To begin with, what does it mean that a decrease in the workers' share
is bound immediately to engender over-production and commercial crises?
Such a view can only make sense provided Rodbertus takes the 'national
product' to consist of two parts, _vide_ the shares of the workers and
of the capitalists, in short of _v + s_, one share being exchangeable
for the other. And that is more or less what he actually seems to say on
occasions, e.g. in his first _Letter on Social Problems_:
'The poverty of the working classes precludes their income from giving
scope to increasing production. The additional amount of products from
the entrepreneurs' point of view lowers the value of the aggregate
product so far as to bar production on the former scale, leaving the
workers at best to their accustomed straits, though, if it could be made
available to the workers, it would not only improve their lot but would
further act as a counterweight by increasing the value of what is
retained by the capitalists (and so enable the latter to keep their
enterprises at the same level).'[257]
The 'counterweight' which in the hand of the workers increases the
'value' of 'what is retained' by the entrepreneurs, can in this context
only be the demand. Once again, we have landed happily at the familiar
_Ort_ of v. Kirchmann's where workers and capitalists exchange their
incomes for the surplus product, and where the crises arise because
variable capital is small and the surplus value large. This peculiar
notion has already been dealt with above. There are other occasions,
however, when Rodbertus advances a somewhat different conception. The
interpretation of his theory in the fourth _Letter on Social Problems_
is that the continual shifts in the relations of demand, evident in the
share of the working class and caused by the share of the capitalist
class, must result in a chronic disproportion between production and
consumption.
'What if the entrepreneurs endeavour 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 relentless force?--What if the share
of these classes is continually decreasing to the same extent as their
productivity is increasing?'--'Is it not really the fact that the
capitalists of necessity organise production in accordance with the
present volume of shares in order to make wealth universal, and that yet
they always produce over and above this volume (of previous shares),
thereby perpetuating dissatisfaction which culminates in this stagnation
of trade?'[258]
On this showing, the explanation of crises should be as follows: the
national product consists of a number of 'common goods', as v. Kirchmann
puts it, for the workers, and of superior goods for the capitalists. The
wages represent the quantity of the former, and aggregate surplus value
that of the latter. If the capitalists organise their production on this
footing, and if at the same time there is progressive productivity, a
lack of proportion will immediately ensue. For the share of the workers
to-day is no longer that of yesterday, but less. If the demand for
'common goods' had involved, say, six-sevenths of the national product
yesterday, then to-day it involves only five-sevenths, and the
entrepreneurs, having provided for six-sevenths of 'common goods', will
find to their painful surprise that they over-produced by one-seventh.
Now, wiser by this experience, they try to organise to-morrow's output
of 'common goods' to a mere five-sevenths of the total value of the
national product, but they have a new disappointment coming to them,
since the share of the national product falling to wages to-morrow is
bound to be only four-sevenths, and so on.
In this ingenious theory there are quite a few points to make us wonder.
If our commercial crises are entirely due to the fact that the workers'
'wage rate', the variable capital, represents a constantly diminishing
portion of the total value of the national product, then this
unfortunate law brings with it the cure for the evil it has caused,
since it must be an ever smaller part of the aggregate product for
which there is over-production. Although Rodbertus delights in such
terms as 'an overwhelming majority', 'the large popular masses' of
consumers, it is not the number of heads that make up the demand, but
the value they represent which is relevant. This value, if Rodbertus is
to be believed, forms a more and more trifling part of the aggregate
product. Crises are thus made to rest on an ever narrowing economic
basis, and all that remains to discover is how in spite of it all it can
still happen that the crises are universal and increasingly severe
besides, as Rodbertus is fully aware. The purchasing power lost by the
working classes should be gained by the capitalist class; if _v_
decreases, _s_ must grow larger to make up for it. On this crude scheme,
the purchasing power of society as a whole cannot change, as Rodbertus
says in so many words: 'I know very well that what is taken from the
workers' share goes ultimately to swell that of the "rentiers" (rent and
surplus value are used 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 can make itself felt.'[259]
In short, the most it can amount to is that there is 'too much' of
'common goods' and 'too little' of superior goods for the capitalists.
