Page:Landmarks of Scientific Socialism-Anti-Duehring-Engels-Lewis-1907.djvu/249

 economic societies would be in the same fix and each would have to make it out of the other with the result that they would only be extorting tribute from their own members.

Or it might find an easy way out by paying for six hours work less than the product of six hours work, eight marks a day instead of twelve, prices remaining the same. It accomplishes in this way plainly and openly what formerly it did secretly, it adopts the Marx surplus value notion to the amount of one hundred and twenty thousand marks a year, since it pays the members under the value of their work and reckons the goods which they are only able to buy by its means at their full value. His economic society therefore can only get a reserve fund by adopting the truck system. There fore one of two things is certain, either the economic society practices "equal work for equal work" and then it can get no funds for the maintenance and development of industry except through private sources, or it does create such a fund and ceases to practice "equal work for equal work."

This is the fact about the exchange in the economic society, but what about the form of it? According to Herr Duehring in his economic society money does not function as money between the members of the society. It serves merely as a labor certificate; it corresponds with the expression of Marx "only the share of the individual of the common labor, and his individual claim to the consumption of a certain portion of the common product" and in this function, says Herr Duehring, it is just as little money as a theater ticket. In short it functions in exchange like Owens "labor-time money." As far as the mere calculating between amount due for production and the amount to be expended in