Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/55

 But no, the comparison of values is effected without there being any point of comparison between them and without unity of measure:—that is what the economists of the nineteenth century, rather than embrace the revolutionary theory of equality, have resolved to maintain towards and against all. What will posterity say about it?" (Vol. I., p. 68.)

Posterity, so brusquely apostrophised, will commence by being puzzled about this chronology. It must necessarily ask: But were not Ricardo and his school economists of the nineteenth century? The system of Ricardo, which set forth the principle "that the relative value of commodities depends exclusively on the quantity of labor required for their production," appeared in 1817. Ricardo is the chief of a whole school which reigned in England since the Restoration. The Ricardian theory sums up, rigorously, pitilessly, all the doctrine of the English middle class, itself the type of the modern bourgeoisie.

"What will posterity say about it?" It will not say that M. Proudhon did not know Ricardo, because he speaks of him, deals with his theory at considerable length, returns to it constantly, and ends by saying that it is rubbish. If ever posterity concerns itself with the subject, it will say, perhaps, that M. Proudhon, fearing to shock the anglophobia of his readers, has preferred to make himself the editor responsible for the ideas of Ricardo. However that may be, it will find it very curious that M. Proudhon gave as a "revolutionary theory of the future" that which Ricardo had scientifically explained as the theory of existing society, of bourgeois society, and that he thus took for the solution of the contradiction between utility and exchange-value what Ricardo and his school had, a long time before him, pre-