Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/23

 tion operates, according to Ricardo (chap. i., sections 4 and 5) regularly in favor of the rate of profit at the expense of the value.

But Ricardo's definition of value, in spite of its evil characteristics, has a phase which renders it dear to our good bourgeoisie. That is the side on which it appeals with irresistible force to their sense of justice. Justice and equality of rights, those are the twin pillars upon which the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would raise their social edifice above the ruins of injustice, of feudal inequalities and privileges. The determination of the value of commodities by labor and the free exchange which arises according to this measure of value between the possessors of equal rights, such are, as Marx has already shown, the real foundation upon which all the political, juridical and philosophical ideology of the modern bourgeoisie is erected. When one knows that labor is the measure of commodities, the good sentiments of the worthy bourgeoisie must feel deeply wounded by the wickedness of the world, which, indeed, nominally recognises this principle of justice, but which every moment without compunction actually appears to set it on one side. Above all, the "little man," whose honest labor—even when it is only that of his workmen or of his apprentices—loses every day more and more of its value through the competition of the great industry and of machinery; above all, the small producer must ardently desire a society in which the exchange of products according to their labor-value would be a complete and invariable reality. In other terms, he must ardently desire a society in which a single law of production of commodities reigns fully and exclusively, but in which the conditions which alone render this law effective, that is to say, the other laws of