final shape, having formulated and elaborated with the greatest clearness the law of the determination of exchange value by labor-time, it is natural that all the polemics among economists should center about him. Stripped of its puerile[1] form this controversy comes down to the following points:
First: Labor itself has exchange value, and different kinds of labor have different exchange values. We get into a vicious circle by making exchange value the measure of exchange value, because the measuring exchange value needs a measure itself. This objection may be reduced to the following problem: Given labor-time as the intrinsic measure of exchange value, develop from that the determination of wages. The theory of wages gives the answer to that.
Second: If the exchange value of a product is equal to the labor-time contained in it, then the exchange value of one day of labor is equal to the product of that labor. In other words, wages must be equal to the product of labor.[2] But the very opposite is actually the case. Ergo.
- ↑ Perhaps the silliest to be found are the annotations of J. B. Say to the French translation of Ricardo, made by Constancio, and the most pedantically arrogant are the remarks of Mr. MacLeod in his newly published "Theory of Exchange," London, 1858.
- ↑ This objection raised against Ricardo by bourgeois economists was taken up later by the socialists. Having assumed the correctness of the formula, they charged the practice with contradiction to the theory and appealed to bourgeois society to realize in practice the conclusions which were supposed to follow from its theoretical principles. That was at least the
