As we well know, every commodity has a price, every job a wage: the market seems like a meeting between equals who exchange freely. For centuries that was the certainty of classical economics: profit comes from skillful exchange and entrepreneurship. Then Karl Marx arrived and that certainty, however solid, was no longer enough. In its place he proposed an idea with truly unique characteristics: profit is not born in exchange, it is born in production. It is not a question of cunning, it is a question of time. The intuition dates back to 1867. Marx combined Hegel's philosophy, Ricardo's economics and the observation of the factories in Manchester and discovered that, in the factory, not everything gets paid. The worker sells his labor-power for a day, but in a few hours he produces the value of his wage; the remaining hours he works for free. That difference is the heart of the problem, it is called surplus value. Seen from the outside, that difference is an engine. The more capital accumulates, the more it pushes to produce surplus value; the more it pushes, the more society divides into two classes, those who own the means of production and those who have to sell their own labor to live.
The theory explains phenomena that the mere economy of exchange left unresolved. Crises repeat cyclically, machines replace men but do not abolish exploitation, wealth grows on one side and misery on the other in the same workshop: it is one of the most discussed results of nineteenth-century social science. It has a contradiction and it raises a still open problem, the fate of capitalism: if everything lives on surplus value, what happens when there is no more room to extract it? Marx himself changed his mind more than once. The question is alive. It is not a laboratory accessory and it is not worn. It is a map of labor and society: it is for those who study economics, for those who seek to unite history and production, for those who want to understand whether even "market freedom" has a structural limit. It is more than a hundred and fifty years old and continues to be debated. Few human theories can say the same. If you are therefore interested in publishing one of your own (and wish to protect it in the best way first) contact us at the telephone numbers indicated at the end of the page or write to us using the appropriate ELECTRONIC FORM. We remind surfers that the texts present in this section are protected by copyright, which prohibits total or partial reproduction. The scientific theories disclosed here belong to the heritage of knowledge; their exposition in these pages is protected as an original elaboration.