Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/227

 places where the earlier socialists no less than the bourgeois economists have groped in utter darkness. From his work dates the origin of scientific socialism.

The solution is as follows. The power of increase in money which is transformed into capital cannot proceed from the money neither does it depend upon trade, since the money only realizes the price of the commodities and this price is, since we hold that only equal values are exchanged, no different from its value. On the same grounds the power of increase cannot come from the exchange of commodities. The change therefore depends upon the commodities which are exchanged, but not upon their value, since they are bought and sold at their value. It arises from their consumption-value as such; that is the change must arise out of the consumption of commodities. "In order for a commodity to derive value from consumption our possessor of money must be fortunate enough to discover a commodity whose use-value has the peculiar property of being a source of value, whose consumption would imply the expenditure of labor and thus be value-producing. And the possessor of money finds such a specific commodity on the market in the shape of labor-power." If, as we have seen, labor has no value this is by no means the case with labor-force. This has a value, as it is a commodity, and, as a matter of fact, it is a commodity to-day and this value is fixed "like that of every other commodity by the amount of labor time necessary for the production and reproduction of this specific commodity." It is fixed by the labor time which is necessary for the procuring of the means of livelihood required to maintain the laborer in a condition to continue laboring and reproduce his kind. Let us suppose that these means of livelihood represent, taking one day with another, six