The Poverty of Philosophy

also value-measuring, cited, regardless of whether it is expended under normal social average conditions or not. Whether 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—of all this there is no mention: 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 adopt 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 steers directly toward the Utopie utopia of Arbeitsgeld 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 Utopie utopia is now made in the blink of an eye. The "precautions" that ensure the Waarenaustausch commodity exchange according to Arbeitswerth labor value as an exceptionless rule present no difficulty. The other utopians of this tendency, from John Gray to Proudhon, struggle to invent social institutions...