Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/25

 this result—that there is no real measure of value, and that it is necessary to be content with a supererogatory measure. Labor may be such measure, but only in the case of an exchange between products of equal quantities of labor; if the case is otherwise in other instances, it is not so unless one has taken means to assure it. Value and labor thus remain without the least real relation to each other, although all the first chapter has been devoted to an endeavor to explain to us how and why the cost of commodities is determined by labor and by nothing but labor.

Labor is yet again taken in the form in which one meets it with the economists. And not even that. Because although there may be something said as to the difference in intensity of labor, it is very generally represented as something which "costs," that is to say which is a measure of value, whether it be expended or not under the normal conditions of society. Whether the producers employ ten days in the manufacture of products which could be manufactured in one day, or if they employ only one; whether they use the best or the worst implements; whether they apply their labor time to the manufacture of articles socially necessary or in the quantity socially required; whether they make articles for which there is no demand at all or articles for which there is more or less demand—of all that there is no question; labor is labor, the product of equal labor must be exchanged with the product of equal labor. Rodbertus, who in all other cases is always ready, whether it be relevant or not, to place himself at the national point of view and to consider the relations of isolated producers from the height of the observatory of general society, timidly avoids all that here. Simply because from the first line of his book he goes straight to the