THE CONTROVERSY BETWEEN RODBERTUS AND von KIRCHMANN
CHAPTER XV
v. KIRCHMANN’S THEORY OF REPRODUCTION
The second theoretical polemics about the problem of accumulation was also started by current events. If the first English crisis and its attendant misery of the working class had stimulated Sismondi’s opposition against the classical school, it was the revolutionary working-class movement arisen since which, almost twenty-five years later, provided the incentive for Rodbertus’ critique of capitalist production. The risings of the Lyons silk weavers and the Chartist movement in England were vastly different from the shadowy spectres raised by the first crisis, and the ears of the bourgeoisie were made to ring with their criticism of the most wonderful of all forms of society. The first socio-economic work of Rodbertus, probably written for the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung in the late thirties but not published by that paper, bears the significant title, The Demands of the Working Classes,[230] and begins as follows:
‘What do the working classes want? Will the others be able to keep it from them? Will what they want be the grave of modern civilisation? Thoughtful people have long realised that a time must come when history would put this question with great urgency. Now, the man in the street has learned it too, from the Chartist meetings and the Birmingham scenes.’
During the forties, the leaven of revolutionary ideas was most vigorously at work in France in the formation of the various secret societies and socialist schools of the followers of Proudhon, Blanqui, Cabet, Louis Blanc, etc. The February revolution and the June proclamation of the ‘right to work’ led to a first head-on clash between the two worlds of capitalist society—an epoch-making eruption of the contradictions latent in capitalism. As regards the other, visible form of those contradictions—the crises—the available data for observation at the time of the second controversy were far more comprehensive than in the early twenties of the century. The dispute between Rodbertus and v. Kirchmann took place under the immediate impact of the crises in 1837, 1839, 1847, and even of the first world crisis in 1857—Rodbertus writing his interesting pamphlet On Commercial Crises and the Mortgage Problem of the Landowners[231] in 1858. Thus the inherent contradictions of capitalist society meeting his eyes were in strident discord with the doctrine of harmony held by the English classics and their vulgarisers both in England and on the Continent, quite unlike any critique in the times when Sismondi had raised his voice in warning.
Incidentally, a quotation from Sismondi in Rodbertus’ first writing proves that the former’s strictures immediately influenced Rodbertus. He was thus familiar with contemporary French writings against the classical school, though perhaps less so with the far more numerous English literature. There is no more than this flimsy support for the myth of the German professors about the so-called ‘priority’ of Rodbertus over Marx in the ‘foundation of socialism’. Accordingly, Professor Diehl writes in his article on Rodbertus in Handwörterbuch der Staatswissenschaften: ‘Rodbertus must be considered the real founder of scientific socialism in Germany, since in his writings between 1839 and 1842, even before Marx and Lassalle, he provided a comprehensive socialist system, a critique of Adam Smith’s doctrine, new theoretical foundations and proposals for social reform.’
This piece of god-fearing, pious righteousness comes from the second edition of 1901, after all that had been written by Engels, Kautsky and Mehring to destroy this learned legend, and in spite of it. Quite inevitably, of course, and proof against any evidence to the contrary, however weighty, it was only right in the eyes of all the learned German economists that the palm of ‘priority’ should be wrested from Marx, the revolutionary anarchist, by Rodbertus, the ‘socialist’ with monarchist, Prussian and nationalist leanings, the man who believed in communism five hundred years from now, but for the present supported a steady exploitation rate of 200 per cent. However, we are interested in another aspect of Rodbertus’ analysis. The same Professor Diehl continues his eulogy as follows: ‘Rodbertus was not only a pioneer of socialism; political economy as a whole owes much stimulation and furtherance to him; economic theory in particular is indebted to him for the critique of classical economics, for the new theory of the distribution of income, for the distinction between the logical and historical categories of capital, and so on.’