Value is the proportion in which all the
realizations of the human soul must balance each other in order
to produce a harmonious whole, which, being wealth, gives us
well-being, or rather is the token, not the object, of our
happiness.
"The proposition, THERE IS NO MEASURE OF VALUE, is illogical and
contradictory, as is shown by the very arguments which have been
offered in its support.
"The proposition, LABOR IS THE PRINCIPLE OF PROPORTIONALITY OF
VALUES, not only is true, resulting as it does from an
irrefutable analysis, but it is the object of progress, the
condition and form of social well-being, the beginning and end
of political economy. From this proposition and its corollaries,
EVERY PRODUCT IS WORTH WHAT IT COSTS, and PRODUCTS ARE BOUGHT
WITH PRODUCTs, follows the dogma of equality of conditions.
"The idea of value socially constituted, or of proportionality of
values, serves to explain further: (a) how a mechanical
invention, notwithstanding the privilege which it temporarily
creates and the disturbances which it occasions, always produces
in the end a general amelioration; (b) how the value of an
economical process to its discoverer can never equal the profit
which it realizes for society; (c) how, by a series of
oscillations between supply and demand, the value of every
product constantly seeks a level with cost and with the needs of
consumption, and consequently tends to establish itself in a
fixed and positive manner; (d) how, collective production
continually increasing the amount of consumable things, and the
day's work constantly obtaining higher and higher pay, labor must
leave an excess for each producer; (e) how the amount of work to
be done, instead of being diminished by industrial progress, ever
increases in both quantity and quality--that is, in intensity and
difficulty--in all branches of industry; (f) how social value
continually eliminates fictitious values,--in other words, how
industry effects the socialization of capital and property; (g)
finally, how the distribution of products, growing in regularity
with the strength of the mutual guarantee resulting from the
constitution of value, pushes society onward to equality of
conditions and fortunes.
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