Marx's definition of profit

[Jauchart]

Did Marx have a specific definition for "profit," or did he just use the normal dictionary definition: a valuable return, gain; excess of returns over expenditures? If so, please provide citations.
I'm writing a study of the medieval economy, which I'm finding to have been more "profit-driven" than many realize. But a reader has challenged my use of "profit" as applied to the medieval economy, claiming that Marx meant it only to apply to the capitalist mode of production.

[Brotto Rühle]

From Marx's "Value, Price and Profit" (http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/value-price-profit/):



X. Profit is Made by Selling a Commodity at its Value

Suppose an average hour of labour to be realized in a value equal to sixpence, or twelve average hours of labour to be realized in six shillings. Suppose, further, the value of labour to be three shillings or the produce of six hours' labour. If, then, in the raw material, machinery, and so forth, used up in a commodity, twenty-four hours of average labour were realized, its value would amount to twelve shillings. If, moreover, the workman employed by the capitalist added twelve hours of labour to those means of production, these twelve hours would be realized in an additional value of six shillings. The total value of the product would, therefore, amount to thirty-six hours of realized labour, and be equal to eighteen shillings. But as the value of labour, or the wages paid to the workman, would be three shillings only, no equivalent would have been paid by the capitalist for the six hours of surplus labour worked by the workman, and realized in the value of the commodity. By selling this commodity at its value for eighteen shillings, the capitalist would, therefore, realize a value of three shillings, for which had paid no equivalent. These three shillings would constitute the surplus value or profit pocketed by him. The capitalist would consequently realize the profit of three shillings, not by selling his commodity at a price over and above its value, but by selling it at its real value.

The value of a commodity is determined by the total quantity of labour contained in it. But part of that quantity of labour is realized in a value for which and equivalent has been paid in the form of wages; part of it is realized in a value for which NO equivalent has been paid. Part of the labour contained in the commodity is paid labour; part is unpaid labour. By selling, therefore, the commodity at its value, that is, as the crystallization of the total quantity of labour bestowed upon it, the capitalist must necessarily sell it at a profit. He sells not only what has cost him an equivalent, but he sells also what has cost him nothing, although it has cost his workman labour. The cost of the commodity to the capitalist and its real cost are different things.

I repeat, therefore, that normal and average profits are made by selling commodities not above, but at their real values.

[Hit The North]

This link might also help you:

https://www.marxists.org/glossary/terms/p/r.htm#profit

[Dave B]

I think Karl did accept, took on board or understood for arguments sake or whatever the capitalists own definition of profit as;


a valuable return, gain; excess of returns over expenditures?

Thus from volume III


The surplus-value, or profit, consists precisely in the excess value of a commodity over its cost-price, i.e., the excess of the total labour embodied in the commodity over the paid labour embodied in it. The surplus-value, whatever its origin, is thus a surplus over the advanced total capital.


http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch02.htm

Where I suppose Marx’s “cost-price or cost of production” = the capitalist’s “expenditures”.

[there is the additional and important problem of profit on fixed capital which isn’t totally expended in the production of a commodity-leave that for the moment.]

Profit, for the capitalists, is inherently a relative and conditional term.

All profit and exploitation and surplus value is good; but for the capitalist it is a question of how good is the profit?

Making a profit of £8 on an outlay, expenditure, investment, cost production of £50 is a better kind of profit than making £10 on an outlay, expenditure, investment, cost production of £100.

So much so that the capitalist class for whatever reason chase after good and better profits rather than profits per se.

And therefore they are just as interested and perhaps more interested in reducing the cost of production, expenditure, investment than “absolute profit”.

Absolute profit ie £8 or £10 is surplus value, but for a capitalist, that doesn’t necessarily mean that a profit of £8 is a worse kind of profit than one of £10.

That sounds a bit bonkers; and that was exactly what lords of the manor feudal producers of surplus product [commodities] from surplus labour thought.

But that was because they did not have any outlay, expenditure, investment, cost production.

They didn’t have to pay wages [for serfs] or in other words have to have money capital to pay wages for ‘variable capital’ etc.

They didn’t have to pay for raw materials in as much as the ‘village’ feudal agricultural production automatically created its own eg seed corn etc.

And the means of production ie ‘outlay’; the land and essentially the economic equivalent of the capitalists machinery orientated fixed capital didn’t have a ‘market value’.

In fact in feudalism there was a legal institutionalised prohibition of land having a market value or being allowed to be sold by it being ‘entailed’.

However that doesn’t mean that surplus value isn’t produced in feudalism, in fact it is more obvious in feudalism.

Thus Karl talking specifically feudalism and the unpaid labour of the serf;

Capital Vol. III Part VI
Transformation of Surplus-Profit into Ground-Rent
Chapter 47. Genesis of Capitalist Ground-Rent



……….But this identity of surplus-value with unpaid labour of others need not be analysed here because it still exists in its visible, palpable form, since the labour of the direct producer for himself is still separated in space and time from his labour for the landlord and the latter appears directly in the brutal form of enforced labour for a third person. In the same way the "attribute" possessed by the soil to produce rent is here reduced to a tangibly open secret, for the disposition to furnish rent here also includes human labour-power bound to the soil, and the property relation which compels the owner of labour-power to drive it on and activate it beyond such measure as is required to satisfy his own indispensable needs. Rent consists directly in the appropriation of this surplus expenditure of labour-power by the landlord; for the direct producer pays him no additional rent.

Here, where surplus-value and rent are not only identical but where surplus-value has the tangible form of surplus-labour, the natural conditions or limits of rent, being those of surplus-value in general, are plainly clear. The direct producer must 1) possess enough labour-power, and 2) the natural conditions of his labour, above all the soil cultivated by him, must be productive enough, in a word, the natural productivity of his labour must be big enough to give him the possibility of retaining some surplus-labour over and above that required for the satisfaction of his own indispensable needs. It is not this possibility which creates the rent, but rather compulsion which turns this possibility into reality. But the possibility itself is conditioned by subjective and objective natural circumstances. And here too lies nothing at all mysterious. Should labour-power be minute, and the natural conditions of labour scanty, then the surplus-labour is………..

http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1894-c3/ch47.htm

I would recommend reading the whole chapter however as this is the kind of stuff I think you are after.