ue as
it exists to-day is a monopoly price. If all wares have this monopoly
price, as according to this theory, only two things are possible.
Either every buyer, as buyer, loses what he made as seller, for prices
have only changed their names, they are really the same, everything
remains as it was and the much talked of exchange value is merely
imaginary, or the imposed cost represents real values, values
produced by the working value-making class, but taken by the
monopolising class, and this sum of values is simply unpaid labor. In
this latter case we come, in spite of the force theory, and the
compulsory taxation theory and the special exchange value theory back
again to the Marxian theory of value.

The fixing of the value of a commodity by wages which is frequently
confused by Adam Smith with the fixing of value by the time expended
in labor has been, since the time of Ricardo, denounced by political
economists and only to-day persists in popular economics. It is now
the sycophants of the existing capitalistic system who declare that
value is fixed by wages and therefore declare the profits of the
capitalists to be higher kind of wages, wages of abstinence, in that
the capitalist has not dissipated his capital, wages of
superintendence, premiums on risks, etc. Herr Duehring only differs
from them in that he calls profits robbery. In other words Herr
Duehring founds his socialism on the worst teachings of the popular
economists. His popular economics and his socialism stand or fall
together.

It is clear that what a workman accomplishes and what he costs are
different matters from what a machine makes and what it costs. The
value which a workman makes in a day of twelve hours has nothing in
common with the value of the means of life which he consumes in this
working day and the periods of rest in connection with it. There may
be one, three, four or seven hours of labor time incorporated in these
means of livelihood according to the stage of the productivity of
labor. Let us take seven hours as the necessary time for the
production of them. Then Herr Duehring and the vulgar economists
declare that the product of twelve hours labor has the value of the
product of seven hours labor or in other words twelve is equal to
seven. To make the matter more explicit, a peasant produces say twenty
hectolitres of wheat in a year. During this time he consumes a sum of
values which may be expressed by fifteen hectolitres. Then t