Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/91

 would be sure to result in a reduction of the hours of labor of adult men. It is in the nature of the great industry that the hours of labor should be equal for all. That which is to-day the result of capital and the competition of the workers among themselves, will be to-morrow, if you cut off the relation between labor and capital, the effect of an understanding based on the relation of the sum of the productive forces to the sum of existing wants.

But such an understanding is the condemnation of individual exchange, and so we arrive once more at our first result.

In principle there is no exchange of products, but exchange of the labors which co-operate in production. The mode of exchange of the products depends upon the mode of production of the productive forces. Generally the form of the exchange of products corresponds to the form of production. Change the latter and the former finds itself changed as a consequence. We may also see in the history of society the mode of exchanging products regulated by the method of producing them. Individual exchange also corresponds to a determined method of production, which itself corresponds to the antagonism of classes. Thus there is no individual exchange without the antagonism of classes.

But the honest consciences refuse to accept this evidence. So long as one is bourgeois one cannot do other than see in this relation of antagonism a relation of harmony and eternal justice, which permits no one to get value at the expense of another. For the bourgeois individual exchange can exist without the antagonism of classes; for him these are two entirely incompatible things. Individual exchange, as it presents itself to the