Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/53

 tion. They are the two electric poles which, when put into relation with each other, produce the phenomenon of affinity called exchange." (Vol. I., pp. 49 and 50.)

This amounts to as much as saying that exchange is only a "ceremonial form" to bring face to face the consumer and the object of consumption. As well say that all economic relations are "ceremonial forms" serving as intermediaries to immediate consumption. Supply and demand are relations of a given production, neither more nor less than are individual exchanges.

Of what, after all, then, does M. Proudhon's dialectic consist? In substituting for use-value and exchange-value, for supply and demand, some abstract and contradictory notions, such as scarcity and abundance, utility and choice, a producer and a consumer, both of them chevaliers of free will.

And to what, as the result of all this, does he come?

To arrange the means of introducing later one of the elements which he had excluded, the cost of production, as the synthesis between use-value and exchange-value. It is thus that in his eyes the cost of production constitutes synthetic value, or constituted value.



"Value (saleable) is the corner-stone of the economic edifice." "Constituted" value is the corner-stone of the system of economic contradictions.

What then, is this "constituted value" which constitutes all M. Proudhon's discovery in political economy?

Utility being admitted, labor is the source of value. The measure of labor is time. The relative value of products is determined by the labor time it is necessary