Wages, Price and Profit
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~24,200 words · 115 passages
Cite this work
- APAKarl Marx. (n.d.). Wages, Price and Profit. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/wages-price-and-profit
- MLAKarl Marx. "Wages, Price and Profit." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/wages-price-and-profit.
- ChicagoKarl Marx. Wages, Price and Profit. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/karl-marx/wages-price-and-profit.
What it is about
Value, Price and Profit (1865): a lecture to the workers of the International explaining where profit comes from.
Context and history
The best way into Marx's economics: it says in sixty pages, without apparatus, what Capital says in a thousand. The lecture answers a colleague who held that raising wages achieves nothing.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
Before entering into the subject-matter, allow me to make a few preliminary remarks. There reigns now on the Continent a real epidemic of strikes, and a general clamour for a rise of wages. The question will turn up at our Congress. You, as the head of the International Association, ought to have settled convictions upon this paramount question. For my own part, I considered it, therefore, my duty to enter fully into the matter, even at the peril of putting your patience to a severe test. Another preliminary remark I have to make in regard to Citizen Weston. He has not only proposed to you, but has publicly defended, in the interest of the working class, as he thinks, opinions he knows to be most unpopular with the working class. Such an exhibition of moral courage all of us must highly honour. I hope that, despite the unvarnished style of my paper, at its conclusion he will find me agreeing with what appears to me the just idea lying at the bottom of his theses, which, however, in their present form, I cannot but consider theoretically false and practically dangerous. I shall now at once proceed to the business before us. I. Production and Wages Citizen Weston's argument rested, in fact, upon two premises: firstly, that the amount of national production is a fixed thing, a constant quantity or magnitude, as the mathematicians would say; secondly, that the amount of real wages, that is to say, of wages as measured by the quantity of the commodities they can buy, is a fixed amount, a constant magnitude.
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