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1 " They (the commodity producers') social relations appearsimply as private exchange arrangements. After all, exchange as such isessentially a personal transaction. All that is necessary for an act ofexchange is that the parties have things to exchange and the desire toexchange them. In that sense, exchange is a phenomenon known to allsocial systems because they are all familiar with property.In fact, the exchange of a pen for a piece of chalk in school, or theexchange of a horse for an automobile between two members of a socialistsociety, is a private affair, of no interest to theoretical economics.It is the basic error of the marginal utility theory that it seeks todiscover the laws of capitalist society by an analysis of exchange as apurely private transaction'. R. Hilferding, 'Zur Problemstellung dertheoretischen Nationalökonomie bei Karl Marx', /Die Neue Zeit, XXIII, /1(1904-5), p. 106. "
― Rudolph Hiferding
