Engels, then, sets out the contradiction in Ricardo's theory, in trying to reconcile the sale of commodities at their values, with his recognition of the average rate of profit. This contradiction was resolved by Marx, in demonstrating the transformation of exchange-values into prices of production. The bourgeoisie loved Ricardo's concept by which commodities exchanged at equal values.
“Justice and equality of rights are the cornerstones on which the bourgeois of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would like to erect his social edifice over the ruins of feudal injustice, inequality and privilege. And the determination of value of commodities by labour and the free exchange of the products of labour, taking place according to this measure of value between commodity owners with equal rights, these are, as Marx has already proved, the real foundations on which the whole political, juridical and philosophical ideology of the modern bourgeoisie has been built.” (p 15)
Yet, the reality was different, because a look at the prices of commodities showed that this equal exchange was not at all characteristic, and commodities that contained little current labour sold at high prices, and vice versa.
“And the petty bourgeois especially, whose honest labour – even if it is only that of his workmen and apprentices – is daily more and more depreciated in value by the competition of large-scale production and machinery, this small-scale producer especially must long for a society in which the exchange of products according to their labour value is at last a complete and invariable truth. In other words, he must long for a society in which a single law of commodity production prevails exclusively and in full, but in which the conditions are abolished in which it can prevail at all, viz., the other laws of commodity production and, later, of capitalist production.” (p 15)
That is precisely the petty-bourgeois world outlook that was presented by Sismondi, Proudhon, Rodbertus and the Narodniks, and continues, today, in the views of assorted petty-bourgeois ideologists.
“The criticism of this utopia has been so exhaustively furnished by Marx both against Proudhon and against Gray (see the appendix to this work) that I can confine myself here to a few remarks on the form of substantiating and depicting it peculiar to Rodbertus.” (p 15)
I have also set out Lenin's extensive criticism of it, in my series on Lenin on Economic Romanticism.
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