procuring them by his labor, the opposition of useful value to
exchangeable value necessarily results; and from this opposition
a contradiction on the very threshold of political economy. No
intelligence, no will, divine or human, can prevent it.

Therefore, instead of searching for a chimerical explanation, let
us content ourselves with establishing the necessity of the
contradiction. Whatever the abundance of created values and the
proportion in which they exchange for each other, in order
that we may exchange our products, mine must suit you when you
are the BUYER, and I must be satisfied with yours when you are
the SELLER. For no one has a right to impose his own
merchandise upon another: the sole judge of utility, or in other
words the want, is the buyer. Therefore, in the first case, you
have the deciding power; in the second, I have it. Take away
reciprocal liberty, and exchange is no longer the expression of
industrial solidarity: it is robbery. Communism, by the way,
will never surmount this difficulty.

But, where there is liberty, production is necessarily
undetermined, either in quantity or in quality; so that from the
point of view of economic progress, as from that of the relation
of consumers, valuation always is an arbitrary matter, and the
price of merchandise will ever fluctuate. Suppose for a moment
that all producers should sell at a fixed price: there would be
some who, producing at less cost and in better quality, would get
much, while others would get nothing. In every way equilibrium
would be destroyed. Do you wish, in order to prevent business
stagnation, to limit production strictly to the necessary amount?