Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/30

 breeches button, an account which is "just," which "satisfies all the conditions and in which the liquidation is exact." And anyone who does not believe this has only to address himself to "M. X.," the superior employee of the Office of the Public Debt in Pomerania, who has revised the calculation and has found it just, and who may be regarded as never having been capable of a mistake in his accounts.

And now let us briefly notice the naïveté with which Rodbertus would suppress industrial and commercial crises by means of his utopia. When the production of commodities has reached the limits of the world market it is by a cataclysm of this market, by a commercial crisis, that equilibrium is established between the isolated producers, producing each according to his individual calculation, and the market for which they produce, and of the demand of which, both as to quantity and quality, they are ignorant. If competition is to be prevented from making known to the isolated producers the state of the market by the rise or fall of prices, they would be blinded indeed. To direct the production of commodities in such fashion that the producers could not know the state of the market for which they produce—it is to provide for crises in such a fashion as to raise the envy of Doctor Eisenbart for Rodbertus.

We can understand now why Rodbertus determined the value of commodities by labor, and further admitted different degrees of intensity of labor. If he had enquired why and how labor created value and, in consequence, determined and measured it, he would have arrived at socially necessary labor, necessary for the isolated product, as well in relation to other products of the same kind, as well as in relation to the total quantity socially required. He would have been met with the question: