HKB
trading communes. The "sociality" of Herr Duehring is very distinct from the "cloudy ideas" of the earlier socialists. It has no other end than the resurrection of the high finance.
The only value with which political economy is acquainted is the value of commodities. What are commodities? Products produced in a society composed of more or less separated private producers and therefore private products. But these private products first become commodities when they are made not for private use but for the use of someone else, that is for social use. They are converted into objects of social use by means of exchange. The private producers are therefore in a social relationship, they constitute a society. Their private products, while the private products of each individual, are at the same time, unconsciously and indeed involuntarily, social products also. Wherein does the social character of these private products consist? Plainly in two properties, in the first place because they satisfy human needs but have no use-value for the producers, and in the second place that, while they are the products of individual private producers, they are at the same time plainly the products of human labor, of human labor in general. In so far as they have a use-value for other people they can be exchanged; in so far as they all possess the common quality of human labor in general, they can be mutually compared in exchange by means of this labor. In two similar products under identical social conditions there may be unequal amounts of private labor, but equal amounts of human labor in general. An unskillful smith might take as long to make five horseshoes as it would take a skillful smith to make ten. But society does not fix the price according to accidental lack of skill of the one, it recognises only human labor in general, the human labor of the ordinary normal skilled smith. Each of the five horseshoes then made by the first does not have any more value than each of the other ten which were made in the same time as the five. Only so far as is socially necessary does private labor comprehend human labor in general.
Therefore I maintain that a commodity has a certain value, 1st. because it is a socially useful product, 2nd. because it is produced by a private individual for private profit, 3d. because while it is a product of private labor, it is, at the same time, unconsciously and involuntarily a social product and exchanges socially according to a definite social standard, 4th. this standard is not expressed in terms of labor, in so many hours, but in another commodity. If, therefore, I say that this clock is worth this piece of cloth and that they are both worth fifty marks, I say that in the clock, the cloth and the gold there is an equal amount of social labor. I also affirm that the amounts of social labor time in them are socially measured and found to be equal, not directly and absolutely however, as one measures labor time in hours or days, but in a round about fashion, relatively, by means of exchange. I cannot therefore express this certain amount of labor-time in labor hours, since their number is not known to me, but I can express it relatively in terms of another commodity, which has the same amount of labor time incorporated in it. The clock is worth as much as the piece of cloth.