What is the main significance of the idea that the decline in the workers’ share of the product must “immediately” entail overproduction and trade crises? This conception is only intelligible if it is assumed that Rodbertus imagines the “national product” to consist of two parts: the share of the workers, and that of the capitalists (i.e. v + s), with one part somehow being exchanged against the other. Rodbertus indeed says something along these lines in several places, such as in his first Letter on Social Problems:
The poverty of the working classes precludes their income from giving scope to increasing production. If the additional products were acquired by the workers, this would not only improve their lot but would further act as a counterweight by increasing the value of the remainder retained by the entrepreneurs (thus satisfying the condition for the latter to continue production on the same scale). However, from the standpoint of the entrepreneurs, this would depress the value of the aggregate product by so much as to remove this condition, leaving the workers at best to their customary privation.201
When Rodbertus refers to the “counterweight” that in the hands of the workers increases the value of “what is retained” by the entrepreneurs, he obviously means demand. The reader thus finds himself happily transported to von Kirchmann’s famous imaginary locality, where the workers exchange their wages against the surplus product held by the capitalists, and where crises are provoked because the level of variable capital is too low and that of surplus value too high. This peculiar conception has already been dealt with above. Elsewhere, however, Rodbertus regales his readers with an alternative version. In his fourth Letter on Social Problems, he glosses his theory in such a way that the constant discrepancy in the relation between the demand represented by the workers’ share and that emanating from the capitalist class necessarily entails a chronic disproportion between production and consumption:
What if the entrepreneurs endeavor to keep always within the limits of those shares, yet the shares themselves are all the time on the decline for the great majority of the society, the workers, decreasing gradually, unnoticeably, but with an irresistible force? What if the share of these classes continually decreases to the same extent as their productivity increases? … Is it not the case that the capitalists of necessity organize production in accordance with the present respective sizes of these shares in order to make wealth universal, and that yet they always produce over and above the level of these shares as they decline, thereby giving rise to a permanent dissatisfaction that culminates in market stagnation?202
In this case, crises would be explained as follows: the national product consists of a number of “ordinary commodities” for the workers, as von Kirchmann puts it, and more refined commodities for the capitalists. The amount of the former is represented by the sum of wages, that of the latter by the total surplus value. If the capitalists organize their production on this basis, and if productivity increases at the same time, then a disparity will immediately arise. For the workers’ share today is not more than it was yesterday, but less: if the demand for “ordinary commodities” represented six-sevenths of the national product yesterday, today it represents only five-sevenths, and the entrepreneurs, who have arranged production of six-sevenths “ordinary commodities,” will make the painful discovery that they have overproduced these by one-seventh of the national product. If, however, having learned from this experience, they arrange their production tomorrow such that “ordinary commodities” constitute five-sevenths of the total value of the national product, they are only setting themselves up for a new letdown, since the day after tomorrow the wage share of the national product will inevitably fall to four-sevenths, and so on.
This original theory immediately elicits a host of mild doubts. If trade crises are simply a consequence of the fact that the “wage share” of the working class, variable capital, forms an ever-decreasing part of the total value of the national product, then the fatal law also bears within itself the cure for the havoc that it wreaks, since overproduction only concerns an ever-decreasing part of the total product. Although Rodbertus is given to such expressions as “an overwhelming majority” of consumers and “the great popular masses” of consumers, whose share is constantly decreasing, demand is not determined by the sheer number of people, but by the value they represent. According to Rodbertus, this value itself forms an ever-decreasing part of the total product. The economic basis of crises becomes ever narrower, which prompts the question as to why crises are nonetheless firstly general and secondly ever more violent, as noted by Rodbertus himself. Furthermore, according to Rodbertus, the “wage share” forms one part of the national product, and surplus value the other. The purchasing power lost by the working class is gained by the capitalist class; as v decreases, s increases correspondingly. Given Rodbertus’s own crude schema, then, the purchasing power of society as a whole can remain unaltered as a result. Rodbertus puts it as follows:
