"Value, Price and Profit" (German: "Lohn, Preis und Profit") is a transcript of an English-language lecture series delivered to the First International Working Men's Association on June 20 and 27, 1865 by Karl Marx. The text was written between the end of May and June 27 in 1865, while Capital, Volume I was in preparation and one year before it was published. Value, Price and Profit was published as a book in 1898 by Marx's daughter Eleanor Marx Aveling. In this polemic, Marx sought to refute the theoretical basis for the economic policy of Ricardian socialist John Weston. Weston said that "(1) that a general rise in the rate of wages would be of no use to the workers; (2) that therefore, etc., the trade unions have a harmful effect". In the process of criticizing Weston, Marx's explicates his theories of surplus value and the falling rate of profit in simple and concise English. Synopsis Marx argues that because there are economic laws governing the value of commodities as represented by the social relationship of wages and price, capitalists cannot raise or lower wages merely at their whim, nor can they raise prices at will in order to make up for lost profits resulting from an increase in wages. At the heart of the argument is the labour theory of value and the related premise that profit represents surplus value created by labour working above and beyond the amount needed to reproduce itself, as represented by wages and the buying power of wages viz. the price of commodities (particularly necessities). In other words, profit is what is left over after paying the worker a wage representing a certain portion of the labour performed, the remainder effectively being unpaid and reserved to the capitalist. Because this arrangement depends ultimately on the social conditions of labour and production, despite the existence of apparently natural laws governing the value of commodities, within these limits workers can organize around demanding a higher rate of pay at the expense of the profits of the capitalist, not at their own expense as argued by Weston, who claims that capitalists will simply raise prices in order to sell the same quantity of produce at a rate that will pay for the same quantity of labour, effectively cancelling out any wage gains won by workers through union activities. Marx argues that profit is derived not by selling commodities