“I call upon any earnest Economist to explain to me, otherwise than by varying and repeating the question, why value diminishes in proportion as production increases, and vice versa. . . . In technical phrase, value in use and value in exchange, although necessary to each other, are in an inverse ratio to each other. . . . . Value in use and value in exchange remain, then, fatally enchained, although in their own nature they tend to exclude each other.”
“For this contradiction, which is inherent in the notion of value, no cause can be assigned, nor is any explanation of it possible. . . From the data, that man has need of a great variety of commodities, and that he must provide them by his labour, the necessary conclusion is, that there exists an antagonism between value in use and value in exchange, and from this antagonism a contradiction arises at the very threshold of Political Economy. No amount of intelligence, no agency, divine or human, can make it otherwise. In place, then, of beating about for a useless explanation, let us content ourselves with pointing out clearly the necessity of the contradiction.”
We know that the grand discovery of M. Proudhon is, that everything is at once true and false, good and bad, legitimate and illegitimate, that there exits no principle which is not self-contradictory, and that contradiction lurks not only in erroneous theories, but in the very essence of things,—“it is the pure expression of necessity, the peculiar law of existence,” etc.; so that it is inevitable, and would be incurable, rationally, but for progression, and, practically, but for the Banque du Peuple. Nature is a contradiction, liberty a contradiction, competition a contradiction, property a contradiction,—value, credit, monopoly, community, all contradictions. When M. Proudhon achieved this wonderful discovery his heart must have leaped for joy; for since contradiction is everywhere and in everything, he can never want something to gainsay, which for him is the supreme good. He said to me one day, “I should rather like to go to heaven, but I [p189] fear that everybody there will be of one mind, and I should find nobody to argue with.”
We must confess that the subject of Value gave him an excellent opportunity of indulging his taste. But, with great deference to him, the contradictions and paradoxes to which the word Value has given rise are to be found in the false theories which have been constructed, and not at all, as he would have us believe, in the nature of things.
Theorists have set out, in the first instance, by confounding Value with Utility,—that is to say, evil with good; for utility is the desired result, and value springs from the obstacle which is interposed between the desire and the result. This was their first error, and, when they perceived the consequences of it, they thought to obviate the difficulty by imagining a distinction between value in use and value in exchange—an unwieldy tautology, which had the great fault of attaching the same word—Value—to two opposite phenomena.
But if, putting aside these subtilties, we adhere strictly to facts, what do we perceive? Nothing, assuredly, but what is quite natural and consistent.
A man, we shall suppose, works exclusively for himself. If he acquire skill, if his force and intelligence are developed, if nature becomes more liberal, or if he learns how to make nature co-operate better in his work, he obtains more wealth with less trouble. Where is the contradiction, and what is there in this to excite so much wonder?
Well, then, in place of remaining an isolated being, suppose this man to have relations with his fellow-men. They exchange; and I repeat my observation,—in proportion as they acquire skill, experience, force, and intelligence,—in proportion as nature (become more liberal or brought more into subjection) lends them more efficacious co-operation, they obtain more wealth with less trouble; they have at their disposal a greater amount of gratuitous utility; in their transactions they transfer to one another a greater sum of useful results in proportion to a given amount of labour. Where, then, is the contradiction?
If, indeed, following the example of Adam Smith and his successors, you commit the error of applying the same denomination—value—both to the results obtained and to the exertion made; in that case, an antinomy or contradiction will show itself. But be assured that that contradiction is not at all in the facts, but in your own erroneous explanation of those facts.
M. Proudhon ought, then, to have shaped his proposition thus: [p190] It being granted that man has need of a great variety of products, that he can only obtain them by his labour, and that he has the precious gift of educating and improving himself, nothing in the world is more natural than the sustained increase of results in relation to efforts; and there is nothing at all contradictory in a given value serving as the vehicle of a greater amount of realized utility.