Letter to Karl Kautsky, September 20, 1884

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To Kautsky in Zurich

London, September 20, 1884

Dear Kautsky,

Herewith I am returning the manuscripts registered.

As far as economics is concerned your article on Rodbertus is very good. What I object to again is apodictic assertions in fields where you do not feel yourself sure and where you have exposed your weak spots to Schramm who has been skilled enough to nail them.

This refers particularly to the ‘abstraction’ which you have certainly run down much too much in general. In this case the difference is as follows:

Marx summarises the actual content common to things and relations and reduces it to its general logical expression. His abstraction therefore only reflects, in rational form, the content already existing in the things.

Rodbertus on the contrary invents a more or less imperfect logical expression and measures things by this conception to which the things must conform. He is seeking a true, eternal content of things and of social relations whose content however is essentially transient. Hence true capital. This is not present-day capital, which is only an imperfect manifestation of the concept. Instead of deducing the concept capital from the present, the only really existing capital, he has recourse to isolated man in order to arrive from present-day capital at true capital and asks what could function as capital in the productive process of such a man. Of course, simple means of production. Thus true capital is lumped together unceremoniously with the means of production, which depending on circumstances may or may not be capital. Thereby all bad properties, that is, all real properties of capital are eliminated from capital. Now he can demand that real capital should conform to this concept, that is, it should function only as simple social means of production, should discard everything that makes it capital and still remain capital and even just on that account become true capital.

You do the same kind of thing in the case of value. Present value is that of the production of commodities, but with the suppression of the production of commodities, value ‘changes’ or rather, value as such remains and merely changes its form. But in fact economic value is a category that appertains to the production of commodities, disappearing with it (cf. Dühring, pp. 252-62), just as it did not exist before it. The relation of labour to product prior to and after production of commodities no longer expresses itself in the form of value.

Fortunately Schramm is also a bit shaky in the matter of philosophy, and lays himself open to attack, as you have perfectly well apprehended and demonstrated.

Further:

1) Schramm recognises material interests that do not derive — either directly or indirectly — from the mode of production. On this, cf. Marx, A Contribution to the Critique, preface, where the matter is presented concisely and cogently in 20 lines.

2) Long before Rodbertus, the English and French Utopians had criticised existing society just as well as, if not better than, he, as had the post-Ricardian school of socialist economists on the basis of Ricardo’s theory of value; Marx cites some of these in the Poverty, pp. 49 and 50.

3) Marx’s Robinson is the genuine, original Robinson of Daniel Defoe, from which secondary features are also taken — the debris rescued from the shipwreck, etc. Later, he also had his own Friday, and was a shipwrecked merchant, who, if I am not mistaken, traded in slaves at one time. In a word, a true “bourgeois.”

4) To talk of the Marxian school of history was certainly most premature. I should curtail that part of your reply and refer primarily to Marx himself,— the above-mentioned passage from A Contribution to the Critique, and also Capital itself, in particular primitive accumulation, in which Schramm can find out for himself about the chicken and the egg.

In other respects it’s really fortunate that all the bourgeois elements should now be rallying to Rodbertus. We could ask for nothing better.

You will have got your Poverty ms.118 As will Ede my letter of last Sunday containing the contribution to the election fund.

Tussy asks that in future the Sozialdemokrat, etc., be sent to her at the following address:

Mrs Aveling

55 Great Russell Street, London, W. C.

Your

F. E.

I return Bebel’s letter herewith.

So we can expect you here in January or February.

To-Day has simply become a ‘symposium’, i. e. a review in which anybody can write for or against socialism. In the next number there’s to be a critique of Capital! The idea was that I should answer this anonymous piece but I politely refused. Dr Drysdale has also written for the paper, invoking you. There’s a reply from Burrows asking about you. I attended to this, but somewhat cautiously, not knowing whether Drysdale mightn’t have your book.