Value, Price and Profit

Abstract

Value Price and Profit was a speech delivered by Marx at a meeting of the First International where he used ideas of his not-yet-published Capital to present what later came to be known as the “w-r-frontier”. He argued on its basis, against the position of John Stuart Mill, that workers as a whole can obtain higher real wages at the expense of the capitalists’ rate of profit. The relationship between economic and political struggles outlined in Value, Price and Profit is a novel one: the weakening of working-class capacity to intervene at the economic level is supposed to bring on the agenda greater political struggles. This novel reading of the relationship between the economic and the political also has much relevance for today’s world.