The Poverty of Philosophy

then one blinds them completely. To set up commodity production in such a way that the producers can no longer learn anything about the state of the market for which they produce — that is certainly a cure for the crisis disease for which Doctor Eisenbart a legendary itinerant surgeon known for his brutal and ineffective cures might envy Rodbertus.

One understands now why Rodbertus defines the value of commodities simply by "labor" and admits at most different degrees of intensity of labor. Had he investigated through what and how labor creates value and therefore also determines and measures it, he would have come upon the socially necessary labor, necessary for the individual product both in relation to other products of the same kind, as well as in relation to the total social need. With that, he would have come before the question: how the adaptation of the production of individual commodity producers to the total social need is accomplished; and with that, his entire utopia was made impossible. He preferred this time, in fact, to "abstract," namely from that which was precisely what mattered.

Now at last we come to the point in which Rodbertus really offers us something new; something that distinguishes him from all his numerous fellow travelers of the labor-money exchange economy. They all demand this exchange institution for the purpose of abolishing the exploitation of wage labor by capital. Every producer should receive the full labor value of his product. In this, they are all in agreement, from Gray to Proudhon. By no means, says Rodbertus. Wage labor and its exploitation remain.

First, the worker can in no conceivable state of society receive the entire value of his product