Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/26

 utopia of the labor-note, and that all analysis of labor as the producer of value only strews his route with difficulties. His instinct was here considerably stronger than his power of abstraction—that cannot be discovered in Rodbertus, it may be said in passing, only by means of the most concrete poverty of ideas.

The journey to utopia is quickly made. "The dispositions" which fix the exchange of commodities according to the value of labor as following an absolute law present no difficulty. All the other utopians of this tendency, from Gray to Proudhon, are at great pains to elaborate social measures. In order to realize this object they at least endeavor to resolve the economic question by economic means, due to the action of the owner of commodities who exchanges them. For Rodbertus it is much more simple. As a good Prussian he calls in the State. A decree of the public power establishes the reform.

Value is thus then happily "constituted," but not the priority of this constitution which is claimed by Rodbertus. On the contrary, Gray as well as Bray—among many others—have often expressed the same idea; they piously desire measures by which the products will exchange, in spite of all obstacles, always and only at their value in labor. After the State has thus constituted value—at least of a part of the products, as Rodbertus is modest—it issues its labor-notes; in effect, as advances to the industrial capitalists with which the workers are paid; the workers then buy the products with the labor-notes they have received and thus permit the return of the paper money to its original source. It is necessary to learn from Rodbertus himself how admirably that develops.

"For this second condition we must secure the dis-