ct of labourer and employer has taken the place of slavery, the contract is only formally and not actually free, and Hunger makes a good substitute for the whip. What was formerly called food is now called wage."*26
Thus, then, all rent is an exploitation,*27 or, as Rodbertus sometimes calls it still more forcibly, a robbery of the product of other people's labour.*28 This character applies to all kinds of rent equally; to land-rent as well as to profit on capital, and to the emoluments of hire and loan interest derived from them. Hire and interest are as legitimate in connection with the undertakers as they are illegitimate in connection with the labourers, at whose cost, in the last resort, they are paid.*29
The amount of rent increases with the productivity of labour; for under the system of free competition the labourer receives, universally and constantly, only the amount necessary for his maintenance—that is, a definite quantum of the product. Thus the greater the productivity of labour the less will be the proportion of the total value of the product claimed by this quantum, and the greater will be the proportion of the product and of the value remaining over to the proprietor as his share, as rent.*30
Although, according to what has been already said, all rent forms a homogeneous mass having one common origin in practical economic life, it is divided into two branches, land-rent and profit on capital. Rodbertus then explains the reason and the laws of this division in a most peculiar way. He starts from the theoretical assumption, which he carries through all his investigation, that the exchange value of all products is equal to their labour-costs; in other words, that all products exchange with each other in proportion to the labour they have cost.*31 Rodbertus indeed is aware that this assumption does not exactly correspond with reality. Still he believes that the deviations amount to nothing more than that "the actual exchange value falls sometimes on the one side, sometimes on the other," in which cases there is at least always a point towards which they gravitate, "that point being the natural as well as the just exchange value."*32 He entirely rejects the idea that goods normally exchange with each other according to any other proportion than that of the labour incorporated in them; that deviations from this proportion may be the result, not merely of accidental and momentary fluctuations of the market, but of a fixed law drawing the value in another direction.*33 At this stage I merely draw attention to the circumstance, and will show its importance later on.
The total production of goods may, according to Rodbertus, be divided into two branches—raw production, which with the assistance of land obtains raw products, and manufacture which works up the raw products. Before division of labour was introduced the obtaining and working up of raw products were performed in immediate succession by one undertaker, who then received without division the whole resulting rent. In this stage of economic development there was no separation of rent into land-rent and profit on capital. But, since the introduction of the division of labour, the undertaker of the raw production and the undertaker of the manufacture which follows it are distinct persons. The preliminary question is, In what proportion will the rent that results from the total production now be divided among the producers of the raw material on the one hand and the manufacturers on the other?
The answer to this question follows from the character of rent. Rent is a proportion of and deduction from the value of the product. The amount of rent that can be obtained in any branch of production is regulated by the value of the product created in this branch of production. As, however, the amount of the value of the product is regulated here also by the amount of the labour spent on it, the total rent will be divided between raw production and manufacture, according to the expenditure of labour in each of these branches. To illustrate this by a concrete example.*3