Karl Marx

“ The whole transaction, therefore, between the producer and the capitalist is a palpable deception, a mere farce; it is, in fact, in thousands of instances, no more than a barefaced though a legalised robbery." (J. F. Bray, pp. 45, 48, 49 and 50.)
"The gain of the employer will never cease to be the loss of the employed, until the exchanges between the parties are equal; and exchanges never can be equal while society is divided into capitalists and producers—the last living upon their labor, and the first bloating upon the profit of that labor." ”

“ When one knows that labor is the measure of commodities, the good sentiments of the worthy bourgeoisie must feel deeply wounded by the wickedness of the world, which, indeed, nominally recognises this principle of justice, but which every moment without compunction actually appears to set it on one side. Above all, the "little man," whose honest labor—even when it is only that of his workmen or of his apprentices—loses every day more and more of its value through the competition of the great industry and of machinery ”

“ Time is everything, man is nothing; he is no more than the carcase of time. There is no more question of quality. Quantity alone decides everything, hour for hour, day for day: but this equalisation of labor is not the work of M. Proudhon's "eternal justice"; it is solely the accomplishment of modern industry.
In the automatic workshop the labor of one worker is scarcely distinguished in anything from the labor of another worker: the workers cannot distinguish between themselves except by the quantity of time they work. ”

“ Every man is a link, and an indispensable link, in the chain of effects—the beginning of which is but an idea, and the end, perhaps, the production of a piece of cloth. Thus, although we may entertain different feelings towards the several parties, it does not follow that one should be better paid for his labor than another. The inventor will ever receive, in addition to his just pecuniary reward, that which genius only can obtain from us—the tribute of our admiration. ”

“ He has a misgiving that it is to make of the minimum wage the natural and normal price of direct labor, that it is to accept the existing state of society. So, to escape from this fatal consequence he performs a volte-face and pretends that labor is not a commodity, that it could not have a value. He forgets that he has himself taken labor value for a measure. He forgets that his whole system rests on the labor commodity, on labor which is trafficked, bought and sold, exchanged for products, &c.; on the labor, in fine, which is an immediate source of revenue for the worker. ”

“ Justice and equality of rights, those are the twin pillars upon which the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would raise their social edifice above the ruins of injustice, of feudal inequalities and privileges. The determination of the value of commodities by labor and the free exchange which arises according to this measure of value between the possessors of equal rights, such are, as Marx has already shown, the real foundation upon which all the political, juridical and philosophical ideology of the modern bourgeoisie is erected. ”

“ According to the laws of bourgeois economy, the greater part of the product does not belong to the workers who have created it. If, then, we say, "That is unjust, it ought not to be"; that has nothing whatever to do with economy, we are only stating that this economic fact is in contradiction to our moral sentiment. That is why Marx has never based upon this his Communist conclusions, but rather upon the necessary overthrow, which is developing itself under our eyes every day, of the capitalist system of production. He contents himself with saying that surplus-value consists of unpaid labor ”

“ Thus, although under a social system based on equal exchanges, a parsimonious man may become rich, his wealth will be no more than the accumulated produce of his own labor. He may exchange his wealth or he may give it to others who will exchange it for an equal value of the wealth of other persons; but a rich man cannot continue wealthy for any length of time after he has ceased to labor. Under equality of exchanges, wealth cannot have, as it has now, a procreative and apparently self-generating power, such as replenishes all waste from consumption ”

“ From the very nature of labor and exchange, strict justice not only requires that all exchangers should be mutually, but that they should likewise be equally benefited. Men have only two things which they can exchange with each other, namely, labor, and the produce of labor; therefore, let them exchange as they will, they merely give, as it were, labor for labor. If a just system of exchanges were acted upon, the value of all articles would be determined by the entire cost of production, and equal values should always exchange for equal values. ”

“ When the production of commodities has reached the limits of the world market it is by a cataclysm of this market, by a commercial crisis, that equilibrium is established between the isolated producers, producing each according to his individual calculation, and the market for which they produce, and of the demand of which, both as to quantity and quality, they are ignorant. If competition is to be prevented from making known to the isolated producers the state of the market by the rise or fall of prices, they would be blinded indeed. ”

“ From the very moment in which civilisation begins production commences to be based on the antagonism of orders, of States, of classes, and finally on the antagonism between accumulated labor and present labor. No antagonism, no progress. That is the law which civilisation has followed down to our day. Up to the present the productive forces have been developed thanks to this régime of the antagonism of classes. ”

“ If we cast our eyes over the markets of large towns we shall see with what regularity they are provided with all kinds of commodities, native and foreign, in the required quantity; and whatever difference there may be in demand as the effect of caprice, of taste, or by the variation of population; without there often being a glut by too abundant a supply, or excessive dearness through the poorness of supply compared to demand; we must admit that the principle which distributes capital in each branch of industry in the exact proportions required, is more powerful than is generally supposed. ”

“ Men have hitherto blindly hoped to remedy the present unnatural state of things, and to institute equality of rights and laws by removing one rich tyrant and setting up another—by destroying existing inequality and leaving untouched the cause of the inequality; but it will shortly be seen that it is not in the nature of any mere governmental change to afford permanent relief—that misgovernment is not a cause but a consequence—that it is not the creator, but the created—that it is the offspring of inequality of possessions ”