I know very well that, ultimately, the amount by which the workers’ share decreases accrues to that of the “rentiers” [Rodbertus uses “rent” and “surplus value” as synonyms—R. L.], and that purchasing power remains constant on the whole and in the long run. But as far as the product on the market is concerned, the crisis always sets in before this increase in the rentiers’ share can make itself felt.203
Thus the extent of the problem is the constant emergence of an excess of “ordinary commodities” and a corresponding shortfall in refined commodities for the capitalists. By his own peculiar route, then, Rodbertus inadvertently arrives at the very theory of Say and Ricardo so hotly contested by him previously: overproduction on the one side always corresponds to underproduction on the other. Since the value-shares of the working class and the capitalists are constantly being altered in favor of the latter, trade crises would thus increasingly take on the character of periodic underproduction rather than overproduction! It is not worth dwelling on this riddle. What emerges clearly from all of this is that Rodbertus conceives of the national product in value terms as merely comprising two parts, variable capital and surplus value, and that in this regard he thus completely shares the interpretation traditionally held by the classical school—an interpretation that he had previously bitterly resisted, and that he now embellishes with the idea that the entire surplus value is consumed by the capitalists. He expresses this in a few terse words in several places, as for example in his fourth Letter on Social Problems:
Accordingly, we must abstract from the reasons that cause the division of rent in general into ground rent and capital rent, in order to find first and foremost the basic principle underlying the division of rent [surplus value—R. L.] in general, the principle underlying the division of the labor product into wage and rent.204
In his third Letter he states the following:
Ground rent, capital profit, and the wages of labor are, let me repeat, revenue. By this means landlords, capitalists, and workers must live, that is to say, they must satisfy their immediate human needs. The goods that they obtain through their revenues must therefore be suitable for this purpose.205
The misrepresentation of the capitalist economy as production destined only for direct consumption has never been formulated in such a crass fashion, and in this, Rodbertus undoubtedly deserves accolades for setting a precedent—not for Marx, however, but rather for all the vulgar economists. Rodbertus leaves his readers in no doubt as to this confusion of his when, a little later in the same letter, he directly places capitalist surplus value, as an economic category, on the same level as the revenue of the ancient slaveholder:
The first state [that of slavery—R. L.] is associated with the most primitive natural economy: that portion of the labor product that is withheld from the income of workers or slaves and forms the master’s or owner’s property, will undividedly accrue to the single owner of the land, the capital, the worker, and the labor product; there is not even a conceptual distinction to be made between ground rent and capital profits. In the second state, the most complicated money economy is given: the portion of the labor product that is withheld from the income of the now emancipated workers, and accrues to the respective owners of land, and capital, will be further divided among the owners of the raw material and the manufactured product respectively; the single rent of the former state will be decomposed into ground rent and capital profits, and will have to be differentiated accordingly.206
Rodbertus considers the division of the surplus value that is “withheld” from the workers’ revenue into ground rent and profits on capital to be the most salient economic difference between exploitation under the domination of slavery and modern capitalist exploitation. Thus, for Rodbertus, the decisive characteristic of the capitalist mode of production is not the specific historical form of the distribution of newly created value between labor and capital, but rather the allocation of surplus value among its various beneficiaries—i.e. something that is actually of no consequence for the production process! In all other respects, then, capitalist surplus value as a whole remains the same as what “the single rent” was for the slave-owner: the exploiter’s private consumption fund!
