The Poverty of Philosophy

IX

the labor time contained within it, the exchange value of a working day is equal to its product. Or wages must be equal to the product of labor. Now, the opposite is the case." To this, the following note is added: "This objection, brought forward from the economic side against Ricardo, was later taken up by the socialist side. Assuming the theoretical correctness of the formula, the practice of the contradiction was accused of violating the theory, and bourgeois society was urged to practically draw the supposed consequence of its theoretical principle. In this way, at least, English socialists turned the Ricardian formula of exchange value against political economy." In the same note, reference is made to Marx’s Misère de la Philosophie The Poverty of Philosophy, which was still available in bookstores everywhere at that time.

Rodbertus, therefore, had enough opportunity to convince himself whether his discoveries of 1842 were truly new. Instead, he proclaims them again and again and considers them so incomparable that it does not even occur to him that Marx could have drawn his conclusions from Ricardo just as independently as he, Rodbertus, did himself. Purely impossible! Marx has "plundered" him—he, to whom the same Marx offered every opportunity to verify how long before both of them these conclusions, at least in the crude form they still have with Rodbertus, had already been expressed in England!

The simplest socialist application of the Ricardian theory is now the one given above. It has in many cases led to insights into the origin and nature of surplus value that go far beyond Ricardo