[907] On this point see Rist’s Le Capital provient-il uniquement du Travail? in the Revue d’Économie politique, February 1906.
[908] Rodbertus expressly declares that to say that goods are the product of labour is not to imply that the value of the product is always equal to what it cost in the way of labour, or, in other words, that the labour spent on it does not always measure its value (Schriften, vol. ii, pp. 104, 105). A similar statement is made in the Forderungen (1837). In the Zur Erkenntniss (1842) (pp. 129-131) he gives some of the reasons why he thinks that the value of a product is not equal to the labour it has cost: (1) There is the necessity for equalising the gains of capital; (2) the price of a unit of any commodity is fixed by the price of the unit which costs most to reproduce. In the second of the Soziale Briefe he repeats the statement that the labour value theory is nothing better than an ideal (Kapital, Appendix, p. 279). In a letter written to R. Meyer on January 7, 1872, he affirms the demonstration which he had already given, “that goods do not and cannot exchange merely in proportion to the quantity of labour which has been absorbed by them simply because of the existence of capital”; and he adds the significant words: “a demonstration that might in case of need be employed against Marx.”
[909] “The coincidence between the value of the products and the quantity of labour involved in their production is simply the most ambitious ideal that economics has ever formulated.” (Second Sozial Brief.)
[910] Occasionally Rodbertus admits for the sake of hypothesis or demonstration that prices do coincide with the labour cost; but his essential theory has no need of any such hypothesis, and it really plays quite an auxiliary or subordinate rôle. It is in the course of his exposition of the theory concerning the distribution of unearned income between landed proprietors and capitalists (quite an erroneous theory, by the way) that he is driven to admit that “the exchange value of each completed product, as well as of each portion of the product, is equal to its labour value.” (Third Sozial Brief, Schriften, vol. ii, p. 101.)
[911] Kapital, p. 105.
[912] “Whenever exchange is allowed to take its own course in the matter of distributing the national dividend, certain circumstances connected with the development of society and with the growing productivity of social labour cause the wages of the working classes to diminish so as to constitute a decreasing fraction of the national product.” (Second Sozial Brief, Schriften, vol. ii, p. 37.)
[913] Kapital, p. 153.
[914] The idea that entrepreneurs base their production upon the demand of the higher classes is a somewhat novel one, but it is quite definitely stated by Rodbertus. “The classes can only influence the market in proportion to the quantity of the social product which is given them. But the entrepreneurs must determine the quantities which they will produce, according to the size of their demands.” (Kapital, pp. 51-52. Cf. also pp. 170-171.) It is quite obvious, on the contrary, that the entrepreneurs base their production solely upon the demand for the particular goods which they manufacture, and that they are quite indifferent to the share which goes to the higher classes.
[915] Kapital, p. 53.
[916] We shall soon be convinced of the similarity that exists between the two theories if we read the passage in the article on Balance des Consommations avec les Productions, published by Sismondi as an appendix to the second edition of the Nouveaux Principes, vol. ii, p. 430. Rodbertus agrees with Sismondi that equilibrium will be re-established in the long run, but that in the meantime a crisis may have to intervene. (Kapital, p. 171, note; cf. [p. 190], supra.)