Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/52

 which itself depends upon the entire social organisation. Thus the worker who buys potatoes, and the kept woman who buys lace, follow the one and the other their respective choice. But the diversity of their choice is explained by the difference in the positions which they occupy in the world, a difference which is the product of the social organisation.

Is the entire range of wants based upon choice or upon the whole organisation of production? In most cases wants spring directly from production or from a state of things based upon production. The commerce of the world almost entirely turns upon wants arising not from individual consumption but from production. Thus, to take another example, does not the need for notaries presuppose a given civil right, which is only an expression of a certain development of property; that is to say, production?

For M. Proudhon it is not sufficient to have eliminated from the relation of supply and demand the elements of which we have just spoken. He pushes abstraction to the farthest limits, in confounding all producers in a single producer, all consumers in a single consumer, and in establishing the struggle between these two chimerical personages. But in the real world matters go otherwise. The competition between those who offer, and the competition between those who demand, forms a necessary element of the struggle between buyers and sellers, from which saleable value arises.

After having eliminated the cost of production and competition, M. Proudhon can at his ease reduce to absurdity the formula of supply and demand.

"Supply and demand," he says, "are nothing but two ceremonial forms serving to set before each other use-value and exchange-value, and to effect their reconcilia-