Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/64

 value may be measured by labor time in spite of the inequality of value of different days of labor; but, to apply a similar measure it is necessary for us to have a comparative scale of the different days of labor; it is competition which establishes this scale.

Is your hour of labor equal to mine? That is a question debated and settled by competition.

Competition, according to an American economist, determines how many days of simple labor are contained in a day of complex labor. Does not this reduction of days of complex labor to days of simple labor suppose that simple labor is itself taken as the measure of value? The single quantity of labor serving as the measure of value supposes in its turn that simple labor has become the pivot of industry. It supposes that labors are equalised by the subordination of man to the machine, or by the extreme division of labor; that men are effaced before labor; that the balance of the pendulum has become the exact measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is of the speed of two locomotives. Then it is not necessary to say that the hour of one man is worth the hour of another man, but rather that a man of one hour is worth another man of an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is no more than the carcase of time. There is no more question of quality. Quantity alone decides everything, hour for hour, day for day: but this equalisation of labor is not the work of M. Proudhon's "eternal justice"; it is solely the accomplishment of modern industry.

In the automatic workshop the labor of one worker is scarcely distinguished in anything from the labor of another worker: the workers cannot distinguish between themselves except by the quantity of time they work. Nevertheless, this quantitative difference becomes, at a