Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/20

 "If the value in exchange of a product is equal to the labor time which it contains, the value in exchange of a day of labor is equal to its product. Or, indeed, wages must be equal to the product of labor. But it is the contrary which is true." In a note: "This objection raised against Ricardo from the side of the economists, has been raised again later by the Socialists. The theoretical exactitude of the formula being admitted, the practice is accused of being in contradiction to the theory, and bourgeois society was invited to draw practically the conclusions implied by the theory. Some English Socialists have, at least in this sense, turned the formula of the exchange-value of Ricardo against political economy." We are referred in this note to the "Misère de la Philosophie" of Marx, which was then in all the libraries.

It was, then, sufficiently easy for Rodbertus to convince himself of the real novelty of his discoveries of 1842. Instead of that he has not ceased to proclaim them, and to believe them to be so incomparable that he has never once been able to suppose that Marx all alone could have drawn from Ricardo the same conclusions as Rodbertus himself had done. That was impossible. Marx had "pillaged" him—him to whom the same Marx had offered every facility for convincing himself that long before either of them these conclusions, at least in the gross form that they still possess with Rodbertus, had already been expressed in England.

The most simple Socialist application of the theory of Ricardo is that which we have given above. In many cases it has led to perceptions on the origin and the nature of surplus-value which have gone far beyond Ricardo. The same may be said with regard to Rodbertus. Not only does he in this order of ideas never