But, Duhring did not reach, even, the level of understanding of Bailey, let alone Ricardo, whose theory of value he dismissed. Engels quotes Duhring's statement,
““Speaking quite generally, the basic law of comparison and valuation, on which value and the prices expressing it in money depend, belongs in the first place to the sphere of pure production, apart from distribution, which introduces only a second element into the concept of value. The greater or lesser obstacles which the variety of natural conditions places in the way of efforts directed toward the procurement of things, necessitating a greater or lesser expenditure of economic energy, determine also ... the greater or lesser value”, and this is appraised according to “the resistance offered by nature and circumstances to the procuring of things ... The extent to which we invested our own energy into them” (things) “is the immediate determining cause of the existence of value in general and of a particular magnitude of it”,” (p 240)
As Engels says, stripping away all of the excess verbiage and confusion, all this means is that the value of a commodity is determined by the labour-time required for its production, which we already knew long before, but which Duhring had previously rejected, in the form of the theory set down by Smith, Ricardo and Marx. But, even in this formulation, Duhring is in error, because he fails to distinguish between abstract and concrete labour, as well as failing to distinguish between embodied labour and current, socially necessary labour. In other words, the same errors as those of Proudhon.
“In the first place, it depends on what thing the energy is put into, and secondly, on how the energy is put into it. If someone makes a thing which has no use-value for other people, all his energy produces not an atom of value; and if he is stiff-necked enough to produce by hand an object which a machine produces twenty times more cheaply, nineteen-twentieths of the energy he put into it produces neither value in general nor any particular magnitude of value.” (p 240-241)
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