Marx's general opinion of Proudhon, Engels says, was given in his Letter to J.B. Schweitzer, following Proudhon's death, and which appeared in the Berlin Sozial-Demokrat, Nos 16, 17 and 18, in 1865.
“For Germany, the present work has at this precise moment a significance which Marx himself never imagined. How could he have known that, in trouncing Proudhon, he was hitting Rodbertus, the idol of the careerists of today, who was unknown to him even by name at that time?” (p 9)
Rodbertus represented the ideas of the old German landlord class. He accused Marx of plagiarising his ideas, despite the fact, as Engels says, that Marx had not heard of him, at this point, and the ideas he was supposed to have plagiarised were already known to Marx from other sources, and, often, demonstrated, by Marx, to be wrong. Marx dealt with the errors of Rodbertus, at length in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter VIII and IX.
Rodbertus also claimed to have discovered the concept of “constituted value” before Proudhon, but he was certainly not its first discoverer. In any event, Engels says, he's, then, equally covered by Marx's criticism of that concept, set out in this work.
“Insofar as modern socialism, no matter of what tendency, starts out from bourgeois political economy, it almost without exception takes up the Ricardian theory of value. The two propositions which Ricardo proclaimed in 1817 right at the beginning of his Principles,
These two propositions had ever since 1821 been utilised in England for socialist conclusions, and in part with such pointedness and resolution that this literature, which had then almost been forgotten and was to a large extent only rediscovered by Marx, remained unsurpassed until the appearance of Capital.” (p 10)
So, whilst Rodbertus' socialist conclusions, in 1842, drawn from that were an advance, for Germany, it remained the case that this was only so for Germany, as against England, where these conclusions had been drawn a quarter of a century earlier.
Engels quotes Marx from this work, in which he sets out the egalitarian conclusions drawn from Ricardian theory by Hodgskin (1827), Thompson (1824), Edmonds (1828), and Bray (1839). In this work, Marx cites extensively from Bray, to illustrate that the ideas from Proudhon were most certainly not new, but also to show what was wrong with them.
Engels then sets out Marx's comments in A Contribution To The Critique of Political Economy, published, in Germany, in 1859, in which he deals with the objections of vulgar economy to Ricardo's principles. Those same objections are trotted out down to today, by bourgeois ideologists in opposition to the labour theory of value. The second objection they raised was that, if the value of commodities was determined by the labour required for that production, then wages would be equal to this value. Marx explains why this objection is wrong, because it confuses labour (value creating process) with labour-power (commodity), and, in his response, he also refers to The Poverty of Philosophy, in noting that it had been taken up by socialists.
“In this way at least English socialists turned Ricardo’s formula of exchange value against political economy." (p 12)
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