Just now however it is the passage quoted from Engels that interests us. We must say most emphatically that Engels never said any such thing as he is made to say by our philosophically educated critic. Not that the words quoted are not Engels'. The words were used by Engels, surely enough. But their meaning is entirely different. For Engels did not say this, "About the relation of Marx's socialism to his theory of value" as Simkhowitch (and Oppenheimer) seem to think, but about something else, which exactly reverses the meaning of the passage. In his preface to Marx's "Misery of Philosophy," Engels says that long before Marx some socialists attempted to base their socialism on the Ricardian theory of value, claiming that since, according to Ricardo, labor is the source of all value, the laborers are entitled to all the value produced, which means to the whole social product. And then he goes on to say:
"The above application of the Ricardian theory, namely; that to the workingmen, as the only real producers, belongs the entire social product, their product, leads directly to communism. This application is, however, as Marx points out in the passage quoted above, economically formally false, for it is simply the application of ethics to economics. According to the laws of capitalistic economics the greatest portion of the product does not belong to the workingmen who produced it. We may say: this is wrong, it must not be. But that has nothing to do with economics. We merely say by this, that this economic fact is opposed to our moral feelings.
"Marx therefore never based his communistic demands thereon, but on the inevitable break-down of the capitalist mode of production which we daily see approaching its end."
Our philosophically educated critic evidently got things somewhat mixed. Marx never based his communistic demands on the moral application of the Ricardian, or his own, theory of value. Nor on any morality for that mat-
