The Poverty of Philosophy

XXIII

privileged class is necessary, and so the current rate of surplus value, to express myself correctly, shall remain in existence, but must not be increased. Rodbertus assumes this current rate of surplus value to be 200%; that is, for a twelve-hour workday, the worker should not receive certification for 12 hours, but only for 4, and the value produced in the remaining 8 hours should be distributed between the landowner and the capitalist. Rodbertus’s labor certificates are, therefore, a direct lie. But one must be a Pomeranian estate owner to imagine that a working class would put up with working twelve hours to receive certification for four labor hours. If one translates the hocus-pocus of capitalist production into this naive language, where it appears as undisguised robbery, one makes it impossible. Every certificate given to the worker would be a direct invitation to rebellion and would fall under § 110 of the German Imperial Penal Code. One must never have seen any other proletariat than the day-laborer proletariat of a Pomeranian estate, still effectively caught in semi-serfdom, where the stick and the whip rule and where all the pretty young women of the village belong to the harem of the gracious master, to imagine that one could offer such insolence to workers. But our conservatives are, after all, our greatest revolutionaries.

If our workers, however, are meek enough to let themselves be convinced that they have in reality only worked for four hours during a full twelve hours of hard labor, then they are to be guaranteed, as a reward, that their share of their own product will never fall below one-third for all eternity. This is truly music of the future played on a toy trumpet, and it is not worth wasting a word on it. Thus, insofar as Rodbertus offers anything new in his labor-money exchange utopia, this novelty is simply childish and ranks far below the achievements of his numerous comrades both before and after him.