Quite unawares, and by devious ways, Rodbertus here falls in with the
Say-Ricardian theory he so ardently contested, the theory that
over-production on one side always corresponds to under-production on
the other. Seeing that the ratio of the two shares is persistently
shifting to the advantage of the capitalists, our commercial crises
might be expected on the whole to take on increasingly the character of
periodical under- instead of over-production! Enough of this exercise in
logic. The upshot of it all is that Rodbertus conceives the national
product in respect of its value as made up of two parts only, of _s_ and
_v_, thus wholly subscribing to the views and traditions of the
classical school he is fighting tooth and nail, and even adding his own
flourish that the capitalists consume the entire surplus value. That is
why he repeatedly says without mincing his words, as in the fourth
_Letter on Social Problems_:
'Accordingly, we must abstract from the reasons which cause the division
of rent in general into rent proper and capital rent, to find the basic
principle underlying the division of rent (surplus value) in general,
the principle underlying _the division of the labour product into wage
and rent_.'[260] And, in the third _Letter_: 'Ground rent, capital
profit and the wage of labour are, let me repeat, revenue. By this means
landlords, capitalists and workers must live, must satisfy, that is to
say, their immediate human necessities. They must therefore draw their
income in the form of goods suitable for this purpose.'[261]
The misrepresentation of capitalist economy has never been formulated
more crudely, and there is no doubt that Rodbertus claims the palm of
'priority'--not so much over Marx as over all popular economists--with
full justification. To leave the reader in no doubt about the utter
muddle he has made, he goes on, in the same letter, to rank capitalist
surplus value as an economic category on the same level as the revenue
of the ancient slave-owner:
'The first state (that of slavery) goes with the most primitive natural
economy: that portion of the labour product which is withheld from the
income of workers or slaves and forms the master's or owner's property,
will undividedly accrue to the one man who owns the land, the capital,
the worker and the labour product; there is not even a distinction of
thought between rent and capital profits.--The second state entails the
most complicated money economy: that portion of the labour product,
withheld from the income of the now emancipated workers, and accruing 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 one rent of the former state will be split up into
ground rent and capital profits, and will have to be differentiated
accordingly.'[262]
Rodbertus regards the splitting-up of the surplus value 'withheld' from
the workers' 'income' as the most striking difference between
exploitation by slavery and modern capitalist exploitation. It is not
the specific historical form of sharing out newly created value among
labour and capital, but the distribution of the surplus value among the
various people it benefits, which, irrelevant to the productive process,
is yet the decisive fact in the capitalist mode of production. In all
other respects, capitalist surplus value remains just the same as the
old 'single rent' of the slave-owner: a private fund for the exploiter's
own consumption!
