s material body, this medicine, is a product of nothing but the hand labour employed in it?"
Of course I do not mean to put forward the rate of interest as the cause of the smaller valuation of future goods. I know quite well that interest and rate of interest can only be a result of this primary phenomenon. I am not here explaining but only depicting facts.
The appropriateness of these figures, which seem strange at the first glance, will be seen immediately.
More exact criticism on this head I postpone till my second volume. To protect myself against misunderstandings, however, and particularly against the imputation of considering undertaking profit to be a "profit of plunder" when it exceeds the usual rate of interest, I may add a short note.
In the total difference, between value of product and wages expended, which falls to the undertaker, there may possibly be four constituents, essentially different from each other.
2. A payment for the undertaker's own labour. This of course is equally unobjectionable, and in certain circumstances, as in the using of a new invention of the undertaker, may be very highly assessed without any injustice being done to the labourer.
3. The compensation referred to in the text, viz. the compensation for difference of time between the wage payment and the realising of the final product, this being afforded by the customary interest.
4. The undertaker may possibly get an additional profit by taking advantage of the necessitous condition of the labourers to usuriously force down their wages.
Of these four constituents only the latter involves any violation of the principle that the labourer should receive the whole value of his product.
E.g., Soziale Frage, pp. 44, 107.
Soziale Frage, pp. 113, 147. Erklärung und Abhilfe, i. p. 123. In the latter Rodbertus says: "If the value of agricultural and manufacturing product is regulated by the labour incorporated in it, as always happens on the whole, even where commerce is free," etc.
Ibid. p. iii. n.
The above was written before the publication of Rodbertus's posthumous work, Capital, in 1884. In it Rodbertus takes an exceedingly strange position towards our question,—a position which calls rather for a strengthening than a modification of the above criticism. He strongly emphasises the point that the law of labour value is not an exact law, but simply a law that determines the point towards which value will gravitate (p. 6, etc.) He even owns in as many words that, on account of the undertaker's claim on profit, a constant divergence takes place between the actual value of the goods and their value as measured by labour (p. 11, etc.) Only he makes the extent of this concession much too trifling when he assumes that the deviation obtains only in the relations of the different stages of production of one and the same good; and that the deviation does not obtain in the case of all the stages of production as a whole. That is, if the making of a good is divided into several sections of production, of which each section develops into a separate trade, according to Rodbertus the value of the separate product which is made in each individual section cannot remain in exact correspondence with the quantity of labour expended on it; because the undertakers of the later stages of production have to make a greater outlay for material, and therefore a greater expenditure of capital, and on that account have to calculate on a higher profit, which higher profit can only be provided by a relatively higher value of the product in question.
However correct this is, it is clear that it does not go far enough. The divergence of the actual value of goods from the quantity of labour expended does not take place only between the fore-products of one good in relation to each other, in such a way that, in the course of the various stages of production, it cancels itself again through reciprocal compensation, and so the final result of all the stages of production, the goods ready for consumption, obeys the law of labour-value. On the contrary, the amount and the dura