26 
THE SOCIALISM OF TO-DAY. 
In respect of value, says Marx, commodities intended for 
exchange are merely crystallized labour. The unit of labour 
is an average day’s work, which varies in different countries 
and at different times, but which may be considered a fixed 
quantity in a given community. More complicated labour, or 
work which demands the higher faculties, must be considered 
as simple labour raised to a higher power. A useful article, 
then, possesses value only because it represents labour. The 
things most necessary to existence, air and water, have in 
general no value, because they can be obtained without labour. 
How, then, is the quantity of values represented by an article 
to be measured ? By the quantity of “ the substance creative 
of value,” that is to say of labour, that it contains. The quan 
tity of labour is itself measured by the duration of the labour, 
by days and hours. Here Marx makes a correction in the 
theory of Smith and Ricardo, and forestalls an objection. It 
might, in fact, be said that, if it is the duration of the labour that 
creates the value of the products, a coat which took a tailor 
twice as long to make as was necessary, would therefore be 
twice as valuable. Not so, replies Marx ; the measure of the 
value of things is the duration of the labour on the average re 
quisite, performed with the average amount of skill and dili 
gence, and in the normal industrial conditions at any given 
time. If with the aid of a sewing machine a shirt can be made 
in one day, that will be the measure of the value of a shirt, and 
not the two or three days that were formerly necessary. Even 
thus amended, the theory which makes labour the source of 
value is entirely erroneous, as will be shown later on. We may 
here remark that, like all abstractions, these averages are want 
ing in scientific exactness. In truth, each kind of labour has 
its own value, its own particular character. Is the day’s labour 
of a mason of precisely the same value as that of a carpenter, 
a painter, a carver, a plumber, or a common labourer ? Clearly 
not. How, too, can they be compared unless by the wages 
that each of these workmen receives ? It must be admitted, 
der Kapitalismus ; Rud. Meyer, Der Emancipationskampf des vierten 
Standes ; and in French, the short but solid study of M. Maurice Block, 
Les Théoriciens du Socialisme en Allemagne.