Admittedly, Rodbertus contradicts himself elsewhere on this score, too, when he remembers that constant capital exists and that it needs to be renewed in the reproduction process. He thus assumes that the total product is divided into three parts (constant capital, variable capital, and surplus value) rather than merely two (variable capital and surplus value). In his third Letter on Social Problems, he makes the following argument in relation to the forms of reproduction in a slave economy:
Since the master will see to it that part of the slave labor is employed in maintaining or even improving the fields, herds, agricultural and manufacturing tools, there will be “capital replacement,” to use a modern term, in which part of the national economic product is immediately used for the maintenance of assets, without any mediation by exchange or even by exchange value.207
Turning to capitalist reproduction, he continues:
Now, in terms of value, one portion of the labor product, is used or designated for the maintenance of assets, for “capital replacement”; another portion is used for the workers’ subsistence as their money wage; finally, the last portion is retained by the owners of the land, of capital, and of the labor product as their revenue or rent.208
Here the three-way division into constant capital, variable capital, and surplus value is explicit, as it is in Rodbertus’s formulation in this same third Letter on Social Problems of what is peculiar about his “new” theory:
On this theory, then, and under conditions of adequate labor productivity, the portion of the product that remains for revenue after the replacement of capital, will be distributed among workers and owners as wages and rent, on the basis of the ownership in land and capital.209
Here Rodbertus has ostensibly taken a decisive step beyond the classical school in the value-analysis of the total product; indeed, he later directly criticizes Smith’s “doctrine,” and the only surprise is that Rodbertus’s learned admirers, Messrs. [Adolph] Wagner, [Carl August] Dietzel, Diehl & co., neglected to make capital out of the fact that their darling made this discovery before Marx in such an important point of economic theory. In reality the question of Rodbertus’s precedence here is as dubious as it is in value theory in general. Even in the places where Rodbertus appears to gain a true insight, this proves in the next moment to be a misunderstanding or at best a somewhat skewed conception. The extent of Rodbertus’s confusion in relation to the tripartite division of the national product is best shown by his critique of Smith’s theory, as follows:
It is well known that all economists since Adam Smith already divided the value of the product into wage of labor, ground rent, and capital profit, that it is therefore not a new idea to ground the revenues of the various classes, and especially the various components of rent, in a distribution of the product. Yet the economists immediately go astray. All of them, even Ricardo’s school, make the mistake, first and foremost, of failing to recognize that the aggregate product, the aggregate of finished goods, the national product as a whole, is a single entity in which workers, landowners, and capitalists all share. Instead, according to their conception, the division of the raw product and that of the manufactured product occur in their own particular ways: the former is shared between three participants, whereas the latter is distributed between only two participants. According to these systems, the raw product and the manufactured product in themselves constitute separate revenue streams. Secondly,—though both Ricardo and Smith are free from this particular error—they take the natural fact that labor cannot produce goods without a contribution from the material world, i.e. without the land, as an economic one, and regard as a primary datum the social fact that capital in its current sense is required by the division of labor. Thus they set up the fiction of a fundamental economic relationship on which they base the shares of the various owners of land, capital, and labor in society (ownership of these being divided), as follows: ground rent springs from the contribution of the land lent by the owner to production, capital profits derive from the contribution of capital employed by the capitalist to this end, and, finally, wages originate from labor’s contribution. Say’s school, elaborating on this error with much ingenuity, even invented the concept of productive services rendered by land, capital, and labor, corresponding to the shares in the product of their respective owners, in order to explain these shares in turn as the result of these productive services.—Thirdly, and finally, this error is then compounded by the paradox that, whereas the wage of labor and the components of rent are indeed derived from the value of the product, the value of the product is in turn derived from the wage of labor and the components of rent, so that the one is made to depend on the other and vice versa. This contradiction emerges clearly when some of these authors attempt to expound “The Influence of Rent Upon Production Prices” and “The Influence of Production Prices Upon Rent” in two consecutive chapters.210
In spite of these excellent critical remarks, of which the last is particularly acute and in a certain sense anticipates Marx’s corresponding critique in the second volume of Capital, Rodbertus blithely accepts the main error of the classical school and its vulgar epigones, who completely neglected the value-component of the total product that is needed for the replacement of total social constant capital. Indeed it was this confusion on the part of Rodbertus that also made it easier for him to become engrossed in his quixotic struggle against the “decreasing wage share.”
