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its cause a reduction or an increase in the labor time expended in the production of one or
the other. If three working days of different workers be related to one another in the ratio
of 1:2:3, then every change in the relative value of their products will be a change in this
same proportion of 1:2:3. Thus values can be measured by labor time, in spite of the
inequality of value of different working days; but to apply such a measure we must have
a comparative scale of the different working days: it is competition that sets up this scale.
Is your hour's labor worth mine? That is a question which is decided by competition.
Competition, according to an American economist, determines how many days of simple
labor are contained in one day's compound labor. Does not this reduction of days of
compound labor to days of simple labor suppose that simple labor is itself taken as a
measure of value? If the mere quantity of labor functions as a measure of value regardless
of quality, it presupposes that simple labor has become the pivot of industry. It
presupposes that labor has been equalized by the subordination of man to the machine or
by the extreme division of labor; that men are effaced by their labor; that the pendulum of
the clock has become as accurate a measure of the relative activity of two workers as it is
of the speed of two locomotives. Therefore, we should not say that one man's hour is
worth another man's hour, but rather that one man during an hour is worth just as much as
another man during an hour. Time is everything, man is nothing; he is, at the most, time's
carcase. Quality no longer matters. Quantity alone decides everything; hour for hour, day
for day; but this equalizing of labor is not by any means the work of M. Proudhon's
eternal justice; it is purely and simply a fact of modern industry.
In the automatic workshop, one worker's labor is scarely distinguishable in any way from
another worker's labor: workers can only be distinguished one from another by the length
of time they take for their work. Nevertheless, this quantitative difference becomes, from
a certain point of view, qualitative, in that the time they take for their work depends
partly on purely material causes, such as physical constitution, age and sex; partly on
purely negative moral causes, such as patience, imperturbability, diligence. In short, if
there is a difference of quality in the labor of different workers, it is at most a quality of
the last kind, which is far from being a distinctive speciality. This is what the state of
affairs in modern industry amounts to in the last analysis. It is upon this equality, already
realized in automatic labor, that M. Proudhon wields his smoothing-plane of
"equalization", which he means to establish universally in "time to come"!
All the "equalitarian" consequences which M. Proudhon deduces from Ricardo's doctrine
are based on a fundamental error. He confounds the value of commodities measured by
the quantity of labor embodied in them with the value of commodities measured by "the
value of labor". If these two ways of measuring the value of commodities were
equivalent, it could be said indifferently that the relative value of any commodity is
measured by the quantity of labor embodied in it; or that it is measured by the quantity of
labor it can buy; or again that it is measured by the quantity of labor which can acquire it.
But this is far from being so. The value of labor can no more serve as a measure of value
than the value of any other commodity. A few examples will suffice to explain still better
what we have just stated.
If a quarter of wheat cost two days' labor instead of one, it would have twice its original
value; but it would not set in operation double the quantity of labor, because it would
contain no more nutritive matter than before. Thus the value of the corn, measured by the
quantity of labor used to produce it, would have doubled; but measured either by the
quantity of labor it can buy or the quantity of labor with which it can be bought, it would
be far from having doubled. On the other hand, if the same labor produced twice as many
clothes as before, their relative value would fall by half; but, nevertheless, this double
quantity of clothing would not thereby be reduced to disposing over only half the quantity
of labor, nor could the same labor command the double quantity of clothing; for half the
clothes would still go on rendering the worker the same service as before.
Thus it is going against economic facts to determine the relative value of commodities by
the value of labor. It is moving in a vicious circle, it is to determine relative value by a
relative value which itself needs to be determined.
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