Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/70

 that he has himself taken labor value for a measure. He forgets that his whole system rests on the labor commodity, on labor which is trafficked, bought and sold, exchanged for products, &c.; on the labor, in fine, which is an immediate source of revenue for the worker. He forgets all.

In order to save his system he consents to sacrifice its basis.

We now arrive at a new definition of "constituted value."

"Value is the relation of the proportion of the products which compose wealth."

First of all let us remark that the simple expression "relative or exchangeable value' implies the idea of some sort of relation, in which the products exchange reciprocally. By giving to this relation the name of "relation of proportion" we change nothing of the relative value, except the expression. Neither the depreciation nor the enhancement of the value of a product destroys the quality which it possesses of finding itself in a "relation of proportion" of some kind with the other products which form wealth.

Why, then, this new term, which conveys no new idea?

The "relation of proportion" makes one think of many other economic relations, such as the proportion of production, the just proportion between supply and demand, &amp;c.; and M. Proudhon has thought of all that in formulating this didactic paraphrase of saleable values.

In the first place, the relative value of products being determined by the comparative quantity of labor employed in the production of each of them, the relation