The Accumulation of Capital

by Rosa Luxemburg

(2) The ‘economy of exchange’ resulted in the ‘degradation’ of labour to a commodity, the labour wage being determined as an item of expenditure (Eichmann’s der Arbeit) instead of representing a fixed rate of the national product. By a daring jump in history, Rodbertus derives his wages law indirectly from slavery and regards the specific traits which a capitalist production of commodities imposes on exploitation as no more than a lying deception against which he fulminates from a moral point of view.

‘So long as the producers themselves remained the property of those who were not producing, so long as slavery was in existence, it was the advantage of the “masters” alone which unilaterally determined the volume of this share (of the workers). With the producers attaining full liberty of person, if nothing more as yet, both parties agree on the wage in advance. The wage, in modern terminology, is the object of a “free contract”, that is to say, an object of competition. Labour is therefore as a matter of course subjected to the same laws of exchange as its products: labour itself acquires exchange value; the size of the wage depends on the effects of supply and demand.’

Rodbertus, after having thus turned everything upside down, after deriving the exchange value of labour from competition, now immediately derives its value from its exchange value.

‘Under the laws of exchange value, labour, like produced goods, comes to have a kind of “cost value” which exercises some magnetic effects upon its exchange value, the amount of the labour wage. It is that particular amount of payment which is necessary for the “maintenance” of labour, in other words, which enables labour to continue, if only in the persons of its progeny—it is the so-called “minimum of subsistence”.’

For Rodbertus, however, this is not a statement of objective economic laws, but merely an object for moral indignation. He calls the thesis of the classical school, that labour is worth no more than the wages it can command, a ‘cynical’ statement, and he is determined to expose the ‘string of lies’ leading to this ‘crude and unethical’ conclusion.[244]

‘It was a degrading view to estimate the wages of labour in accordance with the “necessary subsistence”, like so many machines to be kept in repair. Now that labour, the fountainhead of all commodities, has itself become a commodity of exchange, it is no less degrading to speak of its “natural price”, of its “costs“, just as we speak of the natural price and costs of its product, and to include this natural price, these costs, in the amount of goods that is necessary to call forth a continuous flow of labour on the market.’

This commodity character of labour power, however, and the corresponding determination of its value, are nothing but a malicious misrepresentation of the Free Trade school. Like the good Prussian he was, Rodbertus put capitalist commodity production as a whole in the dock, as offending against the obtaining constitutional law, instead of pointing out its inherent contradiction, the conflict between determining the value of labour and determining the value created by labour, as the English disciples of Ricardo had done.

‘Stupid beyond words’, he exclaims, ‘is the dualist conception of those economists who would have the workers, as far as their legal status is concerned, join in deciding the fate of society, and would for all that, have these same workers from an economic point of view, always treated as mere commodities!’[245]

Now it only remains to find out why the workers put up with such stupid and blatant injustice—an objection which Hermann for instance raised against Ricardo’s theory of value. Rodbertus is ready with this answer:

‘What were the workers to do after their emancipation other than to agree to these regulations? Imagine their position: when the workers were freed, they were naked or in rags, they had nothing but their labour power. The abolition of slavery or serfdom, moreover, rescinded the master’s legal or moral obligation to feed them and care for their needs. Yet these needs remained, they still had to live. How, then, could their labour power provide them with a living? Were they simply to grab some of the capital existing in the society for their maintenance? The capital of society was already in the hands of other people, and the organs of the “law” would not have tolerated such a step. What, then, could the workers have done? Only these alternatives were before them: either to overthrow the law of society or to return, under roughly the same conditions as before, to their former masters, the owners of the land and of capital, and to receive as wages what was formerly doled out to them to keep them fed.’[246]