‘The essential influence of ownership in land and capital applies only to individuals having traffic with one another. If the nation is taken as a unit, the effects of such ownership upon the individuals completely disappear.’[273]
We see that as soon as Rodbertus comes up against the real problem, the capitalist aggregate product and its movements, he exhibits the Utopian’s characteristic obtuseness in respect of the historical peculiarities of production. Marx’s comment on Proudhon, that ‘speaking of society as a whole, he pretends that this society is no longer capitalist’ therefore fits him like a glove. The case of Rodbertus again exemplifies how every economist before Marx had been at a loss when it came to harmonising the concrete aspects of the labour process with the perspective of capitalist production which regards everything in terms of value, to mediating between the forms of movement performed by individual capitals and the movement of social capital. Such efforts as a rule vacillate from one extreme to another: the shallow approach of Say and MacCulloch, recognising only the conceptions of individual capital, and the Utopian approach of Proudhon and Rodbertus who recognise only those of the process of labour. That is the context in which Marx’s penetration appears in its true light. His diagram of simple reproduction illuminates the entire problem by gathering up all these perspectives in their harmony and their contradictions, and so resolves the hopeless obscurities of innumerable tomes into two rows of figures of striking simplicity.
On the strength of such views on capital and income as these, capitalist appropriation is clearly quite impossible to understand. Indeed, Rodbertus simply brands it as ‘robbery’ and indicts it before the forum of the rights of property it so blatantly violates.
‘This personal freedom of the workers which ought legally to involve ownership in the value of the labour product, leads in practice to their renunciation of the proprietary claims extorted under pressure of ownership in land and capital; but the owners do not admit to this great and universal wrong, almost as though they were instinctively afraid that history might follow its own stern and inexorable logic.’[274]
Rodbertus’ ‘theory in all its details is therefore conclusive proof that those who praise present-day relations of ownership without being able at the same time to ground ownership in anything but labour, completely contradict their own principle. It proves that the property relations of to-day are in fact founded on a universal violation of this principle, that the great individual fortunes being amassed in society nowadays are the result of cumulative robbery mounting up in society with every new-born worker since time immemorial.’[275]
Since surplus value is thus branded as ‘robbery’, an increasing rate of surplus value must appear ‘as a strange error of present-day economic organisation’. Brissot’s crude paradox with its revolutionary ring—‘property is theft’—had been the starting point for Proudhon’s first pamphlet, but Rodbertus’ thesis is quite another matter, arguing that capital is theft perpetrated on property. It need only be set side by side with Marx’s chapter on the transformation of the laws of ownership into the laws of capitalist appropriation—this triumph of historical dialectics in vol. i of Marx’s Capital—in order to show up Rodbertus’ ‘priority’. By ranting against capitalist appropriation under the aspect of the ‘right of property’, Rodbertus closed his mind to capital as the source of surplus value just as effectively as he had previously been prevented by his tirades against ‘saving’ from seeing the surplus value as a source of capital. He is thus in an even worse position than v. Kirchmann, lacking all qualifications for understanding capitalist accumulation.
What it amounts to is that Rodbertus wants unrestricted expansion of production without saving, that is to say without capitalist accumulation! He wants an unlimited growth of the productive forces, and at the same time a rate of surplus value stabilised by an act of law. In short, he shows himself quite unable to grasp the real foundations of capitalist production he wishes to reform, and to understand the most important results of the classical economics he criticises so adversely.
It is no more than to be expected, therefore, that Prof. Diehl should declare Rodbertus a pioneer of economic theory on the strength of his ‘new theory of income’ and of the distinction between the logical and the historical categories of capital (capital properly so-called in contrast to individual capital), that Prof. Adolf Wagner should call him the ‘Ricardo of economic socialism’, proving himself ignorant at once of Ricardo, Rodbertus and socialism alike. Lexis even judges that Rodbertus is at least the equal of ‘his British rival’ in power of abstract thinking, and by far his superior in ‘virtuosity to lay bare the phenomena in their ultimate connections’, in ‘imaginative vitality’, and above all in his ‘ethical approach to economic life’. Rodbertus’ real achievements in economic theory however, other than his critique of Ricardo’s ground rent, his at times quite clear-cut distinction between surplus value and profit, his treatment of the surplus value as a whole in deliberate contrast with its partial manifestations, his critique of Smith’s dogma concerning the analysis of commodities in terms of value, his precise formulation of the periodical character of the crises and his analysis of their manifestations—all these attempts to carry the investigation beyond Smith, Ricardo and Say, promising as such, though doomed to failure because of the confused basic concepts, are rather above the heads of Rodbertus’ official admirers. As Franz Mehring already pointed out, it was Rodbertus’ strange fortune to be lauded to heaven for his alleged prowess in economics by the same people who called him to task for his real merits in politics. This contrast between economic and political achievements, however, does not concern us here: in the realm of economic theory, his admirers built him a grand memorial on the barren field he had dug with the hopeless zeal of the visionary, while the modest beds where he had sown a few fertile seeds, were allowed to be smothered with weeds and forgotten.[276]
It cannot be said that the problem of accumulation had on the whole been much advanced beyond the first controversy by this Prusso-Pomeranian treatment. If in the interim the economic theory of harmony had dropped from the level of Ricardo to that of a Bastiat-Schultze, social criticism had correspondingly declined from Sismondi to Rodbertus. Sismondi’s critique of 1819 had been an historical event, but Rodbertus’ ideas of reform, even on their first appearance, were a miserable regression—still more so on their subsequent reiteration.
In the controversy between Sismondi on the one hand and Say and Ricardo on the other, one party proved that accumulation was impossible because of the crises, and therefore warned against full development of the productive forces. The other party proved that crises were impossible and advocated an unlimited development of accumulation. Though all argued from wrong premises, each was logically consistent.