WorkKarl Marx

Value, Price and Profit

Marx demolishes a fellow unionist's case against wage rises — and, in two English lectures of 1865, previews the theory of profit that *Capital* would spell out.

by Karl Marx110 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Lohn, Preis und Profit
First published: 1898(published posthumously)
Original language: German

Report a rights issue

Overview

A year and a half before the first volume of Capital reached print, Marx laid out its central argument in plain English to a room of trade unionists. The occasion was a quarrel inside the young International Working Men's Association: a Council member named John Weston, an old follower of Robert Owen, had argued that pushing wages up does workers no lasting good, since prices simply rise to match. Marx thought the claim both wrong and demoralising, and answered it over two evening sittings in June 1865. To refute Weston he had to build, quickly and without technical vocabulary, the core of the theory he was still writing up at home: that a worker sells not his labour but his capacity to work, that this capacity is paid for at less than the value it creates, and that the unpaid remainder is the source of profit — so higher wages come out of profit, not out of prices. He closed by urging the unions to stop asking merely for a fair day's wage and to fight instead for the end of the wage system altogether. Marx never published the talks. His daughter Eleanor found the manuscript among his papers, judged it would make a good popular pamphlet, and brought it out in London in 1898, fifteen years after his death. Delivered and written in English, it is one of the few things Marx composed in the language of the country that had taken him in.

Key concepts

Who was John Weston, and what did he claim?

A fellow member of the International's General Council, and an old follower of Robert Owen. Weston argued that raising wages does workers no lasting good, since employers simply raise prices to match, leaving the worker no better off. Marx thought the claim both wrong and demoralising, and delivered these two lectures in June 1865 to refute it before a room of trade unionists.

How does Marx say a commodity's value is determined?

By the amount of labour socially needed to produce it. This is the labour theory of value Marx builds, without technical jargon, to answer Weston: because commodities exchange according to the labour in them, prices do not simply float free to swallow any wage rise. Establishing this is the groundwork for showing where profit really comes from.

What is the 'value of labour-power'?

The cost of producing and maintaining the worker's capacity to work, essentially, what it takes to keep him alive, able and raising a next generation of workers. Marx's decisive move is that the employer buys this capacity at its value, yet sets it to work for longer than it costs. The gap between the two is where profit comes from.

Why is this lecture called the shortest way into Capital?

Because Marx delivered it a year and a half before Capital's first volume appeared, and in it he compresses that book's core argument into plain English for a lay audience. Surplus value, labour-power and the source of profit are all here, stripped of technical apparatus. His daughter Eleanor found the manuscript and published it in 1898.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Where Profit Comes From

If raising wages only pushes prices up, workers can never get ahead — so a fellow unionist argued. Is he right, and what is the real source of an employer's profit?

To refute John Weston before a room of trade unionists, Marx builds Capital's core argument without technical vocabulary: a worker sells not his labour but his capacity to work, paid at less than the value it creates, and the unpaid remainder is profit — so higher wages come out of profit, not out of prices, which do not simply chase them. He closes by urging the unions to drop the demand for a fair day's wage and fight to abolish the wage system itself. Eleanor Marx published the lectures in 1898.

capital
circulation
money
monetary theory
reproduction
wages
value theory
profit
surplus value

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 110
distinct concepts: 188
by passages held, corpus-wide: #485

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “labor power” and “wages”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 90 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
labor power	wages	7
profit rate	wages	7
value theory	wages	7
political economy	wages	6
profit	surplus value	5
labor power	wage labor	4
profit	value theory	3
profit	wages	3
profit rate	surplus value	3
profit rate	value theory	3
labor power	surplus value	2
profit	profit rate	2
surplus value	value theory	2
surplus value	wage labor	2
surplus value	wages	2
labor power	political economy	1
labor power	profit rate	1
labor power	value theory	1
political economy	value theory	1
profit rate	wage labor	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1844 On the Jewish Question (Zur Judenfrage)
Written alongside the Hegel critique and published in the same short-lived Paris journal, this is Marx settling accounts with Bruno Bauer and the Young Hegelians. It marks his turn away from religion and the state toward the economic life he came to think lay underneath them.
DE
1845 The Holy Family, or Critique of Critical Criticism (Die heilige Familie oder Kritik der kritischen Kritik)
Overwhelmingly Marx's despite the shared title page, and aimed squarely at Bruno Bauer's circle. It sits on the hinge between the Young Hegelian quarrels Marx was leaving and the historical materialism he was about to work out.
DE
1848 The Communist Manifesto (Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei)
Commissioned to a deadline as revolution gathered in 1848, and the most public thing Marx ever put his name to — the opposite pole from the manuscripts he left unfinished in drawers. It states in a few pages the view of history his longer works spent decades grounding.
DE
1849 Wage Labour and Capital (Lohnarbeit und Kapital)
An early, popular run at the economics Marx would spend the next twenty years perfecting. Engels reissued it in 1891 with the term "labour-power" set where Marx had written "labour" — repairing it with a concept that arrived only later.
DE
1852 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte)
Marx as historian and political analyst rather than economist or agitator: a close reading of a single French coup, written for a New York émigré paper in 1852. It handed later Marxism its theory of the state's independence from the classes beneath it.
DE
1867 Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (Das Kapital)
The work of Marx's maturity and the one book of his economics he saw into print. Volume one appeared in 1867; Engels assembled volumes two and three from the unfinished manuscripts after Marx died, in 1885 and 1894.
DE
1888 Theses on Feuerbach (Thesen über Feuerbach)
Eleven notebook jottings, not an argument built for readers but private markers Marx set down in 1845 and Engels rescued in 1888. They register the moment he broke with Feuerbach and put human practice at the centre of his thinking.
DE
1898 Value, Price and Profit (Lohn, Preis und Profit) you are here DE
1927 Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right (Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Kritik des Hegelschen Staatsrechts)
His earliest sustained work, written at twenty-five before he had read a page of political economy: a reckoning with the German idealism he had been raised inside. Its published introduction announced the proletariat; the manuscript behind it waited eighty years for a reader.
DE
1939 Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy (Grundrisse der Kritik der politischen Ökonomie)
Written a decade before Capital and unknown for almost a century: the notebooks Marx filled to clarify his own thinking, rediscovered only after 1953 and central to the Marx revival that came with the New Left.
DE

— or open another of their works