Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/50

 sign of all products? And does he not thus become the representative of choice, of the value of choice, or exchange-value?

A demand is at the same time an offer, an offer is at the same time a demand. Thus the antithesis of M. Proudhon in simply identifying supply and demand, the one to utility, the other to choice, rests merely on a futile abstraction.

What M. Proudhon calls value of utility other economists, with as much reason, call value of choice. We will only cite Storch. ("Cours d'Économie Politique," Paris, 1823, pp. 88 and 99.)

According to him, those things are called wants, of which we feel the want; those things are called values to which we attribute value. Most things only have value because they satisfy wants engendered by choice. Opinion as to our wants may change, then the utility of things, which expresses only the relation of those things to our wants, may change also. Natural wants themselves change continually. What variety there is, for instance, in the objects which serve as the staple food among different peoples!

The struggle is not really between utility and choice; it is between the saleable value demanded by him who wishes to sell, and the saleable value offered by him who makes the demand, who wishes to buy. The exchangeable value of the product is each time the result of these contradictory appreciations.

In a final analysis, supply and demand bring together production and consumption, but production and consumption based upon individual exchanges. The product offered is not utility in itself. It is the consumer who verifies its utility. And even when its quality of utility is recognised, it is not exclusively utility. In the