Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/47

 practice does not admit these extremes; on the one side, no human product ever attains the infinite in magnitude; on the other the most scarce things have need of some degree of utility in order to be possessed of any value. Use-value and exchange-value are thus fatally chained to each other, although by their nature they continually tend to exclude each other." (Vol. I., p. 39.)

What is it which adds to the difficulty of M. Proudhon? It is simply that he has forgotten the demand, and that a thing can only be scarce or abundant according as it is in demand. Demand once set aside he assimilates exchange-value to scarcity and use-value to abundance. Practically in saying that the things "of whihwhich [sic] the utility is nil, and which are extremely scarce, will have an inestimable price," he simply says that exchange-value is nothing but scarcity. "Extreme scarcity and utility nil," is pure scarcity. "Inestimable price" is the maximum of exchange-value, it is pure exchange-value. He puts these two terms in equation. Then, exchange-value and scarcity are equivalent terms. In arriving at these pretended "extreme consequences," M. Proudhon finds in effect that he has pushed to extremes, not the things, but the terms which express them, and in that he demonstrates his rhetoric rather than his logic. He finds once more his first hypotheses in all their nakedness when he believes that he has discovered new consequences. Thanks to the same process he succeeds in identifying use-value with pure abundance.

After having put in equation exchange-value and scarcity, utility-value and abundance, M. Proudhon is astonished not to find utility-value in scarcity and exchange-value, nor exchange-value in abundance and utility-value; and in seeing that actual practice does not admit of these extremes he can do no other than believe