent paradox,
whereby the employer pays in full, yet gets more than what he paid; and this is
the secret of the self-increase of capital.
It encourages workers to struggle for better wages and
conditions, but it also (prefiguring Lenin’s argument against “Economism” four
decades later in “What is to be Done?”) shows
clearly why trade unionism, without separate political organisation, will never
succeed in throwing off the yoke of capital.
The abridged version of “Value, Price and Profit”, attached,
can serve as the short, or “basic”, version of “Capital” that so many people
long for. It will help us to get a better grip on some of the key concepts in
“Capital, Volume 1” such as Labour, Value, Labour-Power, and above all, Surplus
Labour, Surplus-Value, and Profit.
To reduce the work to a manageable size for our dialogue
purposes we have put aside several sections of “Value, Price and Profit”. But the work is available on the Internet for
anyone who would like to read it in full. The best source for Marxist classics
in general on the Internet is the Marxists Internet Archive (MIA).
Here is the last part of Value, Price and Profit:
“…the working class ought not to
exaggerate to themselves the ultimate working of these everyday struggles. They
ought not to forget that they are fighting with effects, but not with the
causes of those effects; that they are retarding the downward movement, but not
changing its direction; that they are applying palliatives, not curing the
malady. They ought, therefore, not to be exclusively absorbed in these
unavoidable guerilla fights incessantly springing up from the never ceasing
encroachments of capital or changes of the market. They ought to understand
that, with all the miseries it imposes upon them, the present system
simultaneously engenders the material
conditions and the social forms
necessary for an economical reconstruction of society. Instead of the conservative motto, "A fair day's wage for a fair day's work!" they ought to
inscribe on their banner the revolutionary
watchword, "Abolition of the wages
system!"
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: Value, Price and Profit, Parts 6 to 10,
Marx.
