Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/67

 this error by showing clearly the disparity between these two methods of measuring. M. Proudhon enhances the error of Adam Smith by identifying the two things which the latter had only placed in juxtaposition.

It is in order to find the just proportion in which the workers should share in the products, or in other terms, to determine the relative value of labor, that M. Proudhon seeks for a measure of the relative values of commodities. To determine the measure of the relative value of commodities he can think of nothing better than of giving as the equivalent of a certain quantity of labor the sum of the products that it has created, which amounts to supposing that the whole of society consists solely of direct workers receiving for wages their own produce. In the second place, he sets forth as a fact the equality of the days of different workers. To sum up, he seeks the measure of the relative value of commodities in order to discover the equal remuneration of the workers, and he assumes, as an already established fact, equality of wages in order to discover the relative value of commodities. What admirable dialectic!

"Say and the economists who have followed him have observed that labor being itself subject to valuation, a commodity like any other, in fact, to take it for a principle and the efficient cause of value would be to move in a vicious circle. These economists, if they will permit me to say so, have shown by that a prodigious inattention. Labor is called value, not as being a commodity itself, but in view of the values supposed to be potentially embodied in it. The value of labor is a figurative expression, an anticipation of the cause and the effect. It is a fiction of the same kind as the productivity of capital. Labor produces, capital denotes value. Labor, like liberty, is a vague and indefinite