Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/31

 How is the production of isolated producers accommodated to the total social demand? and all his utopia would have become impossible. This time, indeed, he has preferred to abstract, he has made an abstraction of the problem to be solved.

At last we come to the point where Rodbertus offers us something new: the point which distinguishes him from all his numerous comrades of the organisation of exchange by labor-notes. They all acclaim this method of exchange with the object of destroying the exploitation of wage-labor by capital. Each producer must obtain the total labor-value of his product. They are unanimous about this from Gray to Proudhon. Not at all, says Rodbertus, on the contrary. Wage-labor and its exploitation will still exist.

In the first place there is no social state possible in which the laborer could receive for his own consumption the total value of his product. The funds produced must support a number of functions economically unproductive but necessary; and they must consequently maintain the people concerned with these functions. That is true only as regards the present division of labor. In regard to a society where productive labor would be obligatory, a society which is certainly possible, the statement falls to the ground. There still remains the necessity for an accumulated social reserve fund, and then the laborers, that is to say all, would remain in possession and in enjoyment of the total product, but each isolated worker would not enjoy the integral product of his own labor. The support of functions, economically unproductive, by the product of labor has not been neglected by the other labor-note utopians. But they leave the workers to impose this obligation upon themselves, following in this respect the customary democratic method, while Rod-