Engels, then, sets out this brief critique of Rodbertus. He begins with Rodbertus' acceptance of the superficial appearance of economic categories, such as labour, capital and value etc. Rodbertus confuses value with exchange-value, thereby, eliminating the historical development of the category value from the individual value of the product, through to its manifestation as the social/market value of the commodity, which is, itself, the necessary basis for the emergence of exchange-value. It also, similarly, eliminates the historical development of the product into the commodity.
For Rodbertus, both the commodity and exchange-value spring into existence, ready formed, like Minerva from the head of Zeus, and, as well as confusing value with exchange-value, he also confuses exchange-value with use value.
“After thirty pages in which he mixes up use value and exchange value in higgledy-piggledy fashion with that power of abstract thought so infinitely admired by Herr Adolf Wagner, he arrives at the conclusion that there is no real measure of value and that one has to make do with a substitute measure. Labour could serve as such but only if products of an equal quantity of labour were always exchanged against products of an equal quantity of labour whether this “is already the case of itself, or whether precautionary measures are adopted” to ensure that it is. Consequently value and labour remain without any sort of material connection in spite of the fact that the whole first chapter is taken up to expound to us that commodities “cost labour” and nothing but labour, and why this is so.” (p 16)
He does the same with labour, thereby, not only failing to distinguish between wage-labour, serf-labour, or slave-labour, but also simple as against complex labour, abstract as against concrete labour, and so on. There is no concept of whether the labour is socially necessary labour,
“whether it is expended under normal average social conditions or not. Whether the producers take ten days, or only one, to make products which could be made in one day; whether they employ the best or the worst tools; whether they expend their labour time in the production of socially necessary articles and in the socially required quantity, or whether they make quite undesired articles or desired articles in quantities above or below demand – about all this there is not a word: labour is labour, the product of equal labour must be exchanged against the product of equal labour.” (p 16-17)
And, as Engels says, and as I described earlier, he must do this, because its only on this basis that labour expended is identical, and socially necessary that the utopia of a small commodity producing society, and use of labour money tokens can be justified.
“The other utopians of this tendency, from Gray to Proudhon, rack their brains to invent social institutions which would achieve this aim. They attempt at least to solve the economic question in an economic way through the action of the owners themselves who exchange the commodities. For Rodbertus it is much easier. As a good Prussian he appeals to the state: a decree of the state authority orders the reform.” (p 17)
That is the same approach as the state socialists, today, who call upon the capitalist state to nationalise this or that enterprise/industry, and to print money tokens to enable it to continue producing use values that are not use values, and to pay wages for labour that was not socially necessary, or, in the case of lockdowns, UBI and so on, labour that does not even occur!
“In this way then, value is happily “constituted", but by no means the priority in this constitution as claimed by Rodbertus. On the contrary, Gray as well as Bray – among many others – before Rodbertus, at length and frequently ad nauseam, repeated this idea, viz. the pious desire for measures by means of which products would always and under all circumstances be exchanged only at their labour value.” (p 17)
A version of this utopian theory has been produced by Paul Cockshott, and Alan Cottrill, which I have previously examined.
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