In capitalist forms of production, the value of the total social product is composed of three parts, corresponding respectively to constant capital, the sum of wages (i.e. variable capital), and the total surplus value of the capitalist class. Now, within this value-composition, the value-component corresponding to variable capital constantly decreases in relative terms. This occurs for two reasons: firstly, within the formula c + v + s, the relationship between c and (v + s)—i.e. between constant capital and newly created value—is a dynamic one, such that, in relative terms, c is constantly increasing and (v + s) constantly decreasing. This is one simple expression of the rising productivity of human labor, which is absolutely valid for all economically progressive societies, independently of their historical forms, and which merely implies that living labor is able to convert ever more means of production into objects for use in an ever-shorter time. Since (v + s) decreases relative to the total value of the product, v also decreases as a value-component of the total product. In other words, to resist this decrease, to aim to arrest it, means to oppose the development of the productivity of labor in its general effects. Further, a continuous alteration also occurs within (v + s), such that, relative to one another, v is constantly decreasing and s constantly increasing—i.e. the part of the newly created value that is allotted to wages shrinks as the part that is appropriated as surplus value grows. This is the specifically capitalist expression of the increasing productivity of labor, and it is as absolutely valid under capitalist conditions of production as is the law of the increasing productivity of labor itself. Now, to aim to prevent v from constantly decreasing relative to s through state intervention is tantamount to aiming to prevent the increasing productivity of labor, which reduces the production costs of all commodities, from affecting the fundamental commodity, labor-power; it represents an attempt to exempt this single commodity from the economic effects of technical progress. However, this is not all: the “decreasing wage share” is merely another expression for the increasing rate of surplus value, which represents the most powerful and effective means to arrest the fall in the rate of profit, and which thus constitutes the driving force of capitalist production in general and especially of technical progress within this production. To eliminate the “decrease in the wage share” through legislation would thus be to do away with the raison d’être of the capitalist economy, and would constitute an attempt to suppress its vital principle. Nonetheless, it is worth considering the matter concretely. The individual capitalist, like capitalist society as a whole, has no idea of the value of the product as a sum of socially necessary labor, and is in no position to grasp it as such. The capitalist only cognizes this value in the derivative and inverted form of production costs (this inversion of form occurring through competition). While the value of the product resolves into c + v + s, in the consciousness of the capitalist, it is the reverse: the costs of production are composed of c + v + s. More precisely, these manifest themselves to the capitalist in the following dislocated and derivative forms: (1) the wear and tear on his fixed capital; (2) his outlays in circulating capital, including wages for workers; (3) the “usual” rate of profit—i.e. the average rate of profit on his total capital. How, then, is the capitalist to be compelled, by a law of the kind Rodbertus has in mind, to adhere to a “fixed wage-share” vis-à-vis the total value-product? The notion is as ingenious as would be the attempt, say, to establish a law that raw materials must constitute exactly one-third of the total price of all commodities produced. From any given standpoint of the capitalist mode of production, it is clear that Rodbertus’s main idea—an idea of which he was so proud and on which he sought to build as if it were a new Archimedean discovery that would enable him to provide a radical remedy for capitalist production—is sheer nonsense; such a position could only be arrived at from the confusion in value theory that in Rodbertus’s case culminates in the following incomparable proposition: “now [in a capitalist society—R. L.], the product must have exchange-value just as it had to have use-value in the ancient economy.”211 People in ancient society had to eat bread and meat in order to live, but now, however, hunger can be satiated just by knowing the price of meat and bread! What stands out most clearly from Rodbertus’s fixation on a “fixed wage share” is his complete inability to comprehend capitalist accumulation.
The previous quotations reveal that Rodbertus only takes simple reproduction into account, which accords with his inverted conception of the aim of capitalist production as the production of objects for consumption in order to satisfy “human needs.” However, he repeatedly refers to the “replacement of capital” and to the fact that capitalists must be in a position to “continue their enterprise on the previous scale.” His main argument is directly opposed to the accumulation of capital, however. To fix the rate of surplus value, to prevent its growth, is to paralyze the accumulation of capital. Indeed, for both Sismondi and von Kirchmann, the question of the equilibrium between production and consumption was one of accumulation—i.e. of expanded capitalist reproduction. Both of them derived disturbances to the equilibrium of reproduction from accumulation, which they both considered to be impossible. The only difference between them was that one recommended curbing the productive forces as a remedy, whereas the other advocated their increased use in luxury production, so that the entire surplus value would be consumed without remainder. In this instance, too, Rodbertus follows his own path. Whereas Sismondi and von Kirchmann sought, more or less successfully, to grasp the phenomenon of capitalist accumulation, Rodbertus opposes the very concept: “Economists since Adam Smith have one after the other echoed the principle, setting it up as a universal and absolute truth, that capital could only come about by saving and hoarding.”212
Rodbertus marshals his best weapons against this “deluded judgment,” and he devotes sixty printed pages to a meticulous demonstration that capital is not generated by saving, but by labor; that the economists’ “delusion” in relation to “saving” stems from their erroneous conception that productivity increases are an inherent feature of capital; and that this error derives from yet another: that capital is capital.
