Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. Harriet E. Lothrop (1902).djvu/16

 of commodities, fluctuating and oscillating, now upward, now downward, the fixed central point was searched for around which these fluctuations and oscillations were taking place. In short: starting from the prices of commodities, political economy sought for the value of commodities as the regulating law, by means of which all price fluctuations could be explained, and to which they could all be reduced in the last resort.

And so classical political economy found that the value of a commodity was determined by the labor incorporated in it and requisite to its production. With this explanation it was satisfied. And we too may for the present stop at this point. But to avoid misconceptions, I will remind the reader that to-day this explanation has become wholly inadequate. Marx was the first to investigate thoroughly into the value-forming quality of labor and to discover that not all labor which is apparently, or even really, necessary to the production of a commodity, imparts under all circumstances to this commodity a magnitude of value corresponding to the quantity of labor used up. If, therefore, we say to-day in short, with economists like Ricardo, that the value of a commodity is determined by the labor necessary to its production, we always imply the reservations and restrictions made by Marx. Thus much for our present purpose; further information can be found in Marx’s Critique of Political Economy, which appeared in 1859, and in the first volume of Capital.

But so soon as the economists applied this determination of value by labor to the commodity “labor,” they fell from one contradiction into another. How is the value of “labor” determined? By the necessary labor embodied in it. But how much labor is embodied in the labor of a laborer for a day, a week, a month, a year?