Profit — "The difference between an enterprise's total revenue and all of its expenses related to the production and sale of its goods and services. / Schematically, profit can be considered as "what remains" to the enterprise once it has paid the prices of its factors of production and, generally, all of its expenses. The existence of a profit naturally presupposes that all of its income (measured approximately by its revenue) is greater than all of its expenses"122
Another work of economic vocabulary, after having taken up: "Profit — Difference between the total revenue and the total cost of an enterprise",123 states in line with the prevailing economic teaching: "Profit is an objective to be achieved, which sums up all the goals that are pursued by the firm.124 ".But in this "summary", what about the maximization of profit? The propositions and arguments to be followed are, of course, in line with the statement stated above: enterprises are not inevitably enslaved to a maximum to the advantage of their owners or managers.
Here is a political economy that makes profit first and finally the end of a commodity exchange. Here is another one that does not, as is still the case today for the most taught. On this point, one breaks with the other. The one who does so pursues an overtly normative project that is very different from the apparently descriptive project of the other. By means of the methodological options from which the one who does so derives his capacity for objectivity, the atavistic and contradictory feelings that the notions of profit and capital continue to excite are stepped over. This is in order to base the primitive analysis of economic facts on concepts that are sufficiently defined and indispensable for their use to become impartial. The alternative, which is still the most commonly used, is the dead-end damnation of responses to ideology with ideology, in the pejorative sense of the word.