For his part, von Kirchmann understood very well what lay behind capitalist “saving.” He argues the point nicely as follows:
Everyone knows that the accumulation of capital is not a mere hoarding of reserves, an amassing of metal and monies to remain idle in the owners’ vaults. Those who want to save do it for the sake of re-employing their savings either personally or through the agency of others as capital, in order to yield them revenue. That is only possible if these capitals are used in new enterprises that can produce so as to provide the required interest. One may build a ship, another a barn, a third may cultivate barren heathland, a fourth may order a new spinning frame, while a fifth, in order to enlarge his shoe-making business, may buy more leather and employ more journeymen—and so on. Only if the capital that has been saved is employed in this way, can it yield interest [i.e., profit—R. L.], and the latter is the ultimate purpose of all saving.213
The process described here by von Kirchmann—correctly on the whole, despite his clumsy choice of words—is nothing other than that of the capitalization of surplus value, i.e. that of capitalist accumulation; this is precisely the sense of what classical political economy since Smith had intuitively advocated as “saving.” Von Kirchmann is thus completely consistent from his point of view when he attacks accumulation and “saving,” given that, in his conception, as in that of Sismondi, crises are the direct result of accumulation. Here, too, Rodbertus is the “more rigorous” man. To his misfortune, the Ricardian theory of value affords him the insight that labor is the only source of value, and thus of capital. This elementary knowledge is more than sufficient to render him completely blind to all the complex relations of the production and movement of capital. Since capital is generated by labor, the accumulation of capital—i.e., “saving,” the capitalization of surplus value—is nonsensical as far as he is concerned.
In order to unravel this tangled web of errors “by economists since Adam Smith,” Rodbertus takes an “isolated husbandsman,”* and, performing a lengthy dissection of the unfortunate creature, finds evidence for any point that he needs to demonstrate. Thus he finds “capital” already present here, that is to say, of course, the famous “original stick,” which “economists since Smith” had used to beat the fruits of their theory of capital down from the tree of knowledge. Rodbertus asks whether the stick originates in “saving.” Since any normal person knows that a stick cannot be generated by “saving,” but that Robinson Crusoe has to carve it from wood, this is already proof that the “savings theory” is totally false. Next, the “isolated husbandsman” beats a fruit down from the tree with his stick; this fruit is his “income.”
If capital were the source of revenue, this relation would already be evident in this most primordial and elementary occurrence. Would it be true to say, then, without doing violence to facts and concepts, that the stick is a source of income or of part of the revenue consisting in the fruit brought down? Can we trace revenue, wholly or in part, back to the stick as its cause, may we consider it, wholly or in parts, as a product of the stick?214
Certainly not. Furthermore, since the fruit is the product, not of the stick that was used to beat it down, but of the tree on which it has grown, Rodbertus has already proved that all “economists since Smith” were grossly mistaken when they claimed that revenue derives from capital. After this clarification of all the fundamental concepts of economics by referring to Robinson Crusoe’s “economy,” Rodbertus transfers the knowledge so gained first to a fictitious society “without ownership in capital or land” (i.e., a society based on communist property), and then to a society “with ownership in capital and land” (i.e., contemporary society). Here he observes that all the laws of Robinson Crusoe’s economy also apply, point for point, in these two forms of society. Thus Rodbertus establishes a theory of capital and revenue to crown his utopian fantasy. Since he has discovered that, in Robinson Crusoe’s case, “capital” is plainly and simply the means of production, thereby reducing capital to constant capital with a simple wave of the hand, he protests in the name of justice and morality against the idea that the workers’ means of subsistence, their wages, can also be considered capital. He fiercely resists the concept of variable capital, for this concept is the root of all evil! “If only,” he pleads, “economists would pay attention to what I say, if only they would examine without prejudice whether they are right or I. This is the focal point of all errors in the dominant system about capital, this is the ultimate source of injustice against the working classes, in theory and practice alike.”215
________________
*That is, a lone individual producing his own means of subsistence, a Robinson Crusoe figure “running his own economy.” See Marx’s critique of this mode of argumentation by the political economists in Capital, Vol. 1, pp. 169–77.
Justice demands, then, that “real wage goods” of the workers should not be counted as capital, but as belonging to the category of revenue. Rodbertus is well aware that for the capitalist, the wages “advanced” are just as much part of his capital as are his outlays on dead means of production. However, according to Rodbertus, this only applies to individual capitals. As soon as he considers the total social product and reproduction as a whole, he declares the capitalist categories of production to be an illusion, a malicious lie, and an “injustice”:
Capital in itself, the objects that make up capital, capital from the nation’s point of view, is something quite different from private capital, capital assets, capital property, all that “capital” in the modern use of the term usually stands for.216
Individual capitalists engage in capitalist production, whereas society as a whole produces just like Robinson Crusoe—i.e., as a single collective owner—and thus its production is communist:
It makes no difference from this general and national point of view that greater or smaller parts of the aggregate national product in all the various phases of production are now owned by private persons who in no way are to be counted among the actual producers, and that the latter—without sharing in the ownership of their own product—always manufacture this national aggregate product in the service of these few owners.
