System of Economical Contradictions; Or, The Philosophy of MiseryProudhon, P.-J. (Pierre-Joseph)
Philosophy
System of Economical Contradictions; Or, The Philosophy of Misery
Proudhon, P.-J. (Pierre-Joseph)
Economics
"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.
"Finally, the theory of the successive constitution of all
commercial values implying the infinite progress of labor,
wealth, and well-being, the object of society, from the economic
point of view, is revealed to us: TO PRODUCE INCESSANTLY, WITH
THEE LEAST POSSIBLE AMOUNT OF LABOR FOR EACH PRODUCT, THE
GREATEST POSSIBLE QUANTITY AND VARIETY OF VALUES, IN SUCH A WAY
AS TO REALIZE, FOR EACH INDIVIDUAL, THE GREATEST AMOUNT OF
PHYSICAL, MORAL, AND INTELLECTUAL WELL-BEING, AND, FOR THE RACE,
THE HIGHEST PERFECTION AND INFINITE GLORY.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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