Page:American Journal of Sociology Volume 5.djvu/599

 THE PHILOSOPHY OF VALUE 5^3

or imitative in comparison with inter-individual exchange ; on the contrary, the give-and-take between sacrifice and accomplishment, within the individual, is the basal presumption, and at the same time the persistent substance, of every two-sided exchange. The latter is merely a sub-species of the former ; that is, the sort in which the sacrifice is occasioned by the demand of another indi- vidual. At the same time, it can only be occasioned by the same sort of result for the actor so far as objects and their qualities are concerned. It is of extreme importance to make this reduction of the economic process to that which actually takes place, that is, in the soul of every economic agent. We must not allow ourselves to be deceived about the essential thing by the fact that in the case of exchange this process is reciprocal ; that is, that it is conditioned by the like procedure in another. The main thing is that the natural and solitary economic trans- action, if we may conceive of such a thing, runs back to the same fundamental form as two-sided exchange : to the process of equalization between two subjective occurrences within the indi- vidual. This is in its proper essence not affected by the second- ary question whether the impulse to the process proceeds from the nature of things or the nature of man ; whether it is a matter of purely natural economy or of exchange economy. All feelings of value, in other words, which are set free by producible objects are in general to be gained only by foregoing other values. At the same time, such sacrifice may consist, not only in that mediate labor for ourselves which appears as labor for others, but fre- quently enough in that quite immediate labor for our own per- sonal purposes.

Moreover, those theories of value which discover in labor the absolute element of value accommodate themselves to this form of conception as to the higher and more abstract idea. Whoever labors sacrifices something which he possesses — his labor-power, or his leisure, or his pleasure merely in the self- satisfying play of his powers — in order to get in exchange for these something which he does not possess. Through the fact that labor accomplishes this it acquires value, just as, on the other side, the attained object is valuable for the reason that it