[18] _Sur la théorie Marxiste de la valeur_ (in the _Journal des Economistes_, number for March 1897, pp. 222-31, see p. 228). [19] _Discorrendo di socialismo e di filosophia_, p. 21. [20] It must be carefully noticed that what I call a _concrete fact_ may still not be a fact which is empirically real, but a fact made by us hypothetically and _entirely imaginary_ or a fact _partially empirical_, _i.e._ existing partially in empirical reality. We shall see later on that Marx's typical premise belongs properly to this second class. [21] I accept the term employed by Labriola so much the more readily since it is the same as that used by me a year ago. See Essay on Loria (_Materialismio Storico_, pp. 48-50). [22] In making an hypothesis of this nature, Marx distinguished clearly that, in such a case, 'labour-time would serve a _double_ purpose: on the one hand as standard of value, on the other as a standard of the individual share reckoned to each producer in the common labour' (_andrerseits dient die Arbeitzeit zugleich als Mass des individuellen Antheils des Producenten an der Gemeinarbeit, und daher auch an dem individuell verzehrbaren Theil des Gemein products_): See _Das Kapital_ I, p. 45. [23] This is a different thing from the workmen or operatives in our capitalist society, who form a _class_, _i.e._ a portion of economic society and not economic society in general and in the abstract, producing goods which can be increased by labour. [24] It may be doubted whether this general application of labour-value to every working economic society was included in the ideas of Marx and Engels, when the numerous passages are recalled in which one or other has declared many times that _in the future communistic society the criterion of value will disappear and production will be based on social utility, cf._ Engels as early as in the _Umrisse_ 1844, (Italian translation in _Critica sociale_ a. v. 1895) _Marx_, _Misère de la philosophie_, 2nd ed. Paris, Giard et Brière. 1896, p. 83; Engels _Antidühring_, p. 335. But this must be understood in the sense that, not being a hypothetical communistic society based on exchange, the function of value (in exchange) would lose, according to them, its practical importance; but not in the other sense that in the opinion of the communistic society the value of goods would no longer equal the labour which they cost to society. Because even in such a system of economic organisation, value-labour would be the economic law which entirely governed the valuation of individual commodities, produced by labour. There would be that clearness of valuation which Marx describes in his _Robinsonia, cf. Das Kapital_, p. 43. [25] _Dal terzo volume del 'Capitale,'_ pp. 42-55.