Engels quotes Duhring's comment in which he describes Marx's analysis of surplus value, as the surplus labour performed by the wage-worker and appropriated as profit by the industrial capitalist. Engels comments,
“According to Herr Dühring, therefore, Marx’s surplus-value would be nothing more than what, is known in everyday language, as the earnings of capital, or profit. Let us see and hear what Marx says himself. On page 195 of Capital, surplus-value is explained in the following words placed in brackets after it: “Interest, Profit, Rent”.” (p 270)
In other words, Engels (and it should be remembered Marx, himself, either wrote or proof-read these sections on political-economy) seeks to emphasise that, in Marx's analysis, surplus value is not equated with profit, but to all of these other sub-forms, of rent, interest and taxes. Indeed, as Marx describes, commercial profit is also a deduction from produced surplus-value. However, its necessary to make a clarification, here, that is only possible on the basis of Marx's further analysis and elaboration in Capital III.
In Capital III, Marx, himself begins this analysis by equating the produced surplus-value with profit. He does so, because, in Chapter 15, he sets out that it is in the form of this industrial profit that the surplus-value is manifest. This is important, because it is this “profit”, before the deduction of rent, interest and taxes, that is the basis for the calculation of the general industrial rate of profit. Unless that is the case, thee is no basis upon which to calculate surplus profits, over and above the average rate of profit, and so no basis upon which to calculate rent.
So, in Capital III, Marx sets out the basis upon which surplus value does materialise, first, in the form of industrial profit, realised in the price of commodities, and its division, therefrom into rent, interest, taxes and profit of enterprise. He notes, in Chapter 15, that, therefore, the same average rate of industrial profit can result in different amounts and rates of profit of enterprise, simply because more or less of the surplus-value/profit going to rent, interest, or taxes.
“If we consider the total social capital C, and use p1 for the industrial profit that remains after deducting interest and ground-rent, i for interest, and r for ground-rent, then s/C = p/C = p1 + i + r/C = p1/C + i/C + r/C. We have seen that while s, the total amount of surplus-value, is continually increasing in the course of capitalist development, s/C is just as steadily declining, because C grows still more rapidly than s. Therefore it is by no means a contradiction for p1, i, and r to be steadily increasing, each individually, while s/C = p/C, as well as p1/C, i/C, and r/C, should each by itself be steadily shrinking, or that p1 should increase in relation to i, or r in relation to p1 or to p1 and i. With a rising total surplus-value or profit s = p, and a simultaneously falling rate of profit s/C = p/C, the proportions of the parts p1, i, and r, which make up s = p, may change at will within the limits set by the total amount of s without thereby affecting the magnitude of s or s/C.”
(Capital III, Chapter 15)
Engels, here, however, is keen to make the point against Duhring, that surplus-value is not simply what is commonly referred to as the capitalist's profit (profit of enterprise), but is also the basis of these other revenues, rent, interest, taxes. Engels quotes Marx.
“Surplus-value, therefore, splits up into various parts. Its fragments fall to various categories of persons, and take various forms, independent the one of the other, such as profit, interest, merchants’ profit, ground-rent, etc.” (p 271)
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