Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/86

 the present capitalists would gradually go from them to the working classes." (Bray, pp. 51, 52, 53 and 55.)

"So long as the system of unequal exchanges is tolerated, the producers will be almost as poor and as ignorant and as hardworked as they are at present, even if every Governmental burden be swept away and all taxes be abolished. Nothing but a total change of system—an equalising of labor and exchanges—can alter this state of things for the better, and ensure men a true equality of rights. The producers have but to make an effort—and by them must every effort for their own redemption be made—and their chains will be snapped asunder for ever. As an end political equality is a failure. As a means, also, it is a failure Where things are of equal value, and they are exchanged unequally, the gain of one exchanger must ever be the loss of another for every exchange is then simply a transfer, and not a sacrifice of labor and wealth. Thus, although under a social system based on equal exchanges, a parsimonious man may become rich, his wealth will be no more than the accumulated produce of his own labor. He may exchange his wealth or he may give it to others who will exchange it for an equal value of the wealth of other persons; but a rich man cannot continue wealthy for any length of time after he has ceased to labor. Under equality of exchanges, wealth cannot have, as it has now, a procreative and apparently self-generating power, such as replenishes all waste from consumption; for, unless it be renewed by labor, wealth, when once consumed, is given up for ever. That which is now called profit and interest cannot exist, as such, in connection with equality of exchanges, for producer and distributor would be alike remunerated, and the sum total of their labor would determine the value of the article created and brought to