The other economic feats performed by Rodbertus are on about the same plane. His elaboration of surplus-value into a utopia has already been unintentionally criticised by Marx in his Poverty of Philosophy. What else may be said about it I have said in my preface to the German edition of that work. Rodbertus's explanation of commercial crises as outgrowths of the underconsumption of the working-class may already be found in Sismondi's Nouveaux Principes de I'Economie Politique , book IV, ch. IV. [3] However, Sismondi always had the world-market in mind, while Rodbertus's horizon does not extend beyond the Prussian border. His speculations as to whether wages are derived from capital or income belong to the domain of scholasticism and are definitely settled in Part III of this second book of Capital . His theory of rent has remained his exclusive property and may rest in peace until the manuscript of Marx criticising it is published.
Finally his suggestions for the emancipation of the old Prussian landed property from the oppression of Capital are also entirely utopian;for they evade the only practical question raised in this connection, viz.:
How can the old Prussian landed junker have a yearly income of, say, 20,000marks and a yearly expenditure of, say, 30,000 marks, without running into debt?
The Ricardian school suffered shipwreck about the year 1830 on the rock of surplus-value. And what this school could not solve remained still more insoluble for its successor, Vulgar Economy. The two points which caused its failure were these:
1. Labour is the measure of value. However, living labour in its exchange with capital has a lower value than materialised labour for which it is exchanged. Wages, the value of a definite quantity of living labour, are always less than the value of the product begotten by this same quantity of living labour or in which this quantity is embodied. The question is indeed insoluble, if put in this form. It has been correctly formulated by Marx and thereby been answered. It is not labour which has a value.
As an activity which creates values it can no more have any special value than gravity can have any special weight, heat any special temperature, electricity any special strength of current. It is not labour which is bought and sold as a commodity, but labour- power . As soon as labour-power becomes a commodity, its value is determined by the labour embodied in this commodity as a social product. This value is equal to the labour socially necessary for the production and reproduction of this commodity. Hence the purchase and sale of labour-power on the basis of its value thus defined does not at all contradict the economic law of value.
2. According to the Ricardian law of value, two capitals employing equal quantities of equally paid living labour all other conditions being equal, produce commodities of equal value and likewise surplus-value, or profit, of equal quantity in equal periods of time. But if they employ unequal quantities of living labour, they cannot produce equal surplus-values, or, as the Ricardians say, equal profits. Now in reality the opposite takes place. In actual fact, equal capitals, regardless of how much or how little living labour is employed by them, produce equal average profits in equal times. Here there is therefore a contradiction of the law of value which had been noticed by Ricardo himself, but which his school also was unable to reconcile. Rodbertus likewise could not but note this contradiction.
But instead of resolving it, he made it one of the starting-points of his utopia. ( Zur Erkenntnis , p. 131.) Marx had resolved this contradiction already in the manuscript of his Zur Kritik . According to the plan of Capital , this solution will be provided in Book III. Months will pass before that will be published. Hence those economists who claim to have discovered in Rodbertus the secret source and a superior predecessor of Marx have now an opportunity to demonstrate what the economics of a Rodbertus can accomplish. If they can show in which way an equal average rate of profit can and must come about, not only without a violation of the law of value, but on the very basis of it, I am willing to discuss the matter further with them. In the meantime they had better make haste.
The brilliant investigations of the present Book II and their entirely new results in fields hitherto almost untrod are merely introductory to the contents of Book III, which develops the final conclusions of Marx's analysis of the process of social reproduction on a capitalist basis. When this Book III appears, little mention will be made of the economist called Rodbertus.
The second and third books of Capital were to be dedicated as Marx had stated repeatedly, to his wife.
Frederick Engels London, on Marx's birthday, May 5, 1885Preface to the Second Edition The present second edition is, in the main, a faithful reprint of the first. Typographical errors have been corrected, a few stylistic blemishes eliminated, and a few short paragraphs that contain only repetitions struck out.
The third book, which presented quite unforseen difficulties, is now also nearly ready in manuscript. If my health holds out it will be ready for press this autumn. [RETURN TO TOP OF PAGE]
F. Engels London, 15 July 1893
NOTES
1. In the Preface to Marx's The Poverty of Philosophy, translated by E. Bernstein and K. Kautsky, Stuttgart, 1885. [RETURNTO TEXT]
2. Roscoe and Schorlemmer, Ausführiches Lehrbuch der Chemie , Braunschweig, 1877, I, pp. 13, 18. [RETURNTO TEXT]
3. 'Thus the home market becomes ever more constricted by the concentration of riches in the hands of a small number of proprietors, and industry is forced more and more to seek its outlets in foreign markets, where still greater revolutions await it' (i.e. the crisis of 1817, which Sismondi goes on to describe). 1819 edition, I, p. 336. [RETURNTO TEXT]