I've been reading Capital off and on for months and this is a seemingly pretty important difference that I don't understand. Is there a difference between surplus labor and profit, and if so, what is it? Any explanations, links, or chapters in Capital I should check out are appreciated.

  • Lemmygradwontallowme [he/him, comrade/them]
    ·
    edit-2
    2 days ago

    If I remember, correctly, rate of profit seems to refer more to

    surplus product / (means of production + wages)

    not

    surplus product / wages --> which is rate of surplus value

    • quarrk [he/him]
      ·
      2 days ago

      Yes. Capital wants to produce pure profit, to generate it out of thin air without any machinery or land — setting to zero the MoP part of that first equation.

      Marx analyzing John Stuart Mill:

      With regard to this wonderful illustration, we note first of all that, as a result of a discovery, corn is supposed to be produced without seeds (raw materials) and without fixed capital; that is, without raw materials and without tools, by means of mere manual labour, out of air, water and earth. This absurd presupposition contains nothing but the assumption that a product can be produced without constant capital, that is, simply by means of newly applied labour. In this case, what he set out to prove has of course been proved, namely, that profit and surplus-value are identical, and consequently that the rate of profit depends solely on the ratio of surplus labour to necessary labour. The difficulty arose precisely from the fact that the rate of surplus-value and the rate of profit are two different things because there exists a ratio of surplus-value to the constant part of capital—and this ratio we call the rate of profit. Thus if we assume constant capital to be zero, we solve the difficulty arising from the existence of constant capital by abstracting from the existence of this constant capital. Or we solve the difficulty by assuming that it does not exist. Pro batum est.