This question too, although not stated exactly in this way, has occurred to Marx's critics; and an answer to it has been already given some time ago and by many, by saying that the equivalence of value and labour is an ideal of social ethics, a _moral ideal_. But nothing could be imagined more mistaken in itself and farther from Marx's thought than this interpretation. What moral inference can ever be drawn from the premiss that value is equal to the labour socially necessary? It we reflect a little, _absolutely none_. The establishment of this fact tells us nothing about the needs of the society, which needs will make necessary one or another ethical-legal system of property and of methods of distribution. Value may certainly equal labour, nevertheless special historical conditions will make necessary society organised in castes or in classes, divided into governing and governed, rulers and ruled; with a resulting unequal distribution of the products of labour. Value may certainly equal labour; but even supposing that fresh historical conditions ever make possible the disappearance of society organised in classes and the advent of a communistic society, and even supposing that in this society distribution could take place according to the quantity of labour contributed by each person, this distribution would still not be a deduction from the established equivalence between value and labour, but a standard adopted for special reasons of social convenience.[22] Nor can it be said that such an equivalence supplies in itself an idea of perfect justice (even though unrealisable), since the criterion of justice has no relation to the difference often due to purely natural causes, in the ability to do more or less social labour and to produce a greater or smaller value. Thus neither a rule of abstract justice nor one of convenience and social utility can be derived from the equivalence between value and labour. Rules of either kind can only be based on consideration of a quite different grade from that of a simple economic equation. Sombart, avoiding this vulgar confusion, has been better advised in looking for the meaning of the standard set up by Marx in the nature of society itself, and apart from our moral judgments. Thus he says that labour is _the economic fact of greater objective importance_, and that value, in Marx's view, is nothing 'if not the economic expression of the fact of the socially productive power of labour, as the basis of economic existence.' But this investigation appears to me to be merely begun and not yet worked out to a conclusion; and if I might suggest wherein it needs completion, I should remark that it is necessary to attempt to give clearness and precision to this word _objective_, which is either ambiguous or metaphorical. What is meant by an economically objective fact? Do not these words suggest rather a mere _presentiment of a concept_ instead of the distinct vision of this concept itself?