Johann von Komorzynski · 1897
This is a single-author critical essay on Marx’s Capital, especially the posthumous third volume, with scope extending from the labor theory of value to surplus value, average profit, commercial profit, interest, and rent. Komorzynski’s thesis is that volume III does not solve the contradiction in Marx’s system but exposes it: Marx can explain the equalization of profit only by abandoning the labor-value premise on which the exploitation theory depends.
Komorzynski begins by granting the internal force of Marx’s starting point. If value is created only by labor, then capital income must be unpaid labor; Marx’s distinction between constant and variable capital follows from that premise.
Die Ausbeutungstheorie ist die logische Konsequenz der Arbeitswerttheorie.
English translation: The theory of exploitation is the logical consequence of the labor theory of value.
But this logic immediately generates the “Rätsel der gleichen Profitrate.” If surplus comes only from variable capital, profit rates should vary with the wage-capital share of each industry. Railways, factories, and handicraft shops should therefore show profit rates corresponding to their labor intensity. For Komorzynski, this is not a minor empirical irregularity but a decisive test.
Diese Folgerung steht jedoch im grellsten Widerspruch mit aller Erfahrung.
English translation: This conclusion, however, stands in the most glaring contradiction to all experience.
The second section reconstructs Marx’s original doctrine of value and surplus value and then attacks its foundations. Komorzynski argues that Marx inherits rather than invents the labor theory from classical economics, but that this inheritance is already flawed. Value cannot be grounded in labor cost alone, because scarce natural agents—land, mines, water power—have value without being products of labor. Nor can skilled labor, usefulness, or socially necessary labor be measured without circular reference to exchange relations. The critique also stresses that production is never technically reducible to labor alone: natural powers and existing capital goods are productive conditions, not merely disguised past labor.
Die Ausbeutungslehre steht und fällt mit der Arbeitswerttheorie.
English translation: The doctrine of exploitation stands and falls with the labor theory of value.
The third section turns to the posthumous third volume and the transformation problem. Komorzynski surveys Rodbertus, Lexis, Conrad Schmidt, Fireman, Loria, and others to show that socialist writers had already sensed the required move: prices must be separated from labor-values if equal profit is to be constructed. Marx’s “production price” is therefore not a harmless mediation but a different law of exchange. Komorzynski is especially attentive to Marx’s concept of price as the normal, law-governed exchange relation, not a mere accidental market fluctuation.
Der Preis bedeutet somit bei Marx das quantitative Austauschverhältnis der Produkte, sofern es durch ein ökonomisches Gesetz beherrscht wird, also gerade sofern man von allen äußeren Störungen seiner inneren Regel absieht.
English translation: For Marx, price thus denotes the quantitative exchange ratio of products insofar as it is governed by an economic law—that is, precisely insofar as one abstracts from all external disturbances of its inner rule.
Once Marx says prices equal cost price plus average profit, surplus can no longer be traced in each case to the labor newly added in that branch of production. Commercial capital sharpens the difficulty: if circulation labor creates no value, merchant profit must come from a redistribution of surplus produced elsewhere.
Zum Rätsel der gleichen Profitrate gesellt sich nun in Rücksicht auf das merkantile Kapital das Rätsel der Profitgewinnung überhaupt.
English translation: To the riddle of the uniform rate of profit is now added, with respect to mercantile capital, the riddle of the acquisition of profit as such.
Komorzynski’s decisive claim is that Marx mistakes replacement for reconciliation. Production price does not merely redistribute labor-value; it becomes the real social regulator of exchange, consumption, and income calculation. The old labor-value survives only as a theoretical fiction.
Der "Produktionspreis" ist also völlig in die Funktion des gesellschaftlichen Güterwertes eingetreten und der auf den Arbeitsinhalt der Produkte gestützte Tauschwert hat die reale Geltung eingebüßt.
English translation: The "price of production" has thus wholly stepped into the function of the social value of goods, and the exchange value grounded on the labor content of products has forfeited its real validity.
The work’s relevance lies in its early, systematic formulation of the anti-Marxian “transformation” critique: volume III solves the empirical contradiction only by sacrificing the value theory that made exploitation appear necessary. Komorzynski thus treats the third volume not as Marx’s completion, but as the point where the system’s inner contradiction becomes visible.
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