Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/28

 this, according to them, is a law. The anarchical movements in which the rise is compensated by the fall, and the fall by the rise, they ascribe to chance. With just as good a right, we might consider, like some other economists, the fluctuations as the law, and ascribe the fixing of price by cost of production to chance. But if we look closely, we see that it is precisely these fluctuations, although they bring the most terrible desolation in their train, and shake the fabric of bourgeois society like earthquakes, it is precisely these fluctuations which in their course determine price by cost of production. In the totality of this disorderly movement is to be found its order. Throughout these alternating movements in the course of this industrial anarchy, competition, as it were, cancels one excess by means of another.

We gather, therefore, that the price of a commodity is determined by its cost of production are compensated by the periods in which it sinks below this cost, and conversely. Of course this does not hold good for one single particular product of an industry, but only for that entire branch of industry. So also it does not hold good for a particular manufacturer, but only for the entire industrial class.

The determination of price by cost of production is the same thing as its determination by the duration of the labor which is required for the manufacture of a commodity; for cost of production may be divided into (1) raw material and implements, that is, products of industry whose manufacture has cost a certain number of days’ work, and which therefore