BRUSSELS H 5means of introducing later on one of the elements he had set aside, the
cost of production, as the synthesis of use-value and exchange-value. And
it is thus that in his eyes the cost of production constitutes synthetic value
or constituted value.'^80 By 'constituted value' of a product Proudhon
meant 'the value which is constituted by the labour time incorporated in
it'.^81 According to Marx this doctrine was no invention of Proudhon's (as
he claimed) but was clearly to be found in Ricardo, the difference between
them being that 'Ricardo takes his starting point from present-day society
to demonstrate to us how it constitutes value - M. Proudhon takes
constituted value as his starting point to construct a new social world with
the aid of this value'.^82 So far from one's being able to draw 'egalitarian'
consequences from this doctrine, it meant that wages always tended to a
minimum.^83 For Proudhon had confused 'the two measures: measure by
the labour time needed for the production of a commodity and measure
by the value of the labour. "Any man's labour", he says, "can buy the
value it represents". Thus, according to him, a certain quantity of labour
embodied in a product is equivalent to the worker's payment, that is, to
the value of labour. It is the same reasoning that makes him confuse cost
of production with wages.'^84 Thus, 'in measuring the value of commodities
by labour, M. Proudhon vaguely glimpses the impossiblity of excluding
iabour from this same measure, insofar as labour has a value, as labour is
a commodity. He has a misgiving that it is turning the wage minimum
into the natural and normal price of immediate labour, that it is accepting
the existing state of society. So, to get away from this fatal consequence,
he contradicts himself and asserts that labour is not a commodity, that it
cannot have value. He forgets that he himself has taken the value of
labour as a measure.'^8 S Further, Proudhon set out to show that 'the labour
time needed to create a product indicates its true proportional relation
to needs, so that the things whose production costs the least time are the
most immediately useful and so on, step by step.'^86 But the same argument
would show that 'the wide use of spirits, because of their low cost of
production, is the most conclusive proof of their utility: it is telling the
proletarian that potatoes are more wholesome for him than meat; it is
accepting the present state of affairs; it is, in short, making an apology,
with M. Proudhon, for a society without understanding it.'^87
For Marx, on the other hand, 'In a future society, in which class
antagonism will have ceased, in which there will no longer be any classes,
use will no longer be determined by the minimum time of production;
but the time of production devoted to different articles will be determined
by the degree of their social utility.'^88 Proudhon's proposals abstracted
from differences in demand, competition, etc., and he was inevitably
forced into a dilemma: 'Either you want the genuine bartering process of