Profitability, Prices and Values

Meghnad Desai

Chapter 1 in Marxian Economics: A Reappraisal, 1998, pp 3-13 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract Needless to say much of Capital, and not only Volume III, is concerned with profits and profitability. But it was in volume III that Marx came to the culmination of his value theory and theorised about the way in which the structural/underlying/invisible value relations translate into the phenomenal/overt/visible price relations. This is the contention of chapter 6 in volume I ‘On the Buying and Selling of Labour Power’. It takes, however, a full and elaborate preparation with the help of the earlier two volumes to acquire the background required to attempt the final resolution of the problem. Although the ‘problem’ has been seen as one of transforming values into prices, it is, and has always been, a problem of providing a theory of profits, that is, how — in a world of voluntary contracts and free labour — exploitation can be translated into profits without in any way invoking coercion, false consciousness, market imperfections and so on (I have surveyed the literature on the transformation problem in Desai, 1991, detailing all the solutions except the most recent, which are discussed below.)

Keywords: Physical Capital; Consumption Good; Total Profit; Labour Time; Total Surplus (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 1998
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

There are no downloads for this item, see the EconPapers FAQ for hints about obtaining it.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-1-349-26121-5_1

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.palgrave.com/9781349261215

DOI: 10.1007/978-1-349-26121-5_1

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Palgrave Macmillan Books from Palgrave Macmillan
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().