We may affirm that the natural social order is harmonious, and goes on improving, if, on the one hand, the number of unskilled labours, receiving the smallest possible remuneration, continues to diminish; and if, on the other, that remuneration, measured not in value or in money, but in real satisfactions, continues constantly on the increase.[36]
The ancients have well described all the combinations of Exchange:—
Do ut des (commodity against commodity), Do ut facias (commodity against service), Facio ut des (service against commodity), Facio ut facias (service against service).[37]
Seeing that products and services are thus exchanged for one another, it is quite necessary that they should have something in common, something by which they can be compared and estimated—namely, Value.
But value is always identically the same. Whether it be in the product or in the service, it has always the same origin and foundation.
This being so, we may ask, is Value originally and essentially in the commodity, and is it only by analogy that we extend the notion to the service?
Or, on the contrary, does Value reside in the service, and is it not mixed up and amalgamated with the product, simply and exclusively because the service is so?
Some people seem to think that this is a question of pure subtilty. We shall see by-and-by. At present I shall only observe, that it would be strange if, in Political Economy, a good or a bad definition of Value were a matter of indifference.
I cannot doubt that, at the outset, Political Economists thought they discovered value rather in the product, as such, than in the matter of the product. The Physiocrates [the Économistes of Quesnay’s school] attributed value exclusively to land, and stigmatized as sterile such classes as added nothing to matter,—so strictly in their eyes were value and matter bound up together.
Adam Smith ought to have discarded this idea, since he makes value flow from labour. Do not pure services, services per se, exact labour, and, consequently, do they not imply value? Near to the truth as Smith had come, he did not make himself master of it; for, besides pronouncing formally that labour, in order to possess value, must be applied to matter, to something physically [p173] tangible and capable of accumulation, we know that, like the Physiocrates, he ranked those who simply render services among the unproductive classes.