[257] _Schriften_, vol. iii, p. 176.
[258] Op. cit., vol. i, pp. 53, 57.
[259] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 206.
[260] Ibid., vol. i, p. 19.
[261] Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 110.
[262] Ibid., p. 144.
[263] _Schriften_, vol. ii, p. 146.
[264] Ibid., p. 155.
[265] Ibid., p. 223.
[266] _Schriften_, vol. ii, p. 226.
[267] Ibid., p. 156.
[268] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 40.
[269] Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 25.
[270] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 250.
[271] Ibid., p. 295. Rodbertus reiterates during a lifetime the ideas he
had evolved as early as 1842 in his _Towards the Understanding of Our
Politico-Economic Conditions_. 'Under present conditions, we have,
however, gone so far as to consider not only the wage of labour part of
the costs of the goods, but also rents and capital profits. We must
therefore refute this opinion in detail. It has a twofold foundation:
(_a_) a wrong conception of capital which counts the wage of labour as
part of the capital just like materials and tools, while it is on the
same level as rent and profit; (_b_) a confusion of the costs of the
commodity and the advances of the entrepreneur or the costs of the
enterprise' (_Towards the Understanding of Our Politico-Economic
Conditions_, Neubrandenburg & Friedland, G. Barnovitz, 1842, p. 14).
[272] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 304. Just so already in _Towards the
Understanding of Our Politico-Economic Conditions_, 'We must distinguish
between capital in its narrow or proper sense, and the fund of
enterprise, or capital in a wider sense. The former comprises the actual
reserves in tools and materials, the latter the fund necessary for
running an enterprise under present conditions of division of labour.
The former is capital absolutely necessary to production, and the latter
achieves such relative necessity only by force of present conditions.
Hence only the former is capital in the strict and proper meaning of the
term; this alone is completely congruent with the concept of national
capital' (ibid., pp. 23-4).
[273] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 292.
[274] Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 136.
[275] Ibid., p. 225.
[276] A memorial of the worst kind, by the way, was that of the editors
who published his works after his death. These learned gentlemen,
Messrs. Wagner, Kozak, Moritz Wuertz & Co., quarrelled in the prefaces
to his posthumous writings like a rough crowd of ill-mannered servants
in an antechamber, fighting out publicly their petty personal feuds and
jealousies, and slanging one another. They did not even bother in common
decency to establish the dates for the individual manuscripts they had
found. To take an instance, it needed Mehring to observe that the oldest
manuscript of Rodbertus that had been found was not published in 1837,
as laid down autocratically by Prof. Wagner, but in 1839 at the
earliest, since it refers in its opening paragraphs to historical events
connected with the Chartist movement belonging, as a professor of
economics really ought to know, in the year 1839. In Professor Wagner's
introduction to Rodbertus we are constantly bored by his pomposity, his
harping on the 'excessive demands on his time'; in any case Wagner
addresses himself solely to his learned colleagues and talks above the
heads of the common crowd; he passes over in silence, as befits a great
man, Mehring's elegant correction before the assembled experts. Just as
silently, Professor Diehl altered the date of 1837 to 1839 in the
_Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften_, without a word to say when
and by whom he had been thus enlightened.
But the final touch is provided by the 'popular', 'new and inexpensive'
edition of Puttkamer and Muehlbrecht (1899). Some of the quarrelling
editors collaborated on it but still continue their disputes in the
introductions. Wagner's former vol. ii has become vol. i in this
edition, yet Wagner still refers to vol. ii in the introduction to vol.
i. The first _Letter on Social Problems_ is placed in vol. iii, the
second and third in vol. ii and the fourth in vol. i. The order of the
_Letters on Social Problems_, of the _Controversies_, of the parts of
_Towards the Understanding_ ..., chronological and logical sequence, the
dates of publication and of writing are hopelessly mixed up, making a
chaos more impenetrable than the stratification of the soil after
repeated volcanic eruptions. 1837 is maintained as the date of
Rodbertus' earliest MS., probably out of respect to Professor
Wagner--and this in 1899, although Mehring's rectification had been made
in 1894. If we compare this with Marx's literary heritage in Mehring's
and Kautsky's edition, published by Dietz, we see how such apparently
superficial matters but reflect deeper connections: one kind of care for
the scientific heritage of the authority of the class-conscious
proletariat, and quite another in which the official experts of the
bourgeoisie squander the heritage of a man who, in their own
self-interested legends, had been a first-rate genius. _Suum
cuique_--had this not been the motto of Rodbertus?
_SECTION TWO_
HISTORICAL EXPOSITION
OF THE PROBLEM