Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/104

 all commercial value must arrive at its exact and rigorous determination."

The idea of sheep and vines being brought to the state of money is not new. In France that idea belongs to the period of Louis XIV. At that epoch, money having begun to establish its omnipotence, there was great complaint of the depreciation of all other commodities, and the people prayed most ardently for the moment in which "every commercial value" would arrive at its exact and rigorous determination, at the state of money Here is what we find in Bois-Guillebert, one of the oldest economists of France: "Money then, by this growth of innumerable competitors, which will be the commodities themselves established in their exact values, will be restricted to its natural limits." ("Economistes Financiers du Dixhuitième Siècle," p. 422.)

We see that the first illusions of the bourgeoisie are also their last.

"We read in some works on political economy this absurd hypothesis: If the price of all things were doubled As if the price of all things was not the proportion of things, and as if one could double a proportion, a relation, a law!" (Proudhon, vol. I., page 81.)

The economists have fallen into this error through not having known how to apply the "law of proportion" and of "constituted value"!

Unfortunately we find in the work of M. Proudhon (Vol. I., p. 110) this absurd hypothesis, that "if wages were raised generally, the price of everything would rise." Furthermore, if the phrase in question is found in a work of polticalpolitical [sic] economy, there is also the