Page:Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, A - Karl Marx.djvu/73

Rh form of wealth, and alienation [of commodities], the ruling form of acquisition and that consequently labor creating exchange value is specifically capitalistic in its character.

After different forms of concrete labor, such as agriculture, manufacture, navigation, trade, etc., had each in turn been declared the true source of wealth, proclaimed labor in general, and namely in its general social form of division of labor, to be the only source of material wealth or use-values. While ignoring in connection with the latter the part played by nature, he is troubled by it when he comes to deal with purely social wealth i. e. exchange value. To be sure, Adam determines the value of a commodity by the labor-time contained in it, but relegates the actual application of the principle to pre-Adamic times. In other words, what seems to him true from the standpoint of simple commodity, ceases to be clear as soon as the higher and more complex forms of capital, wage-labor, rent, etc. take its place. This he expresses by saying, that the value of commodities used to be measured by labor-time in the paradise lost of bourgeois society, in which men