Without discussing whether exchange value of goods is really measured in existing societies by the amount of work necessary to produce it-according to the teaching of Adam Smith and Ricardo, in whose footsteps Marx has followed-suffice it to say here, leaving ourselves free to return to the subject later, that the Collectivist ideal appears to us untenable in a society which considers the instruments of labour as a common inheritance. Starting from this principle, such a society would find itself forced from the very outset to abandon all forms of wages.
