The Poverty of Philosophy

therefore value-measuring, regardless of whether it is expended under normal social average conditions or not. Whether the producers spend ten days on the manufacture of products that can be manufactured in one day, or only one, whether they apply the best or the worst tools, whether they use their labor time on the manufacture of socially necessary articles and in the socially required quantity, or whether they manufacture completely undesired articles, or desired articles above or below demand—there is no mention of all this: labor is labor, a product of equal labor must be exchanged for a product of equal labor. Rodbertus, who is otherwise always ready, whether appropriate or not, to take the national standpoint and to survey the conditions of individual producers from the height of the general social vantage point, anxiously avoids this here. And indeed only because, from the very first line of his book, he is steering directly toward the utopia of labor money, and any investigation of labor in its value-forming capacity would have to throw impassable boulders into his fairway. His instinct here was significantly stronger than his power of abstract thought, which incidentally can only be discovered in Rodbertus by means of the most concrete thoughtlessness.

The transition to the utopia is now made in the blink of an eye. The "precautions" that ensure the exchange of commodities according to labor value as an exceptionless rule present no difficulty. The other utopians of this tendency, from Gray to Proudhon, struggle to invent social institutions that are supposed to realize this purpose. They at least attempt to solve the economic question by economic means, through the action of the exchanging commodity owners themselves. Rodbertus has it much easier. As a good Prussian, he appeals to the state: a decree of state power commands the reform.

With that, value is happily "constituted," but by no means the priority of this constitution claimed by Rodbertus. On the contrary, Gray as well as Bray—alongside many others—have long and often repeated this thought before Rodbertus, even to the point of tedium: the pious wish for precautions by means of which products under all circumstances always and only exchange at their labor value.

After the state has thus constituted value—at least of a portion of the products, for Rodbertus is also modest—it issues its labor paper money, gives advances of it to the industrial capitalists with which they pay the workers, whereupon the workers buy the products with the received labor paper money and thus facilitate the reflux of the paper money to its starting point. How beautifully this unfolds, we must hear from Rodbertus himself.

"As far as the second condition is concerned, the necessary precaution that the value certified in the note is really present in circulation is taken by the fact that only those who actually hand over a product receive a note in which the exact quantity of labor by which the product was produced is noted. Whoever hands over a product of 2 days of labor receives a note on which '2 days' is written. Through the exact observance of this rule in