Page:Karl Marx - Wage Labor and Capital - tr. J. L. Joynes (1900).pdf/7

 easily made intelligible, to the latter such intricate questions remain a riddle during all their life.

Classical Political Economy accepted from industrial practice the traditional conception of the manufacturer buying and paying for of his workingmen. This conception had proved quite sufficient for business purposes, those of bookkeeping and price-calculation. But transplanted naively into Political Economy, it caused there all kinds of strange errors and vagaries.

Political Economy is confronted with the fact, that the prices of all commodities, among them also the price of that, which is called “,” are constantly changing, rising and falling by reason of the most various circumstances, which frequently have no connection whatever with the production of the commodity itself, so that, as a rule, prices seem to be determined by mere accident. As soon then as Political Economy assumed a scientific character, it became one of its first tasks, to seek the law hiding behind accident, which was apparently ruling the prices of commodities, but truly was ruled in its turn by this law. Within these oscillations, i.e. the up-and-downward movements of prices, the new science began to seek the firm central point, around which these oscillations occur. In a word, starting from the of commodities, Economics began to seek for their regulating law, viz: The of commodities, by which the price-oscillations might be explained, to which they might ultimately be reduced.

Classical Political Economy found then, that the value of a commodity is determined by the labor which is embodied in it, in other words, which is required for its production. It rested satisfied with this explanation, which even we may accept for our proximate purposes. (To ward off misunderstandings, however, I should remind the reader, that this explanation has now become altogether insufficient.) Marx was the first to analyze in a thorough manner the peculiar property of labor to create new value, and he found that not all labor, which was seemingly or actually necessary for the production