Has the utility of agricultural products therefore diminished since the Middle Ages?
The use of products is determined by the social conditions in which the consumers are placed, and these conditions themselves rest on the antagonism of classes.
Cotton, potatoes and spirits are the objects of commonest use. Potatoes have engendered scrofula; cotton has largely driven linen and wool out of the market, although wool and linen are in many cases of much greater utility, if only from considerations of hygiene; spirits, again, have largely replaced beer and wine, although spirits, used as food, are generally recognised to be poison. For a whole century Governments vainly struggled against European opinion; economics prevailed, they dictated orders to consumption.
Why, then, are cotton, potatoes and spirits the pivots of bourgeois society? Because the least amount of labor is necessary for their production, and they are in consequence at the lowest price. Why does the minimum of price decide the maximum of consumption? Can it by any chance be because of the absolute utility of these objects, of their intrinsic utility, of their utility in so far as they correspond in the most useful manner to the needs of the worker, as man, and not of the man as worker? No, it is because, in a society based upon poverty, the poorest products have the fatal prerogative of serving the use of the greatest number.
To say now that, because the least costly things are most generally used therefore they must be of the greatest: utility, is to say that the extensive use of spirits because of their low cost of production is the most conclusive proof of their utility; it is to tell the proletariat that the potato is the most salutary meat; it is to accept the existing state of things; it is, in fine, to make, with M.
