Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/48

 in the mystery. There is for him inestimable price, because there are no buyers, and he will never find them while he continues to exclude demand.

From another side, the abundance of M. Proudhon seems to be something spontaneous. He all at once forgets that there are people who produce, and that it is to their interest never to lose sight of the demand. If not, how can M. Proudhon have been able to say that the things which are very useful must be very cheap, or even cost nothing? He ought to have concluded, on the contrary, that it is necessary to restrict abundance, the production of very useful things, if one wished to raise their price, their value in exchange.

The old vine growers of France, in asking for a law prohibiting the planting of fresh vines; the Dutch, in burning the spices of Asia, in uprooting the clove-trees in the Malays, wished simply to reduce abundance in order to raise the exchange-value. So the society of the Middle Ages, in limiting by law the number of associates whom a single master could employ, and in limiting the number of instruments he could use, acted on the same principle. (See Anderson, "History of Commerce.")

After having represented abundance as use-value and scarcity as exchange-value—nothing more easy than to demonstrate that abundance and scarcity are in inverse ratio—M. Proudhon identifies use-value with supply and exchange-value with demand. To make the antithesis still more clear, he substitutes other terms by putting value of choice instead of exchange-value. Here then the struggle has changed its ground and we have on one side utility (use-value, supply), on the other choice (exchange-value, demand.)

These two powers opposed the one to the other, who will reconcile them? What can be done to bring them