Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/92

 bourgeois, is far from resembling individual exchange as it is in actual practice.

Mr. Bray makes of the illusion of the honest bourgeois the ideal which he desires to realise. In purifying individual exchange, in freeing it from all the antagonistic elements he finds in it, he believes he has found an "equalitarian" relation which he desires to see adopted by society.

Mr. Bray does not see that this equalitarian relation, this corrective ideal, which he wishes to apply to the world is itself nothing but the reflection of the existing world, and that it is in consequence quite impossible to reconstitute society on a basis which is only an embellished shadow. In proportion as this shadow becomes substance, it is seen that this substance, far from being the dreamed-of transfiguration, is nothing but the body of existing society.

"Gold and silver are the first commodities the value of which has arrived at its constitution."

Gold and silver then are the first applications of the "constituted value" of M. Proudhon, And as M. Proudhon constitutes the values of products in deter-