The Poverty of Philosophy

while we suffocate in beet sugar and drown in potato schnapps, that we do not have enough trousers to cover our nakedness while trouser buttons swarm about by the millions — then Rodbertus shows us his famous calculation triumphantly, according to which the correct certificate has been issued for every superfluous pound of sugar, for every unsold barrel of schnapps, for every unattachable trouser button, a calculation that works out exactly, according to which "all claims are satisfied and the liquidation is properly mediated." And whoever does not believe it should turn to the government chief cashier and revenue officer accountant original: "Regierungshauptkassenrentamtskalkulator" X. in Pomerania, who has audited the calculation and found it correct, and who is absolutely credible as he has never been caught in a cash deficit.

And now consider the naivety with which Rodbertus wants to eliminate industrial and trade crises by means of his utopia. As soon as commodity production has assumed world-market dimensions, the reconciliation between individual producers producing for private account and the market for which they produce, which is more or less unknown to them regarding the quantity and quality of need, is settled by a world-market storm, a trade crisis.*) If one now forbids competition from informing the individual producer of how the world market stands through the rising or falling of prices,

*) At least this was the case until recently. Since England's world-market monopoly is being broken more and more by the participation of France, Germany, and above all America in world trade, a new form of reconciliation seems to be making itself felt. The period of general prosperity preceding the crisis still does not want to come. If it fails to appear altogether, chronic stagnation would have to become the normal state of modern industry, with only slight fluctuations.