Let us examine with regard to equality of value a little more closely. All labor time is of equal value, that of the barrow pusher and that of the architect. Therefore labor time and consequently labor itself has a value. But labor is the creator of all values. It is the only thing which gives the original products of nature a value in the economic sense. Value in itself is nothing but the expression in a given object of necessary, social, human labor. One might just as well speak of and fix a value to labor as speak of the value of value, of the weight, not of a specific body, but of gravity itself. Herr Duehring calls people like Owen, St. Simon and Fourier, social alchemists. When he invents a value for labor time, that is for labor, he shows that he is far below these same alchemists.
For Socialism, which will emancipate human labor force from its place as a commodity, the understanding that labor has no value and can have none is a matter of the greatest importance. With an understanding of it, all attempts made by Herr Duehring by means of his crude worker-socialism (Arbeitersozialismus) to regulate the division of the means of existence, as a kind of higher wages, fall to the ground. From it there follows the broader view, since it is controlled by purely economic motives, that distribution regulates itself in the interests of production, and production is advanced in the greatest degree by a method of distribution which permits all the social departments to develop, maintain, and express their capacities to the fullest possible extent. To the ideas of the intellectuals which have come into Herr Duehring's possession, it must always seem to be an enormity that it will abolish barrow pushing and architecture simultaneously as professions, and that the man who has given half an hour
