Chapters 13-15: The Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall

Background

There was a consensus among economists in Marx’s day that the rate of profit tended to decrease from one decade to the next.

The exchange of products of capital

In Capital volume 1 chapter 1 Marx poses the numerical comparability of commodities – say, ten apples equal one pen – as a puzzle. Socially the ten apples are equated with one pen. This is nothing to do with their use-values. We cannot eat pens, or write with apples. In what way can they be equal?

Prices of production

In chapters 8, 9, 10 Marx discusses “prices of production”. He never exactly defines what these are, but the gist seems to be that these are long-run equilibrium prices, what prices would be if the rate of profit were fully equalised.

Capital chapter 15

Chapters 1 to 6 showed that a society defined by the production of most goods and services as commodities, and by labour-power being a commodity – i.e. a capitalist society – generates a system of production which dominates and alienates humanity.

Interlude: Marx’s “Wages, Price, and Profit”

At the same time as he was writing Capital volume 1, Marx gave an exposition of his view on workers’ struggles over wages in a report (in effect a lecture) delivered at two successive meetings of the General Council of the First International, on 20 and 27 June 1865.

Harvey ch. 5; Capital ch.10-11

As Harvey points out, here “finally we get to the idea of class struggle. Finally!”

Chapter 2. Rate of profit

“Surplus-value and rate of surplus-value are, relatively, the invisible and unknown essence that wants investigating, while rate of profit and therefore the appearance of surplus-value in the form of profit are revealed on the surface of the phenomenon”.