Shop Talks on Economics |
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The author, Mary Marcy, was gifted with intelligence, integrity, honesty, courage, simplicity, selflessness, and other higher human qualities. This book was the result of those qualities. In it, she attempted to simplify the complex theories, concepts, and language of Marx and Marxism to make it easier and understandable to common working class and other men and women. She did an excellent job in doing that. This was a great service to them as well as to socialism. Capitalist and imperialist government repression and persecution ruined her career and life and the ungrateful American nation lost a great and passionate fighter and writer for justice and truth.
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Popular passages
Page 47 - Capital and labor would be transferred from the less remunerative to the more remunerative branches; and this process of transfer would go on until the supply in the one department of industry would have risen proportionately to the increased demand, and would have sunk in the other departments according to the decreased demand.
Page 18 - To explain, therefore, the general nature of profits, you must start from the theorem that, on an average, commodities are sold at their real values, and that profits are derived from selling them at their values, that is, in proportion to the quantity of labour realised in them. If you cannot explain profit upon this supposition, you cannot explain it at all.
Page 24 - ... and the capitalist as a capitalist. The rate of surplus value, all other circumstances remaining the same, will depend on the proportion between that part of the working day necessary to reproduce the value of the labouring power and the surplus time or surplus labour performed for the capitalist.
Page 23 - It is this sort of exchange between capital and labor upon which capitalistic production, or the wages system, is founded, and which must constantly result in reproducing the working man as a working man, and the capitalist as a capitalist. The rate of...
Page 18 - Prices, you will find that the fluctuations of market prices, their deviations from values, their ups and downs, paralyze and compensate each other; so that apart from the effect of monopolies and some other modifications I must now pass by, all descriptions of commodities are, on the average, sold at their respective values or natural prices.
Page 49 - Firstly. A general rise in the rate of wages would result in a fall of the general rate of profit, but, broadly speaking, not affect the prices of commodities.
Page 18 - ... the average, sold at their respective values or natural prices. The average periods during which the fluctuations of market prices compensate each other are different for different kinds of commodities, because with one kind it is easier to adapt supply to demand than with the other. If then, speaking broadly, and embracing somewhat longer periods, all descriptions of commodities sell at their respective values, it is nonsense to suppose that profit, not in individual cases, but that the constant...
Page 15 - ... quite different from the tautological method of determining the values of commodities by the value of labour, or by wages.
Page 15 - The greatness of its value, or its relative value, depends upon the greater or less amount of that social substance contained in it ; that is to say, on the relative mass of labor necessary for its production. The relative values of commodities are, therefore, determined by the respective quantities or amounts of labor, worked up, realized, fixed in them.
Page 46 - ... proportion between the demand for, and the supply of. these commodities. It is perfectly true that, considered as a whole, the working class spends, and must spend, its income upon necessaries. A general rise in the rate of wages would, therefore, produce a rise in the demand for, and consequently in the market prices of, necessaries. The capitalists who produce these necessaries would be compensated for the risen wages by the rising market prices of their commodities.
Bibliographic information
| Title | Shop Talks on Economics Socialist and labour thought in Britain since 1884. 1911/20 |
| Author | Mary Marcy |
| Publisher | Charles H. Kerr & Company, Co-operative, 1911 |
| Original from | the University of Michigan |
| Digitized | Jan 12, 2007 |
| Length | 58 pages |
| Export Citation | BiBTeX EndNote RefMan |