The Poverty of Philosophy

XI

fact. But what is formally economically false can nevertheless be historically correct. If the moral consciousness of the masses declares an economic fact, such as slavery or serfdom in its time, to be unjust, this is proof that the fact itself has already outlived itself, that other economic facts have emerged by virtue of which the former has become unbearable and untenable. Behind the formal economic inaccuracy, therefore, a very true economic content can be hidden. This is not the place to go into the meaning and history of the theory of surplus value in more detail.

Besides this, however, other conclusions can be and have been drawn from the Ricardian theory of value. The value of commodities is determined by the labor required for their production. Now, however, it is found that in this bad world, commodities are sold sometimes above and sometimes below their value, and not only as a result of fluctuations in competition. The rate of profit has just as much a tendency to equalize itself for all capitalists at the same level as commodity prices have a tendency to reduce themselves to the value of labor by means of supply and demand. However, the rate of profit is calculated on the total capital invested in an industrial business. Since the annual product can embody equal amounts of labor in two different branches of business, and thus represent equal values, and wages can be equally high in both, but the advanced capitals can be, and often are, twice or three times as large in one branch of business as in the other, the Ricardian law of value comes here, as Ricardo himself already discovered,