Value, Price & Profit

Course on Marx's Capital: Week 3

Value, Price & Profit

This is a course on Marx’s “Capital”, Volume 1 (to be followed immediately by a course on Volumes 2 & 3). Next week we begin the book itself, with Chapter 1 of Volume 1. Maybe this is a good time to appeal for help in recruiting more people to this course.

For this “CU-Africa” group, we are looking for ten to twenty people from each of the countries in Africa. We are intending to more than double the present membership of this group, which is 228. We are looking to get more of the kind of people who will contribute to the discussion, by e-mail, of the great work “Capital”. Please send e-mail addresses for subscription to dominic.tweedie@gmail.com.

“Wage Labour and Capital” gave us notice of the “problematic” faced by Karl Marx in 1847. By 1863 Marx had drafted a sketch plan that was beginning to resemble the shape of the full work that was published four years later in 1867. By 1865 when he did “Value, Price and Profit” (see the download linked below), Marx had no doubt solved most of the theoretical as well as the literary problems of the work.

This short work has served various purposes. It debunks the argument, still used by employers today, that wage rises will cause unemployment. Hence “Value, Price and Profit” has been a mainstay for generations of shop stewards and union negotiators.

Secondly, and prefiguring Lenin’s argument against “Economism” four decades later in “What is to be Done?”, it states clearly that trade unionism, without political organisation, will never succeed in throwing off the yoke of capital (see the excerpt from Chapter 14 on the last page of our 8-page download).

This abridged 8-page version of “Value, Price and Profit” can occasionally serve as a “mini-Capital” or in other words as the short version of “Capital” that so many people crave. It will at least help us to get a better grip on some of the key concepts such as Labour, Value, Labour-Power, Surplus-Value and Profit.

The two quoted paragraphs that follow are particularly instructive. Hobbes’ 1651 book “Leviathan” was a tremendous groundbreaker; Karl Marx noticed that Hobbes had “instinctively hit upon this point overlooked by all his successors”, namely the distinction between Labour-Power and Labour, which Marx had worked so hard and so long to realise clearly (note the remarks about the hunt for surplus value in our earlier post on Wage Labour and Capital)

‘What the working man sells is not directly his labour, but his labouring power, the temporary disposal of which he makes over to the capitalist. This is so much the case that I do not know whether by the English Laws, but certainly by some Continental Laws, the maximum time is fixed for which a man is allowed to sell his labouring power. If allowed to do so for any indefinite period whatever, slavery would be immediately restored. Such a sale, if it comprised his lifetime, for example, would make him at once the lifelong slave of his employer.

‘One of the oldest economists and most original philosophers of England — Thomas Hobbes — has already, in his “Leviathan”, instinctively hit upon this point overlooked by all his successors. He says: "the value or worth of a man is, as in all other things, his price: that is so much as would be given for the use of his power." Proceeding from this basis, we shall be able to determine the value of labour as that of all other commodities.’

“Value, Price and Profit” includes a counter-intuitive surprise in Marx’s statement that: “Profit is made by Selling a Commodity at its Value” (top of page 8 in our download version). Capitalism would still exist if it could shed its nasty price-gouging habits. It is not a simple swindle, but is a system and a class relationship.

Capitalism would also still exist if Labour Power was always paid for at its full value.

The source of the “self-increase of capital” is located in the workplace, and not in the marketplace.

Download:

Click here to download Value, Price and Profit [abridged], in MS-Word file format

  

Previous main Communist University posts:
Channel [members]	Course Archive	Weeks	Posted
SADTU Pol Ed [430]	Lenin’s The State & Revolution	1/6	18 June 2010
CU Africa [227]	Marx’s Capital, Volumes 1, 2 & 3	1/33	15 June 2010
CU [3140]	Philosophy and Religion	0/10	21 June 2010
Courses completed in 2010 to date:
SADTU Pol Ed	National Democratic Revolution	12	March - June
	Basics	10	January - March
SADTU Pol Schools	3-Day School	3 days	2-4 June
CU	No Woman, No Revolution	10	March - June
	Basics	10	January – March
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