and
apparently human relations, alternately assisting each other.
Subsequently it transpired that they stand in the most hostile, in an
inverted, relationship towards each other. In the beginning value is
apparently determined on rational principles, by the costs of
production of an article and by its social utility. Subsequently it
transpires that value is a purely accidental determination, which does
not need to have any connection at all either with the costs of
production or with social utility. The magnitude of wages is in the
beginning determined by a free contract between the free worker and
the free capitalist. Subsequently it transpires that the worker is
compelled to let it be determined, just as the capitalist is compelled
to fix it as low as possible. Coercion takes the place of the freedom
of the contracting parties. The same observation applies to trade and
all the other relations of political economy. Political economists
occasionally have an intimation of these contradictions, the
development of which forms the principal content of their mutual
wrangling. When, however, they become fully aware of them, they
proceed to attack private property in one of its partial
manifestations, as the falsifier of wages which are rational in
themselves, that is, in the ideas they have formed about wages; or of
value that is rational in itself, or of commerce that is rational in
itself. Thus Adam Smith occasionally attacks the capitalists, Destutt
de Tracy attacks the money-changers, Simonde de Sismondi attacks the
factory system, Ricardo attacks landed property, and thus almost all
political economists attack the non-industrial capitalists who regard
property merely as consumable goods.

Sometimes, therefore, the political economists invest economic
conditions with a human semblance, that is, when they are attacking a
particular abuse, but at other times, which is mostly the case, they
interpret these conditions in their strict economic meaning, as
distinguished from human conditions. They reel unconsciously in this
contradiction.

Now Proudhon has made an end once for all of this unconsciousness. He
took seriously the human semblance given to economic conditions and
sharply confronted it with their inhuman reality. In all seriousness
he accepted the human gloss which the political economists had put
upon economic conditions, and sharply compared it with their inhuman
reality. He demanded that these conditions shoul