Wage-Labour and Capital and Value, Price, and Profit

Thoroughly enjoyed this book. A good place to continue your study of Marxism, but I have sometimes seen either Wage-Labour And Capital or Value Price and Profit listed as one of the first books you can read to understand Marxism.I’m not so sure about this. Marx’s master work and critique of capitalism, “Capital” is the most comprehensive expression of his thoughts, but even Volume I is pretty daunting because of its size.I had already begun reading some of Capital Vol I before reading these works (Wage-Labour, and Value) cover-to-cover, and some of what Marx talks about in depth in Capital he touches on a little more briefly here.So /I/ was able to understand what he was talking about, having already read some more basic works of his beforehand for context, but I’m not sure if someone reading this for their first step into Marxism will get as much out of it as they should.Wage-Labour and Capital is based on a series of lectures Marx have in 1847. This one is definitely more readable and understandable than Value, Price, and Profit, in my opinion, anyway, and you could kind of consider it Capital Lite. Marx’s friend Frederick Engels wrote the introduction to this work, and it is very good on its own.Value, Price, and Profit on the other hand, was written under different circumstances and I had a harder time getting through it. (You must remember that these works are pretty old, and the translations themselves are 80+ years old, so they are not modern English)Marx wrote it in 1865 as a speech. The speech was a rebuttal to another man’s claims that wage increases were useless, and therefore trade unions hurt workers.If you can imagine, Marx and his contemporaries did not take this very well lol.But Marx wrote this speech WHILE he was working on his master work Capital. So, you see ideas yet unpublished directly lifted from Capital and put in Value, Price, and Profit.Problem being, Marx had to keep it fairly brief as he only had so much time to deliver his speech.This is why he never formally published the speech, as he was afraid he couldn’t properly represent his ideas within the time limit and wanted to publish Capital instead.“Value” remained unpublished until Marx’s death for that very reason, and his daughter Eleanor published it. I think there is some validity to Marx’s fear, but at the same time I can see the desire for a shorter, more easily digested work to read instead of Capital, since many people don’t have the time or ability to read a book of that magnitude.I would recommend as a starting pointPrinciples of Communism- Frederick EngelsCommunist Manifesto- Marx and Engelsat least before reading this. I still haven’t finished Capital, but what I did read was a great reinforcement for these pamphlets.If you’re not starting with this book, then jump right in and enjoy.Of course, I could be totally crazy...

The material in this volume consists of presentations that Marx made in the late 1840's for purposes of persuasion and clarification as to the merit of his understanding of the relationship between labor and capital, and his interpretation of the labor theory of value. His intended audience was not made up of academicians and professional economists, but workers who were striving to improve the conditions of laboring people generally. As Marx acknowledged near the beginning of Value, Price and Profit, he assumed that his audience would be, "ignorant," as he put it, of learned economic discourse, and therefore required a simplification of the work he had already completed. Oddly, in the introduction to Wage-Labour and Capital, Engels asserts that workers, given their lived experience, are quite well equipped to absorb Marx's account of the social relationship that involves capital and labor in what some have referred to as a unity of opposites.Either way, in my view Marx is most difficult to understand when he is writing about specifically economic issues, and, Engels to the contrary, that applies to the two essays in this book. Neither essay is unreadable in the sense that Althusser and Balibar are in Reading Capital, but Marx, whatever his intentions, did not write or speak in a way that was readily understandable for the masses. I can only imagine that Marx assumed that the laboring people he expected to address, while not possessed of the leisure and resources to study political economy at length and in depth, were veterans of organized political activity with radical ends who had often been exposed to the thinking of Marx and those like him.As far as I can tell, Marx's efforts to make his work more accessible to non-specialists typically backfired; he became wordy and repetitious and, though trying not to, he became more convoluted. Nevertheless, bearing in mind that Marx really is dealing with inherently hard-to-understand issues, if readers are patient and thoughtful they can gain a great deal from this slim volume. It certainly improved my understanding of just what Marx means by class struggle, and I am no longer so quick to dismiss his version of the labor theory of value as, to use Veblen's characterization, unduly "metaphysical."This book, read along with The Communist Manifesto, provides the best introduction I can think of to the first volume of Capital. As such, it is valuable indeed.

The media could not be loaded.  Karl Marx authored these two talks to clarify capitalism to a working-class person. They have remained his clearest, simplest treatment of political economy, becoming the basis of his popular Capital.As named, they mainly concentrate on value, wages, profits, competition, the relations between these, and historical forms of exploitation. They have definitely helped my knowledge; I loved them.

In the first half of the book we are greeted to an amazing work from Marx. Wage-Labour and Capital does a fantastic job of exposing the reader to class consciousness and knowing their place in society. By the end, you despise the wage system and ultimately feel sick to your stomach about how our current system is run. Value Price and Profit on the other hand was different. It was not as good of a read as the first book, but there is a reason why, it is not a book. This was a speech addressed to the First International Working Men's Association. Due to this, i do not judge this as a true book and read it as if Marx was speaking each word on a podium. Even with that said, it is a FANTASTIC read. Acknowledging the major problems revolving surplus labour are so key if you wish to further read Marx. I give the first book a 10/10 and the second a solid 9/10. HIGHLY RECOMMEND.

The children that live in my house and eat my food decided that they were going to have a Marx seminar of their own making and tried to dive into everything at once. After carrying around Capital for a month, the eldest told me that he just wasn't getting through it the way he had hoped - he was 14 and I figured that was a bit too heavy for him. So we bought this smaller more easily digestible text and he and his younger sibling just ate this up and now are even more impossible to live with.

Excellente réédition d'un classique de Marx qui ne vieillit guère, du point de vue macro-économique, malgré le passage des siècles et le glissement du libéralisme économique au néolibéralisme.

Great book to read and understand commercialism

This is great. If you feel a bit intimidated by 'Capital', this works as a short introduction to some of its core ideas. Relatively easy to understand and still very relevant.

not the best Marx book edition

Beautiful Thank You