It is true that certain specific peculiarities of the relations within the society as a whole result from this, namely (1) “exchange” as mediation and (2) the unequal distribution of the product.
Yet all these effects do not affect the movement of national production and the configuration of the national product, which in general always remain the same (as under the rule of communism), no more than they alter in any respect, as far as the national point of view is concerned, the contrast between capital and revenue so far established.
Sismondi, like Smith and many others, had put a lot of effort into disentangling the concepts of capital and revenue from the contradictions of capitalist production; Rodbertus, on the other hand, makes the matter easier for himself: as far as society as a whole is concerned, he simply disregards all form-determinations of capitalist production and labels the means of production “capital” and means of consumption “revenue”—basta!
“Ownership in land and capital only exerts an essential influence in relation to individuals engaging in relations of exchange. If the nation is taken as a unit, the effects of such ownership upon the individuals completely disappear.”217 As can be seen, Rodbertus displays a propensity for underestimating the historical particularities of production typical of the utopian, and the observation that Marx makes about Proudhon fits him like a glove: as soon as he speaks of society as a whole, it is as if it were no longer capitalist.* On the other hand, Rodbertus’s example is yet another demonstration of how the political economists before Marx groped around helplessly in their attempts to reconcile material aspects of the labor-process with the value-dimension of capitalist production, or the forms of movement of individual capitals with those of total social capital. Such attempts usually swing back and forth between two extremes: the vulgar conception à la Say and McCulloch on the one hand, for whom the only standpoint is that of individual capitals; and the utopian conception à la Proudhon and Rodbertus on the other, for whom there is only the standpoint of the labor process. It is in this context that Marx’s elucidation of the whole problem through the schema of simple reproduction can first be properly appreciated; here all these various standpoints are combined in their consonances and contradictions, and the hopeless confusion of innumerable tomes is resolved into two rows of figures of astonishing simplicity.
It goes without saying that capitalist appropriation is unintelligible from such a conception of capital and revenue as that of Rodbertus. The latter simply brands this appropriation “theft” and impugns it before the tribunal of property rights as a callous violation of these rights:
This personal freedom of the workers, which legally implies ownership in the value of the labor product, leads in practice to their alienation of this proprietary entitlement as a consequence of the coercion exercised by property in land and capital; but the owners do not admit to this great and universal wrong, almost as though they were instinctively afraid that history might follow its own stern and inexorable logic.
This theory [i.e. Rodbertus’s—R. L.] in all its details is therefore conclusive proof that those who eulogize present-day relations of ownership without being able at the same time to ground ownership in anything but labor, completely contradict their own principle. It proves that the property relations of today are in fact founded on a universal violation of this principle, that the great individual fortunes being amassed in society nowadays are the result of cumulative robbery mounting up in society with every newborn worker since time immemorial.218
Just as surplus value is dubbed “theft,” the rising rate of surplus value appears “as a strange error of present-day economic organization.”219 In his first pamphlet,* Proudhon at least spins out [Jacques Pierre] Brissot’s paradoxical and raw, but revolutionary-sounding proposition: “property is theft.” Rodbertus, on the other hand, argues that capital is the theft of property. A comparison with the chapter in the first volume of Marx’s Capital on the inversion of the law of property into the law of capitalist appropriation, which represents a masterpiece of historical dialectic, confirms once again Rodbertus’s precedence over Marx. In any case, Rodbertus’s denunciations of capitalist appropriation from the standpoint of “the right of property” prevent him from understanding how capital generates surplus value, just as his earlier declamations of “saving” hindered him from grasping how capital has its origins in surplus value. In this way, all the presuppositions for an understanding of capitalist accumulation are beyond Rodbertus’s grasp, and he even manages to lose out to von Kirchmann on this score.
________________
*See Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy in Marx and Engels Collected Works, Vol. 6, p. 184.