Yet Rodbertus again contradicts himself in other places, remembering all
of a sudden the constant capital and the necessity for its renewal in
the reproductive process. Thus, instead of bisecting the aggregate
product into _v_ and _s_, he posits a triple division: _c_, _v_, and
_s_. In his third _Letter on Social Problems_ he argues on the forms of
reproduction in a slave-economy:
'Since the master will see to it that part of the slave labour 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 upkeep of the estate,
without any mediation by exchange or even by exchange value.'[263] And,
passing on to capitalist reproduction, he continues: 'Now, in terms of
value, one portion of the labour product, is used or set aside for the
maintenance of the estate, for "capital replacement", another, for the
workers' subsistence as their money wage; and the owners of the land, of
capital, and of the labour product retain the last as their revenue or
rent.'[264]
This, then, is an explicit expression of the triple division into
constant capital, variable capital, and surplus value. Again, in this
third _Letter_, he formulates the peculiarity of his 'new' theory with
equal precision: 'On this theory, then, and under conditions of adequate
labour productivity, the portion of the product which remains for wages
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.'[265]
It does seem now as if Rodbertus' analysis of the value of the aggregate
product represents a distinct advance over the classical school. Even
Adam Smith's 'dogma' is openly criticised a little further on, and it is
really surprising that Rodbertus' learned admirers, Messrs. Wagner,
Dietzel, Diehl & Co. failed to claim their white-headed boy's 'priority'
over Marx on such an important point of economic theory. As a matter of
fact, in this respect no less than in the general theory of value,
Rodbertus' priority is of a somewhat dubious character. If he seems on
occasion to gain true insight, it immediately turns out to be a
misunderstanding, or at best a wrong approach. His criticism of Adam
Smith's dogma affords a supreme example of his failure to cope with the
triple division of the national product towards which he had groped his
way. He says literally:
'You know that all economists since Adam Smith already divided the value
of the product into wage of labour, rent, and capital profit, that it is
therefore not a new idea to ground the incomes of the various classes,
and especially the various items of the rent, in a division of the
product. But the economists at once go off the track. All of them, not
even excepting Ricardo's school, make the mistake, first, not to
recognise that the aggregate product, the finished good, the national
product as a whole, is an entity in which workers, landowners, and
capitalists all share, but conceiving the division of the unfinished
product to be of one kind shared among three partners, and that of the
manufactured product as of another kind again, shared between only two
partners. For these theories both the unfinished product and the
manufactured product constitute as such separate items of revenue.
Secondly,--though both Sismondi and Ricardo are free from this
particular error--they regard the natural fact that labour cannot
produce goods without material help, i.e. without the land, as an
economic fact, and take the social fact for a primary datum that capital
as understood to-day is required by the division of labour. Thus they
set up the fiction of a fundamental economic relationship on which they
base also for the shares of the various owners, ground rent springing
from the contribution of the land lent by the owner to production,
capital profits from the contribution of capital employed by the
capitalist to this end, and the wages finally from labour's
contribution, seeing that there are separate owners of land, capital,
and labour in the society. Say's school, elaborating on this mistake
with much ingenuity, even invented the concept of productive service of
land, capital, and labour in conformity with the shares in the product
of their respective owners, so as to explain these shares as the result
of productive service.--Thirdly, they are caught up in the ultimate
folly of deriving the wage of labour and the items of rent from the
value of the product, the value of the product in turn being derived
from the wage of labour and the items of rent, so that the one is made
to depend on the other and _vice versa_. This absurdity is quite
unmistakable 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.'[266]
Yet for all these excellent critical comments--the last, particularly
acute, actually does to some extent anticipate Marx's criticism of this
point in _Capital_, volume ii--Rodbertus calmly falls in with the
fundamental blunder of the classical school and its vulgar followers: to
ignore altogether that part of the value of the aggregate product which
is needed to replace the constant capital of the society. This way it
was easier for him to keep up the singular fight against the 'declining
wage rate'.
