blication 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 duration of the advance of capital definitively forces the value of all goods away from exact correspondence with their labour costs. To illustrate. Say that the production of a commodity requiring ninety days for its manufacture is divided into three stages of thirty days' labour in each. Rodbertus would say that the product of the first thirty days' labour might only attain the value of twenty-five days' labour, while the second thirty attained the value of thirty days', and the third thirty of thirty-five days' labour. But on the whole the final value of the product would be equal to ninety days' labour. But it is a matter of common experience that, in normal successive production, the value of such a commodity will increase during the three stages by a definite amount, say 30 + 31 + 32, and that the final product will be equal to, say, ninety-three days of labour; i.e. a value greater than the value of the labour incorporated in it by the amount of the customary interest.
Besides this, Rodbertus deserves the severest censure that, in spite of his own admission, he always persists in developing the law of the distribution of all goods in wages and rent under the theoretical hypothesis that all goods possess "normal value"; that is, a value that corresponds to their labour costs. He thinks he is justified in doing this because the "normal value, in regard to the derivation both of rent in general and of land-rent and capital-rent in particular, is the least captious; it alone does not quietly beg the question, and assume what was first to be explained by it, as every value does in which is included beforehand an element for rent."
Here Rodbertus is grievously mistaken. He begs the question quite as improperly as any of his opponents ever did; only in an opposite way. His opponents, by their assumptions, have begged the question of the existence of interest. Rodbertus has begged the question of its non-existence. In taking no notice of the constant divergence from "normal value" (which divergence gives natural inter