Prices of production refers to a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. It is introduced in the third volume of Das Kapital, where Marx considers the operation of capitalist production as the unity of a production process and a circulation process involving commodities, money and capital. The argument is that the exchange of newly produced commodities in capitalist markets is regulated by their production prices. The regulating pri...
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Prices of production refers to a concept in Karl Marx's critique of political economy. It is introduced in the third volume of Das Kapital, where Marx considers the operation of capitalist production as the unity of a production process and a circulation process involving commodities, money and capital. The argument is that the exchange of newly produced commodities in capitalist markets is regulated by their production prices. The regulating price of a type of product is a sort of modal average, above or below which people would be much less likely to trade the product. So it refers basically to a "normal or dominant price level" that prevails during a longer interval of time. It presupposes that both the inputs and the outputs of production are priced goods and services, i.e. that production is integrated in fairly sophisticated market relations enabling a sum of capital invested into it to be transformed into a larger sum of capital.
For most political economists, this kind of...
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