Under capitalist forms of production, the value of the aggregate social
product is divided into three parts: one corresponding to the value of
the constant capital, the second to the wage total, i.e. the variable
capital, and the third to the aggregate surplus value of the capitalist
class. In this composition, the portion corresponding to the variable
capital is relatively on the decline, and this for two reasons. To begin
with, the relation of _c_ to (_v + s_) within _c + v + s_ changes all
the time in the direction of a relative increase of _c_ and a relative
decrease of _v + s_. This is the simple law for a progressive efficiency
of human labour, valid for all societies of economic progress,
independently of their historical forms, a formula which only states
that living labour is increasingly able to convert more means of
production into objects for use in an ever shorter time. And if (_v +
s_) decreases as a whole, so must _v_, as its part, decrease in relation
to the total value of the product. To kick against this, to try and stop
the decrease, would be tantamount to contending against the general
effects of a growing labour productivity. Further, there is within (_v +
s_) as well a change in the direction of a relative decrease in _v_ and
a relative increase in _s_, that is to say, an ever smaller part of the
newly created value is spent on wages and an ever greater part is
appropriated as surplus value. This is the specifically capitalist
formula of progressive labour productivity which, under capitalist
conditions of production, is no less valid than the general law. To use
the power of the state to prevent a decrease of _v_ as against _s_ would
mean that the fundamental commodity of labour power is debarred from
this progress which decreases production costs for all commodities; it
would mean the exemption of this one commodity from the economic effects
of technical progress. More than that: the 'declining wage rate' is only
another expression of the rising rate of surplus value which forms the
most powerful and effective means of checking a decline of the profit
rate, and which therefore represents the prime incentive for capitalist
production in general, and for technical progress within this system of
production in particular. Doing away with the 'declining wage rate' by
way of legislation would be as much as to do away with the _raison
d'être_ of capitalist society, to deal a crippling blow to its entire
system. Let us face the facts: the individual capitalist, just like
capitalist society as a whole, has no glimmering that the value of the
product is made up from the sum total of labour necessary in the
society, and this is actually beyond his grasp. Value, as the capitalist
understands it, is the derivative form, reversed by competition as
production costs. While in truth the value of the product is broken down
into the values of its component fragments _c_, _v_ and _s_, the
capitalist mind conceives of it as the summation of _c_, _v_ and _s_.
These, in addition, also appear to him from a distorted perspective and
in a secondary form, as (1) the wear and tear of his fixed capital, (2)
his advances on circulating capital, including workers' wages, and (3)
the current profits, i.e. the average rate of profit on his entire
capital. How, then, is the capitalist to be compelled by a law, say of
the kind envisaged by Rodbertus, to maintain a 'fixed wage rate' in the
face of the aggregate value of the product? It would be quite as
brilliant to stipulate by law for exactly one-third, no more, no less,
of the total price of the product to be payable for the raw materials
employed in the manufacture of any commodity. Obviously, Rodbertus'
supreme notion, of which he was so proud, on which he built as if it
were a new Archimedean discovery, which was to be the specific for all
the ills of capitalist production, is arrant nonsense from all aspects
of the capitalist mode of production. It could only result from the
muddle in the theory of value which is brought to a head in Rodbertus'
inimitable phrase: that 'now, in a capitalist society, the product must
have value-in-exchange just as it had to have value-in-use in ancient
economy'.[267] People in ancient society had to eat bread and meat in
order to live, but we of to-day are already satisfied with knowing the
price of bread and of meat. The most obvious inference from Rodbertus'
monomania about a 'fixed wage rate' is that he is quite incapable of
understanding capitalist accumulation.
Previous quotations have already shown that Rodbertus thinks solely of
simple commodity production, quite in keeping with his mistaken doctrine
that the purpose of capitalist production is the manufacture of consumer
goods for the satisfaction of 'human wants'. For he always talks of
'capital replacements', of the need to enable the capitalists to
'continue their enterprise on the previous scale'. His principal
argument, however, is directly opposed to the accumulation of capital.
To fix the rate of the surplus value, to prevent its growth, is
tantamount to paralysing the accumulation of capital. Both Sismondi and
v. Kirchmann had recognised the problem of balancing production and
consumption to be indeed a problem of accumulation, that is to say of
enlarged capitalist reproduction. Both traced the disturbances in the
equilibrium of reproduction to accumulative tendencies denying the
possibility of accumulation, with the only difference that the one
recommended a damper on the productive forces as a remedy, while the
other favoured their increasing employment to produce luxuries, the
entire surplus value to be consumed. In this field, too, Rodbertus
follows his own solitary path. The others might try with more or less
success to comprehend the _fact_ of capitalist accumulation, but
Rodbertus prefers to fight 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 accumulating.'[268]
Rodbertus is up in arms against this 'deluded judgment'. Over sixty
pages of print he sets out in detail that (_a_) it is not saving which
is the source of capital but labour, that (_b_) the economists'
'delusion' about 'saving' hails from the extravagant view that capital
is itself productive, and that (_c_) this delusion is ultimately due to
another: the error that capital is--capital.
