Value, Price and Profit
Preliminary
Section summary
Marx opens his address to the General Council of the International. A wave of strikes on the Continent makes the question of wages urgent, and the Council needs settled views on it. He honours Citizen Weston’s courage in defending unpopular opinions, promises to agree in the end with the just idea behind them, but calls his theses theoretically false and practically dangerous.
There reigns now on the Continent a real epidemic of strikes, and a general clamour for a rise of wages. The question will turn up at our Congress. You, as the head of the International Association, ought to have settled convictions upon this paramount question. For my own part, I considered it therefore my duty to enter fully into the matter, even at the peril of putting your patience to a severe test.
Another preliminary remark I have to make in regard to Citizen Weston. He has not only proposed to you, but has publicly defended, in the interest of the working class, as he thinks, opinions he knows to be most unpopular with the working class. Such an exhibition of moral courage all of us must highly honour. I hope that, despite the unvarnished style of my paper, at its conclusion he will find me agreeing with what appears to me the just idea lying at the bottom of his theses, which, however, in their present form, I cannot but consider theoretically false and practically dangerous. I shall now at once proceed to the business before us.