“ The struggle is not really between utility and choice; it is between the saleable value demanded by him who wishes to sell, and the saleable value offered by him who makes the demand, who wishes to buy. The exchangeable value of the product is each time the result of these contradictory appreciations.
In a final analysis, supply and demand bring together production and consumption, but production and consumption based upon individual exchanges. The product offered is not utility in itself. It is the consumer who verifies its utility. ”

“ That is only the frank expression of the hate which the industrial capitalist feels for the landed proprietor, who appears to him as a useless incumbrance, a superfluity in the otherwise harmonious whole of bourgeois production."
"Rent," says Marx, "results from the social relations in which exploitation is carried on. It cannot result from the nature, more or less fixed, more or less durable, of land. Rent proceeds from society and not from the soil." ”

“ Our new system of society by shares, which is only a concession made to existing society, in order to arrive at communism, established in such a way as to admit of individual property in productions in connection with a common property in production powers—making every individual dependent on his own exertions, and at the same time allowing him an equal participation in every advantage afforded by nature and art—is fitted to take society as it is, and to prepare the way for other and better changes. ”

“ It is important to insist upon this point, that what determines value is not the time in which a thing has been produced, but the minimum time in which it is susceptible of being produced, and this minimum is demonstrated by competition. Suppose for a moment that there is no longer any competition, and therefore, no means of demonstrating the minimum of labor necessary for the production of a commodity, what would be the result? ”

“ To have so many wants to satisfy supposes so many things to produce—there are no products without production—to have so many things to produce pre-supposes more than the hand of a single man already assisting in production. But from the moment that you suppose more than one hand assisting in production you have already supposed a whole system of production based on the sub-division of labor. Thus the need, such as M. Proudhon supposes it, itself pre-supposes the whole sub-division of labor. In supposing the sub-division of labor you have exchange, and consequently exchange-value. ”

“ In modern capitalist society each industrial capitalist produces on his own account what he likes, how he likes, and as much as he likes. The quantity socially demanded is for him an unknown magnitude, and he does not know the quality of the objects demanded any more than their quantity. That which to-day cannot be supplied quickly enough may to-morrow be in excess of the demand. Ultimately demand is satisfied in some fashion, ill or well, and generally production is definitely regulated by the objects demanded. How is the reconciliation of this contradiction effected? By competition. ”

“ He all at once forgets that there are people who produce, and that it is to their interest never to lose sight of the demand. If not, how can M. Proudhon have been able to say that the things which are very useful must be very cheap, or even cost nothing? He ought to have concluded, on the contrary, that it is necessary to restrict abundance, the production of very useful things, if one wished to raise their price, their value in exchange. ”

“ We have heretofore acted upon no other than this most unjust system of exchanges—the workmen have given the capitalist the labor of a whole year in exchange for the value of only half a year—and from this, and not from the assumed inequality of bodily and mental powers, in individuals, has arisen the inequality of wealth and power which at present exists around us. ”

“ Society would be, as it were, one great joint-stock company, composed of an indefinite number of smaller companies, all laboring, producing and exchanging with each other on terms of the most perfect equality. ”

“ Competition, according to an American economist, determines how many days of simple labor are contained in a day of complex labor. Does not this reduction of days of complex labor to days of simple labor suppose that simple labor is itself taken as the measure of value? The single quantity of labor serving as the measure of value supposes in its turn that simple labor has become the pivot of industry. It supposes that labors are equalised by the subordination of man to the machine, or by the extreme division of labor; that men are effaced before labor ”

“ If there is an exchange of these products there is an exchange of equal quantities of labor. In exchanging these equal quantities of labor, we do not change the reciprocal position of the producers any more than we change something in the situation of the workers and manufacturers among them. To say that this exchange of products measured by time has, for its consequence, the equal remuneration of all the producers, is to suppose that equality of participation has existed anterior to the exchange. ”

“ He who delivers a product to which two days' labor have been devoted, if he receives a certificate of two days' labor, has then secured that there should be assigned or certified to him neither more nor less value than he has in fact delivered—and further, as he only who has really put a product in circulation, alone secures such an attestation, it is equally certain that the value inscribed on the note is capable of paying society. ”

“ Then if we imagine all the members of society to be workers, the exchange of equal quantities of hours of labor is only possible on condition that we understand beforehand the number of hours necessary to employ in material production. ”

“ When, then, we speak of commodities, of their exchange-value, and of the principles which regulate their relative price, we have in view only those commodities the quantity of which can be increased by the industry of man, the production of which is encouraged by competition, and is not prevented by any obstacle. ”

“ In fact, the landed proprietors and the industrial capitalists do fulfil certain functions, socially useful, or even necessary, although economically unproductive, and receive in exchange a kind of remuneration, rent and profit—which is a conception scarcely new, even in 1842. Truth to tell, they receive very much too much for the little that they do, and which they do sufficiently ill; but Rodbertus has need of a privileged class, at least for 500 years to come, also the rate of surplus-value, to express myself correctly, that must also exist, but without being capable of being augumented. ”

“ The products of which an individual or a company has the monopoly vary in value according to the law which Lord Lauderdale has postulated: they fall in proportion as they are supplied in greater quantity, and they rise with the desire of purchasers to acquire them; their price has no necessary relation to their natural value. But as to the things which are subject to competition between the sellers, and of which the quantity can be increased within reasonable limits, their price depends definitely not upon the state of demand and of supply, but upon the actual cost of production. ”