v. Kirchmann for his part understood quite well what is at the bottom of
capitalist 'savings'. He had the pretty argument: '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 which can produce so as to provide the required
interest. One may build a ship, another a barn, a third may reclaim a
desolate swamp, a fourth may order a new spinning frame, while a fifth,
in order to enlarge his shoe-making business, would buy more leather and
employ more hands--and so on. Only if the capital that has been saved is
employed in this way, can it yield interest (meaning profit), and the
latter is the ultimate object of all saving.'[269]
That is how v. Kirchmann described somewhat clumsily, but on the whole
correctly, what is in fact the capitalisation of surplus value, the
process of capitalist accumulation, which constitutes the whole
significance of saving, advocated by classical economists 'since Adam
Smith' with unerring instinct. Declaring war on saving and accumulation
was quite in keeping with v. Kirchmann's premises, considering that he,
like Sismondi, saw the immediate cause of the crises in accumulation.
Here, too, Rodbertus is more 'thorough'. Having learned from Ricardo's
theory of value that labour is the source of all value, and consequently
of capital, too, he is completely blinded by this elementary piece of
knowledge to the entire complexity of capitalist production and capital
movements. Since capital is generated by labour, both the accumulation
of capital, i.e. 'saving', and the capitalisation of the surplus value
are nothing but eyewash.
In order to untangle this intricate network of errors by 'economists
since Adam Smith', he takes, as we might expect, the example of the
'isolated husbandman' and proves all that he needs by a long-drawn
vivisection of the unhappy creature. Here already he discovers
'capital', that is to say, of course, that famous 'original stick' with
which 'economists since Adam Smith' have hooked the fruits of a theory
of capital from the tree of knowledge. 'Would saving be able to produce
this stick?' is his query. And since every normal person will understand
that 'saving' cannot produce any stick, that Robinson [Crusoe] must have
made it of wood, we have already proved that the 'savings' theory is
quite mistaken. Presently, the 'isolated husbandman' hooks a fruit from
the tree with the stick, and this fruit is his 'income'.
'If capital were the source of income, already this most elementary and
primitive event would have to give evidence of this relation. 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 income consisting in
the fruit brought down? can we trace income, 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?'[270]
Surely not. And since the fruit is the product, not of the stick which
brought it down, but of the tree which grew it, Rodbertus has already
proved that all 'economists since Adam Smith' are grossly mistaken if
they maintain that income derives from capital. After a clear exposition
of all fundamental concepts of economics on the example of Robinson
[Crusoe]'s 'economy', Rodbertus transfers the knowledge thus acquired
first to a fictitious society 'without ownership in capital or land',
that is to say to a society with a communist mode of possession, and
then to a society 'with ownership in capital and land', that is to say
contemporary society, and, lo and behold--all the laws of Robinson
[Crusoe]'s economy apply point for point to these two forms of society
as well. Rodbertus contrives here a theory of capital and income which
is the very crown of his Utopian imagination. Since he has discovered
that Robinson [Crusoe]'s 'capital' is the means of production pure and
simple, he identifies capital with the means of production in capitalist
economy as well. Thus reducing capital, with a wave of his hand, to
constant capital, he protests in the name of justice and morality
against the fact that the wages, the workers' means of subsistence, are
also considered capital. He contends furiously against the _concept_ of
variable capital, seeing in it the cause of every disaster. 'If only',
he grieves, '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 about capital in the ruling system, this is
the ultimate source of injustice against the working classes, in theory
and practice alike.'[271]
For 'justice' demands that the goods constituting the 'real wages' of
the workers be counted, not as part of capital, but as belonging to the
category of income. Though Rodbertus knows very well that the capitalist
must regard the wages he has 'advanced' as part of his capital, just
like the other part laid out on immediate means of production, yet in
his opinion this applies only to individual capitals. As soon as it is a
question of the social aggregate product, of reproduction as a whole, he
declares the capitalist categories of production an illusion, a
malicious lie and a 'wrong'. 'Capital _per se_ (properly so-called), the
items which 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.'[272]
An individual capitalist produces by capitalist methods, but society as
a whole must produce like Robinson [Crusoe], as a collective owner
employing communist methods.
