ver as rent, which, distributed over a business capital of £1000, shows interest at the usual rate of 5 per cent. On reaching this point the exchange value of shoes will require to remain fixed if the profit in the shoemaking trade is not to become abnormal again, in which case a repetition of the process of levelling down would ensue.
On the same analogy, if the rate of profit in the jeweller's trade be under the average, say 2½ per cent, it will be raised to 5 per cent in this way. The profit in jewellery being so small, its manufacture will be curtailed, the supply of jewellery thereby reduced and its exchange value raised, till such time as the additional product of ten labourers in the jewellery trade reaches an exchange value of £1500. There now remain to the undertaker, after deducting £500 for necessary wages, £1000 as rent, this being interest on the business capital of £20,000 at the usual rate of 5 per cent. Thus is reached the resting-point at which the exchange value of jewellery, as in the former example the exchange value of shoes, may remain steady.
Before going farther I shall, by looking at the matter from another side, make entirely clear the important point that the levelling of abnormal profits cannot take place without a steady alteration in the exchange value of the products concerned.
If the exchange value of the products were to remain unaltered, then an insufficient rate of profit could only be raised to the normal level if the difference were made up at the cost of the labourers' necessary wages. For example, if the product of ten labourers in the jewellery manufacture retained without alteration the value of £1000, corresponding to the amount of labour expended, then evidently a levelling up of the rate of profit to 5 per cent—that is, an increase in the amount of profit from £500 to £1000—is only conceivable if the wages which the ten labourers have hitherto received were to be wholly withdrawn, and the entire product handed over to the capitalist as profit. To say nothing of the fact that such a supposition contains in itself a simple impossibility, I need merely point out that it is equally opposed to experience and to Rodbertus's own theory. It is contrary to experience; for experience shows that the usual effect of a restriction of supply in any branch of production is not a depression of the wages of labour, but a raising of the prices of product. And again, experience does not bear witness that the wages of labour, in such trades as require a large investment of capital, stand essentially lower than in other trades—which would necessarily be the case if the demand for a higher profit had to be met from wages instead of from prices of product. And it is also contrary to Rodbertus's own theory. For that theory assumes that the labourers in the long run always receive the amount of the necessary costs of their maintenance as wages,—a law which would be sensibly violated by this kind of equalisation.
It is just as easy to show conversely that, if the value of the products remained unaltered, a limitation of profits could only take place by raising the wages of the labourers in the trades concerned above the normal scale, which again, as we have said, is contrary to experience and to Rodbertus's own theory.
I may venture then to claim that I have described the process of the equalisation of profits in accordance with facts, and in accordance with Rodbertus's own hypothesis, when I assume that the return of profits to their normal level is brought about by means of a steady alteration in the exchange value of the products concerned. But if the year's product of ten labourers in the shoemaking trade has an exchange value of £550, and the year's product of ten labourers in the jewellery trade has an exchange value of £1500,—and it must be so if the equalisation of profits assumed by Rodbertus always takes place,—what becomes of his assumption that products exchange according to the labour incorporated in them? And if, from the employment of the same amount of labour, there result in the one tra