The Poverty of Philosophy

the petty bourgeois, whose honest labor—even if it is only that of his journeymen and apprentices—is daily devalued more and more by the competition of large-scale production and machinery, the small producer in particular must long for a society in which the exchange of products according to their labor value finally becomes a full and exceptionless truth; in other words, he must long for a society in which a single law of commodity production applies exclusively and without abbreviation, but the conditions under which it can apply at all, namely the remaining laws of commodity production and furthermore of capitalist production, are removed.

How deeply this utopia is rooted in the thinking of the modern—real or ideal—petty bourgeois is proven by the fact that it was systematically developed by John Gray as early as 1831, practically attempted and theoretically belabored in England in the thirties, proclaimed as the newest truth by Rodbertus in Germany in 1842 and by Proudhon in France in 1846, was proclaimed once again by Rodbertus in 1871 as the solution to the social question and, as it were, as his social testament, and in 1884 again finds followers among the legion of careerists who set out to exploit the Prussian state socialism in the name of Rodbertus.

The critique of this utopia has been provided by Marx so exhaustively against both Proudhon and Gray (see the appendix to this work) that I can limit myself here to a few remarks about the specifically Rodbertian form of its justification and elaboration.

As already said, Rodbertus adopts the conventional economic definitions entirely in the form in which they have been handed down to him by the economists. He does not make the slightest attempt to examine them. Value for him is "the validity of a thing against the others according to quantity, this validity grasped as a measure." This, to put it mildly, highly sloppy definition gives us at best an idea of what value roughly looks like, but says absolutely nothing about what it is. Since this is all that Rodbertus knows how to tell us about value, it is understandable that he searches for a measure of value lying outside of value. After tossing use-value and exchange-value hodgepodge together for thirty pages with the power of abstract thought so infinitely admired by Mr. Adolph Wagner, he arrives at the result that there is no real measure of value and that one must be content with a surrogate measure. Labor could provide such a measure, but only if products of equal quantities of labor always exchanged for products of equal quantities of labor; be it that this "is already the case in itself, or that precautions are taken" to ensure this. Value and labor thus remain without any factual connection, despite the fact that the entire first chapter is spent explaining to us that and why commodities "cost labor" and nothing but labor.

Labor is now again taken without scrutiny in the form in which it appears among the economists. And not even that. For even if the differences in intensity of labor are pointed out in two words, labor is still cited quite generally as "costing,"