'It makes no difference from this general and national point of view
that greater or smaller parts of the aggregate national product are now
owned in all the various phases of production by private persons who
must not be numbered among the producers proper, and that the latter
always manufacture this national aggregate product as servants--without
sharing in the ownership of their own product--of these few owners.'
Certain peculiarities of the relations within the society as a whole no
doubt result from this, namely (1) the institution of 'exchange' as an
intermediary, and (2) the inequality in the distribution of the product.
'Yet all these consequences do not affect the movements of national
production and the shaping of the national product which are always the
same, now as ever (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 income so far established.'
Sismondi had laboured in the sweat of his brow, as had Smith and many
others, to disentangle the concepts of capital and income from the
contradictions of capitalist production. Rodbertus has a simpler method
and abstracts from the specific forms determined by capitalist
production for society as a whole; he simply calls the means of
production 'capital' and the article of consumption 'revenue' and leaves
it at that.
'The essential influence of ownership in land and capital applies only
to individuals having traffic with one another. If the nation is taken
as a unit, the effects of such ownership upon the individuals completely
disappear.'[273]
We see that as soon as Rodbertus comes up against the real problem, the
capitalist aggregate product and its movements, he exhibits the
Utopian's characteristic obtuseness in respect of the historical
peculiarities of production. Marx's comment on Proudhon, that 'speaking
of society as a whole, he pretends that this society is no longer
capitalist' therefore fits him like a glove. The case of Rodbertus again
exemplifies how every economist before Marx had been at a loss when it
came to harmonising the concrete aspects of the labour process with the
perspective of capitalist production which regards everything in terms
of value, to mediating between the forms of movement performed by
individual capitals and the movement of social capital. Such efforts as
a rule vacillate from one extreme to another: the shallow approach of
Say and MacCulloch, recognising only the conceptions of individual
capital, and the Utopian approach of Proudhon and Rodbertus who
recognise only those of the process of labour. That is the context in
which Marx's penetration appears in its true light. His diagram of
simple reproduction illuminates the entire problem by gathering up all
these perspectives in their harmony and their contradictions, and so
resolves the hopeless obscurities of innumerable tomes into two rows of
figures of striking simplicity.
On the strength of such views on capital and income as these, capitalist
appropriation is clearly quite impossible to understand. Indeed,
Rodbertus simply brands it as 'robbery' and indicts it before the forum
of the rights of property it so blatantly violates.
'This personal freedom of the workers which ought legally to involve
ownership in the value of the labour product, leads in practice to their
renunciation of the proprietary claims extorted under pressure of
ownership 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.'[274]
Rodbertus' 'theory in all its details is therefore conclusive proof that
those who praise present-day relations of ownership without being able
at the same time to ground ownership in anything but labour, completely
contradict their own principle. It proves that the property relations of
to-day 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
new-born worker since time immemorial.'[275]
Since surplus value is thus branded as 'robbery', an increasing rate of
surplus value must appear 'as a strange error of present-day economic
organisation'. Brissot's crude paradox with its revolutionary
ring--'property is theft'--had been the starting point for Proudhon's
first pamphlet, but Rodbertus' thesis is quite another matter, arguing
that capital is theft perpetrated on property. It need only be set side
by side with Marx's chapter on the transformation of the laws of
ownership into the laws of capitalist appropriation--this triumph of
historical dialectics in vol. i of Marx's _Capital_--in order to show up
Rodbertus' 'priority'. By ranting against capitalist appropriation under
the aspect of the 'right of property', Rodbertus closed his mind to
capital as the source of surplus value just as effectively as he had
previously been prevented by his tirades against 'saving' from seeing
the surplus value as a source of capital. He is thus in an even worse
position than v. Kirchmann, lacking all qualifications for understanding
capitalist accumulation.
