ture £110. Neither the one nor the other is to be expected of private undertakers, at least as a rule; nor do they deserve the slightest reproach on that account, and, least of all, the reproach of injustice, exploitation, or robbery.
There is only one personage from whom the labourers could expect such a treatment—the State. For on the one hand, the state, as a permanently existing entity, is not bound to pay as much regard to the difference of time in the outgoing and replacing of goods as the short-lived individual. And on the other hand, the state, whose end is the welfare of the whole, can, if it is a question of the welfare of a great number of the members, quit the strict standpoint of service and counter-service, and, instead of bargaining, may give. So then it certainly is conceivable that the state—but certainly only the state—assuming the function of a gigantic undertaker of production, might offer to the labourers as wage the full future value of their future product at once, that is, immediately after the accomplishment of their labour.
Whether the state ought to do this,—by which, in the view of Socialism, the social question would be practically solved,—is a question of propriety which I have no intention of entering on at this moment. But this must be repeated with all emphasis: if the socialist state pays down at once, as wages to the labourer, the whole future value of his product, it is not a fulfilment of the fundamental law that the labourer should receive the value of his product as wages, but a departure from it on social and political grounds. And such a proceeding would not be the bringing back of a state of things that was in itself natural, or in accordance with the pure idea of justice,—a state of things only temporarily disturbed by the exploiting greed of the capitalists. It would be an artificial interference, with the intention of making something possible which, in the natural course of things, was not possible, and of making it possible by means of a disguised continuous gift from the magnanimous commonwealth state to its poorer members.
And now a brief practical application. It is easy to recognise that the method of payment which I have just now described in our illustration is that which actually does obtain in our economic world. In it the full final value of the product of labour is not divided as wages, but only a smaller sum; this smaller sum, however, being divided at an earlier period of time. Now, so long as the total sum of the wages spread over the course of the production is not less than the final value of the finished product by more than is necessary to make up the difference in the valuation of present as compared with future goods—in other words, so long as the sum of the wages does not differ from the final value of the product by more than the amount of the interest customary in the country—no curtailment is made on the claims that the workers have on the whole value of their product. They receive their whole product according to its valuation at the point of time in which they receive their wages. Only in so far as the total wages differ from the final value of the product by more than the amount of interest customary in the country, can there be, under the circumstances, any real exploitation of the labourers.*45
To return to Rodbertus. The second, and most distinct blunder of which I have accused him in the foregoing, is that he interprets the proposition I have conceded (the labourer is to receive the whole value of his product) in an unwarrantable and illogical manner, as if it meant that the labourer is to receive now the whole value which his completed product will have at some future time.
If we inquire how it was that Rodbertus fell into this mistake, we shall find that the cause of it was another mistake, this being the third important error in the Exploitation theory. It is that he starts with the assumption that the value of goods is regulated solely by the amount of labour which their production has cost. If this were correct, then the first product, in w