Value, Price and Profits: With Focus on Africa’s $4 Trillion Untapped Investments - By Abdullahi Idris

Every beginning is difficult. This holds true in all sciences. The value form, whose fully developed shape is the money form, is very elemen...

Every beginning is difficult. This holds true in all sciences. The value form, whose fully developed shape is the money form, is very elementary and simple. Nevertheless, the human mind has, for more than 2,000 years, sought in vain to get to the bottom of it. This volume cannot stand accused on the score of difficulty.

Many people assume that Marxism is so dogmatic and outdated in its methods of inquiry and conclusions that it has nothing of interest to say about the modern world. In part, this is due to widespread misconceptions and ignorance of Marx’s own work.

In part, it is due to simple ignorance of the work of modern Marxists. In recent years, controversies among Marxists have ranged over the most important questions about the nature of the modern capitalist economy and the causes and consequences of the present crisis. In contrast to Baran and Sweezy, who focus particularly on the nature of markets in modern capitalism, an alternative tradition has continued to stress the relevance and importance of Marx’s value analysis of capital and the production process. There have been important contributions in Japan, Europe, and the United States.

In recent years, the publication and translation of long-buried manuscripts, particularly the Grundrisse, have brought greater understanding of Marx’s work. Many myths about Marx’s work have been exploded, for example, the idea that he was a technological determinist or believed in some kind of inevitable polarization of classes, or a progressive fall in the standard of living of the working class. With the aid of the Grundrisse, it is again possible to reconstruct Marx’s system of thought and appreciate its profundity.

Though Marx never completed the great work he planned, he left behind its essentials and his method of analysis. We believe that Marx’s approach provided the means for understanding the development of capitalism, not merely in its early laissez-faire stage, but in its late monopoly stage as well. Marx foresaw the concentration of production, the divorce of ownership from control, the creation of the world market, the approach to automation, and the rise of the new middle classes.

One of Marx’s greatest achievements was to formulate, in general terms, the limits of capitalist production and the causes of crises. His method was to analyze capitalism as both a system of production and a system of circulation and markets. Both are necessary to understand its development fully, but they require different approaches.

The market is the moment of exchange, the sphere of money and price. It is through the market that all exchange relations must be expressed and realized. It is not, however, fundamental to the capitalist mode of production. At the level of the market and competition, everything appears backwards. To understand market phenomena, it is necessary first to analyze the spheres of production and the social basis of capitalism.

Only in this way can the inexplicable events of the world market—inflation, crises, monopoly, and cycles—be explained. Marx’s analysis, therefore, starts with production and a discussion of the concept of value. It is, he acknowledged, the most difficult part of his analysis but, unfortunately, also the most essential.