Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/59

 and not, as has often been advanced, the proportion between supply and demand." (Vol. II., p. 253.)

Lord Lauderdale had developed the variations of exchange-value according to the law of supply and demand, or of scarcity and abundance relatively to demand. According to him the value of a thing would increase when its quantity diminished or demand increased; it would diminish in proportion to the increase of its quantity or to the reduction of demand. Thus the value of anything might change by the operation of eight different causes, namely, four causes appertaining to the thing itself, and four causes appertaining to money or any other commodity which served as measure of its value. Here is Ricardo's refutation:

"The products of which an individual or a company has the monopoly vary in value according to the law which Lord Lauderdale has postulated: they fall in proportion as they are supplied in greater quantity, and they rise with the desire of purchasers to acquire them; their price has no necessary relation to their natural value. But as to the things which are subject to competition between the sellers, and of which the quantity can be increased within reasonable limits, their price depends definitely not upon the state of demand and of supply, but upon the actual cost of production." (Vol. II., p. 159.)

We will leave the reader to compare the precise, clear, and simple language of Ricardo with the rhetorical efforts made by M. Proudhon in order to arrive at the determination of relative value by labor time.

Ricardo shows us the real movement of bourgeois production which constitutes value. M. Proudhon, making abstraction of this movement, "struggles" to invent new processes in order to regulate the world