Engels notes not only did Rodbertus produce nothing new, but he accepted, uncritically, all of the categories of labour, capital, value and so on as external forms, “in which they were handed down to him by the economists. He thereby not only cuts himself off from all further development – in contrast to Marx who was the first to make something of these propositions so often repeated for the last sixty-four years – but, as will be shown, he opens for himself the road leading straight to utopia.” (p 13)
Logically, the idea that the whole product of labour belongs to the worker, leads to communism. That could be an historical collapse into primitive communism, in which living standards would likewise return to their primitive level. But, realistically, despite all of the presentation, in science fiction, no such return is possible. The same technological/material conditions that led to the dissolution of the primitive commune, the first time around, cannot be undone, and so make its resurrection impossible. Similarly, the kind of petty-bourgeois/peasant/small producer society, envisioned by Sismondi, Proudhon, Rodbertus, and the Narodniks, is also impossible, for the reasons Marx, Engels and Lenin set out.
As Lenin demonstrated, against the Narodniks, you cannot have peasant society without the other things that go with it, i.e. a feudal landowning class, and, as soon as such a society engages in commodity production, that involves competition, and winners and losers. The winners, again, become bourgeois, and the losers proletarians. So, the only alternative is communism based upon very large-scale production, and collective ownership and control by workers.
This conclusion is inevitable if all of the social product belongs to labour, because, then, there is nothing left for profit, rent, interest or taxes. The workers not only own and control the part of the total product required for their own reproduction (necessary product), but also the surplus product, which they can, now, utilise, as Marx describes in The Critique of the Gotha Programme, to raise their living standards, reduce their work day, invest in additional means of production, cover the costs of unproductive labour, and so on.
However, the theory used by the socialists to arrive at these conclusions was false, and the conclusions derived, not from science, but from morals, a feature of all petty-bourgeois socialism.
“According to the laws of bourgeois economics, the greatest part of the product does not belong to the workers who have produced it. If we now say: that is unjust, that ought not to be so, then that has nothing immediately to do with economics. We are merely saying that this economic fact is in contradiction to our sense of morality.” (p 13)
Marx kept to the simple fact that surplus value consists of unpaid labour.
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