Note 24 — Chapter III · CONCERNING THE INTERPRETATION AND CRITICISM OF SOME CONCEPTS OF MARXISMToC

It may be doubted whether this general application of labour-value to every working economic society was included in the ideas of Marx and Engels, when the numerous passages are recalled in which one or other has declared many times that in the future communistic society the criterion of value will disappear and production will be based on social utility, cf. Engels as early as in the Umrisse 1844, (Italian translation in Critica sociale a. v. 1895) Marx, Misère de la philosophie, 2nd ed. Paris, Giard et Brière. 1896, p. 83; Engels Antidühring, p. 335. But this must be understood in the sense that, not being a hypothetical communistic society based on exchange, the function of value (in exchange) would lose, according to them, its practical importance; but not in the other sense that in the opinion of the communistic society the value of goods would no longer equal the labour which they cost to society. Because even in such a system of economic organisation, value-labour would be the economic law which entirely governed the valuation of individual commodities, produced by labour. There would be that clearness of valuation which Marx describes in his Robinsonia, cf. Das Kapital, p. 43.