The Socialism of to-day

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 835096955

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-28834

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Laveleye, Émile de

Title:: The Socialism of to-day

Place of publication:: London

Publisher:: Field & Tuer

Year of publication:: 1884

Scope:: 1 Online-Ressource (XLIV, 331 S.)

Collection:: Economics Books

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RO DB ER TUS-J A GETZOW. 15 which Marx and Lassalle have since unfolded, and which, through them, have reverberated throughout the world. This writer is Rodbertus-Jagetzow. Minister of Agriculture in Prussia in 1848, who immediately after that epoch retired to his estates and occupied himself with farming and with historical and economical researches. He published no large theoretical treatises, but only articles in the Reviews and Journals. His system is expounded in letters addressed to his friend. Von Kirchmann.* The famous agitator, Lassalle, was in regular correspondence with Rodbertus to the end of his life, and Marx borrowed from him the foundation of his theories. This writer’s small and too little known volume is certainly one of the most original works that Germany has produced in the matter of Political Economy, although the basis of his deductions is, in my opinion, entirely erroneous. Rodbertus was not, it is true, a Socialist, but, like Ricardo, he prepared the scientific arsenal from which Socialism has obtained its weapons. We cannot give here a complete analysis of the ideas of Rodbertus, but can only indicate their leading points. As he himself rightly says, his system is only the rigorous application of the principle laid down by Adam Smith, and still more rigorously formulated by Ricardo, that all wealth ought to be considered economically as the product of labour, and as costing labour alone. Poverty and commercial crises, those two great obstacles to the regular progress of well-being and civilization, have, according to him, only one cause, which is this : As long as the exchange of commodities and the division of produce remain subject to laws of historical origin, and not to those of reason, so long will the wages of the working classes form a relatively smaller part of the national produce in pro portion as the productivity of labour increases. Rodbertus arrived at this conclusion by the study of the economic influences which regulate the rate of wages and of rent. The working man, he says, brings on the market a perishable * These letters were collected and published in 1875 under the title, Zur Beleuchtung der socialen Frage. Rudolf Meyer has also recently ( 1882) brought out at Berlin (A. Klein, publisher) some letters and fragments of Rodbertus that are worth reading.

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