Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/58

 theory of rent, decomposes capital and comes, in the final analysis, to find that there is nothing but accumulated labor. He afterwards develops a whole theory of wages and profit, and demonstrates that wages and profit rise and fall in inverse ratio the one to the other, without influencing the relative value of the product. He does not ignore the influence which the accumulation of capitals and the difference in their nature (fixed capital and circulating capital), as well as the rate of wages, may exercise on the proportional value of the products. There are, indeed, the principal problems which occupy Ricardo.

"Every economy of labor," says he, "never fails to reduce the relative value of a commodity, whether this economy be effected in the labor necessary to the manufacture of the article itself or in the labor necessary to the formation of the capital employed in that manufacuremanufacture [sic]." (Vol. I., p. 48.) "In consequence, while a day's labor continues to give to one the same quantity of fish and to the other the same of game, the natural rate of the respective prices of exchange will remain the same, whatever may, otherwise, be the variation in wages and in profit, and in spite of all the effects of the accumulation of capital." (Vol. I., p. 32.) "We have regarded labor as the foundation of the value of things, and the quantity of labor necessary to their production as the law which determines the respective quantities of commodities which must be given in exchange for others; but we have not pretended to deny that there may be in the current prices of commodities some accidental and passing deviation from this primitive and natural price." (Vol. I., p. 105). "It is the cost of production which regulates, in the last analysis, the price of things