Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/106

 following passage from an American economist who reproaches the other economists with quite the opposite fault. "The moral entity in the grammatical being called society has been clothed with attributes which have no existence except in the imagination of those who make a thing with a word that it is which has led to so many difficulties and to such deplorable mistakes in political economy." (Th. Cooper, "Lectures on the Elements of Political Economy," Columbia, 1826.)

"This principle of the surplus of labor," continues M. Proudhon, "is true of individuals only because it emanates from society, which thus confers upon them the benefit of its own laws."

Does M. Proudhon wish by that to say simply that the production of the social individual exceeds that of the isolated individual? Is it of this surplus of the production of associated individuals over that of non-associated individuals that M. Proudhon is to be understood to speak? If that is so we can cite a hundred economists who have expressed this simple truth without all the mysticism with which M. Proudhon surrounds it. Here is what Sadler, for instance, says on the subject:

"Combined labor gives results which individual labor could never produce. In proportion, then, as people increase in number, the products of their united industry will greatly exceed the sum of a simple addition calculated on this increase. In mechanical arts, as in the labors of science, a man can actually do more in a day than an isolated individual could do in the whole of his life. The axiom of the mathematician, that the whole is equal to the parts, is not true, as applied to this subject. As to labor, the great pillar of human existence, it may be said that the product of accumulated efforts greatly exceeds all that individual and separate efforts could