The Poverty of Philosophy

VIII

application of the Ricardian theory. We could cite to Mr. Proudhon: the political economy of Hopkins, 1822; William Thompson, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth, most conducive to Human Happiness, 1827; T. R. Edmonds, Practical, Moral and Political Economy, 1828, etc. etc., and four more pages of et ceteras. We will only let one English communist speak: Bray, in his remarkable writing: Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy, Leeds 1839." And the citations from Bray provided here alone eliminate a good portion of the priority claimed by Rodbertus.

At that time, Marx had never entered the reading room of the British Museum. Aside from Parisian and Brussels libraries, aside from my books and excerpts, he had only looked through the books to be found in Manchester during a six-week trip to England that we took together in the summer of 1845. The relevant literature was therefore by no means as inaccessible in the forties as it is, for example, today. If it nevertheless remained unknown to Rodbertus, that was due solely to his Prussian local narrow-mindedness. He is the true founder of specifically Prussian socialism and is now finally being recognized as such.

However, even in his beloved Prussia, Rodbertus was not to remain undisturbed. In 1859, Marx’s A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, First Fascicle, appeared in Berlin. In it, among the objections of the economists against Ricardo, the second objection is highlighted on page 40:

"If the exchange value of a product is equal to