Note 188 — Chapter VII

"It is not necessary to go a round-about way in order to ascertain the amount of social labor crystallized in a given product. Daily experience shows directly the requisite average. Society can easily calculate how many hours are contained in a steam engine, in a hectoliter of last year's wheat, in a hundred square meters of cloth of a certain quality. Society will, therefore, never dream of re-expressing these units of work,—crystallized in the products and known to it directly and absolutely—by a merely relative, varying and insufficient measure, formerly used by it as a make-shift that it could not get along without; a measure, moreover, which itself is a third product, instead of by their natural, adequate and absolute measure—time.... Society will have to organize the plan of production according to the means of production, under which category labor-power especially belongs. The various utilities of the several articles of use, balanced with one another and with the amount of labor necessary for their production, will in the end determine the plan. People settle matters a good deal more simply without the intervention of the celebrated 'money value.'"—Fr. Engels' "Herr Eugene Duehring's Umwaelzung der Wissensehaft."