What it amounts to is that Rodbertus wants unrestricted expansion of
production without saving, that is to say without capitalist
accumulation! He wants an unlimited growth of the productive forces, and
at the same time a rate of surplus value stabilised by an act of law. In
short, he shows himself quite unable to grasp the real foundations of
capitalist production he wishes to reform, and to understand the most
important results of the classical economics he criticises so adversely.
It is no more than to be expected, therefore, that Prof. Diehl should
declare Rodbertus a pioneer of economic theory on the strength of his
'new theory of income' and of the distinction between the logical and
the historical categories of capital (capital properly so-called in
contrast to individual capital), that Prof. Adolf Wagner should call him
the 'Ricardo of economic socialism', proving himself ignorant at once of
Ricardo, Rodbertus and socialism alike. Lexis even judges that Rodbertus
is at least the equal of 'his British rival' in power of abstract
thinking, and by far his superior in 'virtuosity to lay bare the
phenomena in their ultimate connections', in 'imaginative vitality', and
above all in his 'ethical approach to economic life'. Rodbertus' real
achievements in economic theory however, other than his critique of
Ricardo's ground rent, his at times quite clear-cut distinction between
surplus value and profit, his treatment of the surplus value as a whole
in deliberate contrast with its partial manifestations, his critique of
Smith's dogma concerning the analysis of commodities in terms of value,
his precise formulation of the periodical character of the crises and
his analysis of their manifestations--all these attempts to carry the
investigation beyond Smith, Ricardo and Say, promising as such, though
doomed to failure because of the confused basic concepts, are rather
above the heads of Rodbertus' official admirers. As Franz Mehring
already pointed out, it was Rodbertus' strange fortune to be lauded to
heaven for his alleged prowess in economics by the same people who
called him to task for his real merits in politics. This contrast
between economic and political achievements, however, does not concern
us here: in the realm of economic theory, his admirers built him a
grand memorial on the barren field he had dug with the hopeless zeal of
the visionary, while the modest beds where he had sown a few fertile
seeds, were allowed to be smothered with weeds and forgotten.[276]
It cannot be said that the problem of accumulation had on the whole been
much advanced beyond the first controversy by this Prusso-Pomeranian
treatment. If in the interim the economic theory of harmony had dropped
from the level of Ricardo to that of a Bastiat-Schultze, social
criticism had correspondingly declined from Sismondi to Rodbertus.
Sismondi's critique of 1819 had been an historical event, but Rodbertus'
ideas of reform, even on their first appearance, were a miserable
regression--still more so on their subsequent reiteration.
In the controversy between Sismondi on the one hand and Say and Ricardo
on the other, one party proved that accumulation was impossible because
of the crises, and therefore warned against full development of the
productive forces. The other party proved that crises were impossible
and advocated an unlimited development of accumulation. Though all
argued from wrong premises, each was logically consistent.
v. Kirchmann and Rodbertus both started, were bound to start, from the
fact of crises. Here the problem of enlarged reproduction of aggregate
capital, the problem of accumulation, was completely identified with the
problem of crises and side-tracked in an attempt to find a remedy for
the crises, although the historical experience of fifty years had shown
all too clearly that crises, as witnessed by their periodical
recurrence, are a necessary phase in capitalist reproduction. One side
now sees the remedy in the complete consumption of the surplus value by
the capitalist, that is to say in refraining from accumulation, the
other in stabilisation of the rate of surplus value by legislative
measures which comes to the same thing, i.e. renouncing accumulation
altogether. This special fad of Rodbertus' sprang from his fervent and
explicit belief in an unlimited capitalist expansion of the productive
forces and of wealth, without accumulation of capital. At a time when
capitalist production was developed to a degree which was soon to enable
Marx to make his fundamental analysis, the last attempt of bourgeois
economics to cope with the problem of reproduction degenerated into
absurd and puerile Utopianism.