Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/81

 industry of past centuries and its corollary of "just proportion," or with the great industry and all its train of misery and anarchy.

After all, the determination of value by labor time, that is to say the formula which M. Proudhon has given us as the regenerating formula of the future, is then only the scientific expression of the economic relations of existing society, as Ricardo has clearly and definitely demonstrated it long before M. Proudhon.

But at least the "equalitarian" application of this formula belongs to M. Proudhon. Is it he who has first thought of reforming society by transforming all men into immediate workers, exchanging quantities of equal labor? Is it indeed for him to make to the Communists—these people innocent of all knowledge of political economy, these "obstinately stupid men," these "paradisical dreamers"—the reproach of not having found before him, this "solution of the problem of the proletariat"?

Whoever is, no matter how little, acquainted with the movement of political economy in England, knows that nearly all the Socialists of that country have, at different times, proposed the equalitarian application of the Ricardian theory. We may cite to M. Proudhon the "Political Economy" of Hopkins; William Thompson: "An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness," 1827: T. R. Edmonds: "Practical, Moral, and Political Economy," 1828, &c., &c., and we might add pages of &c. We will content ourselves with quoting an English Communist. We will reproduce the decisive passage of his remarkable work, "Labor's Wrongs and Labor's Remedy," Leeds, 1839, and we will dwell upon it at sufficient length; in the first place, because J. F. Bray is yet but