Karl’s Quotes

On value, price, and supply and demand,

“ But to consider matters more broadly : You would be altogether mistaken in fancying that the value of Labour or any other commodity whatever is ultimately fixed by supply and demand. Supply and demand regulate nothing but the temporary fluctuations of market prices. They will explain to you why the market price of a commodity rises above or sinks below its value, but they can never account for that value itself. Suppose supply and demand (were) to equilibrate, or, as the economists call it, to cover each other. Why, the very moment these opposite forces become equal they paralyse each other, and cease to work in one or the other direction. At the moment when supply and demand equilibrate each other, and therefore cease to act, the market price of a commodity coincides with its real value, with the standard price round which its market prices oscillate. In inquiring into the nature of that value, we therefore having nothing at all to do with the temporary effects on market prices of supply and demand. The same holds true of wages as of the prices of all other commodities.”
(Value, Price and Profit, p26 Little Marx Library)