Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/65

 certain point of view, qualitative, inasmuch as the time given to work depends, in part, on purely material causes, such as physical constitution, age, and sex; in part on purely negative moral qualities, such as patience, impassability, assiduity. Lastly, if there is a difference of quality in the labor of the workers it is at most a degree of the last quality, which is far from being a distinctive speciality. Such is, in the final analysis, the state of things in modern industry. It is on this already realised equality of automatic labor that M. Proudhon bases his plane of "equalisation" which he proposes to realise universally in "the time to come."

All the "equalitarian" consequences which M. Proudhon draws from the doctrine of Ricardo rest upon a fundamental error. That is, that he confounds the value of commodities measured by the quantity of labor embodied in them with the value of commodities measured by "the value of labor." If these two methods of measuring the value of commodities were confounded in one, we might say indifferently, the relative value of any commodity is measured by the quantity of value embodied in it; or, it is measured by the quantity of labor which it is able to purchase; or, again, it is measured by the quantity of labor which will purchase it. It is necessary, indeed, that it should be thus. The value of labor could no more serve as a measure of value than the value of any other commodity. Some examples will serve to more fully explain the above point.

If a quarter of wheat cost two days' labor instead of one, it would have double its primitive value; but it would not put in motion a double quantity of labor, because it would contain no more nutritive matter than before. Thus the value of the wheat, measured by the quantity of labor employed to produce it, would have