The Poverty of Philosophy

X

beyond; thus, among others, with Rodbertus. Apart from the fact that in this respect he nowhere offers anything that was not said at least just as well before him, his presentation, like that of his predecessors, suffers from the fact that he accepts the economic categories—labor, capital, value, etc.—without question in the crude form handed down to him by the economists, which clings to the surface, without examining their content. Through this, he not only cuts himself off from any path of further development—in contrast to Marx, who only made something of these propositions, which have now been repeated often for 64 years—but he also opens the direct path into utopia, as will be shown.

The above application of the Ricardian theory, that the entire social product, their product, belongs to the workers as the sole real producers, leads directly to communism. However, as Marx also indicates in the passage above, it is formally economically false, for it is simply an application of morality to economy. According to the laws of bourgeois economy, the largest part of the product does not belong to the workers who created it. If we now say: that is unjust, that should not be, that does not concern economy for the time being. We only say that this economic fact contradicts our moral feeling. Marx therefore never based his communist demands on this, but on the necessary collapse of the capitalist mode of production, which is increasingly taking place before our eyes every day; he only says that surplus value consists of unpaid labor, which is a simple