The Poverty of Philosophy

VII

economic conditions, 1842, in order to examine it briefly, insofar as it also brings to light—again unconsciously—anticipations of Proudhon, alongside the communism of Weitling also contained therein.

Insofar as modern socialism, regardless of its direction, proceeds from bourgeois political economy, it attaches itself almost without exception to the Ricardian theory of value. The two propositions that Ricardo proclaimed right at the beginning of his Principles in 1817: 1) that the value of every commodity is determined solely and exclusively by the quantity of labor required for its production, and 2) that the product of the entire social labor is distributed among the three classes of landowners (rent), capitalists (profit), and workers (wages)—these two propositions had already been utilized for socialist conclusions in England since 1821, and indeed sometimes with such sharpness and decisiveness that this literature, now almost forgotten and largely rediscovered by Marx, remained unsurpassed until the appearance of Capital. More on that another time. If, therefore, Rodbertus drew socialist conclusions from the above propositions in 1842 for his part, this was certainly a very significant step forward for a German at that time, but it could at most pass as a new discovery for Germany. How little such an application of the Ricardian theory was new, Marx proves against Proudhon, who suffered from a similar conceit.

"Anyone who is at all familiar with the development of political economy in England knows that almost all the socialists of that country have, at different times, proposed the egalitarian (i.e., socialist)