In summary, Rodbertus wants the unrestricted expansion of production, but without any “saving”—i.e. without capitalist accumulation! He wants the unrestricted augmentation of the productive forces—but a fixed rate of surplus value set by state legislation! In a word, he displays a total lack of understanding of the actual foundations of the capitalist production that he wants to reform, and an ignorance of the most important results of the classical economics of which he is so critical.
No wonder, then, that Professor Diehl should be moved to state that Rodbertus has produced pioneering work in economic theory through his “new theory of income” and through his distinction of the logical and historical categories of capital (i.e. his contrast between “capital in itself” and individual capitals). Nor that Professor Adolph Wagner should be likewise moved to call Rodbertus the “Ricardo of economic socialism,” thus demonstrating his own innocence in relation to Ricardo, Rodbertus, and socialism in one fell swoop. Lexis even finds that Rodbertus at least equals “his British rival” in the power of abstract thought, and is by far his superior in the “virtuosity to expose the deepest interconnections of the phenomena,” in “imaginative vitality,” and above all in his “ethical approach to economic life.” In contrast, Rodbertus’s real achievements in economic theory apart from his critique of Ricardo’s ground rent are mostly lost on the former’s official admirers: such achievements include Rodbertus’s at times totally clear distinction between surplus value and profit; his treatment of surplus value as a whole in deliberate contrast with its partial manifestations; his partly excellent critique of Smith’s theory of the value-composition of commodities; his acute formulation of the periodicity of crises and his analysis of the forms in which they manifest themselves—all valuable attempts to take the analysis beyond Smith and Ricardo, but that were admittedly doomed to fail on account of his confusion in relation to fundamental theoretical concepts. It was Rodbertus’s peculiar lot, as Franz Mehring has pointed out, to be praised to the heavens for his alleged feats of economic theory, but treated by the very same people “as a stupid boy” on account of his real political merits.* The contrast between his economic and his political achievements is of no concern here, however; even in the realm of economic theory, his admirers built him a great monument on the barren field that he had dug with the incorrigible zeal of the visionary, at the same time as they allowed the few modest beds in which he had sown a few fertile seedlings to become overgrown with weeds and forgotten.220
________________
*This is a reference to Proudhon’s first and perhaps most famous work, Qu’est-ce que la propriéte? Ou recherches sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement (Paris: J.F. Brocard, 1840).
On the whole, it would be difficult to claim that this Prussian-Pomeranian treatment of the problem of accumulation represented any advance beyond the first controversy. If the theory of economic harmony had dropped from its Ricardian heights to the level of [Frédéric] Bastiat and [Franz Hermann] Schulze, social critique had plummeted correspondingly from Sismondi to Rodbertus. Furthermore, if Sismondi’s critique in 1819 was an event of historical significance, Rodbertus’s ideas on reform already marked a deplorable regression when they were first aired, and even more so in their later iterations.
In the polemic between Sismondi, on the one hand, and Say and Ricardo, on the other, one party demonstrated the impossibility of accumulation as a result of crises, and warned against the development of the productive forces. The other party proved the impossibility of crises and advocated the unrestricted development of accumulation. Each party was logically consistent in its own way, despite starting out from false premises. Von Kirchmann and Rodbertus both take the fact of crises as their starting point, as was inevitable. Although, given the historical experience of half a century, crises had clearly shown themselves, precisely through their periodicity, to be the mere form of motion of capitalist reproduction, the problem of the expanded reproduction of total social capital—i.e. the problem of accumulation—was fully identified with the problem of crises and was thus sidetracked into the search for a remedy against crises. One party thus sees the solution to this problem in the consumption without remainder of the surplus value by the capitalists, such that they forgo accumulation; the other sees the solution in the fixing of the rate of surplus value by law, such that the opportunity to accumulate is likewise relinquished. Rodbertus’s quirk in this regard was to hope for and advocate an unconfined capitalist expansion of the productive forces and of wealth without capitalist accumulation. At a time when the maturity of capitalist production would soon enable Marx to carry out its fundamental analysis, the last attempt of bourgeois economics to resolve even the problem of reproduction degenerated into an inane and infantile utopianism.
________________
*See Franz Mehring, “Zur neueren Rodbertus-Literatur,” Die Neue Zeit, Vol. 12, No. 2 (1893/1894), p. 528.