Kozak (‘Das Kapital’ von Rodbertus, Berlin, 1884, Introduction, p. xv). Finally, in the Briefe und social politische Aufsätze von Dr Rodbertus-Jagetzow published by R. Meyer in 1881, Rodbertus says straight out, ‘Today I find myself robbed by Schäffle‡ and Marx, without my name being mentioned’ (Letter no. 60, p. 134). In a further passage Rodbertus’s claim assumes more specific form: ‘I showed in the third of my Social Letters* how the capitalist’s surplus-value is derived, essentially the same way as Marx, only clearer and more briefly’ (Letter no. 48, p. 111).

Marx never came across these accusations of plagiarism. In his copy of the Emancipationskampf the only pages cut were those of the part relating to the International, until I myself cut the remainder after his death. He never saw the Tubingen Zeitschrift. The Briefe, etc. to R. Meyer remained equally unknown to him, and I came to know of the passage about the ‘robbery’ only in 1884, through the good offices of Herr Dr Meyer himself. But Marx was familiar with letter no. 48; Herr Meyer had been kind enough to send the original to Marx’s youngest daughter. After some furtive gossip that the secret sources of his critique were to be found in Rodbertus had reached his ears, Marx showed me the note in question. Here he finally had authentic information as to what Rodbertus himself claimed. If this was all Rodbertus was saying, then Marx was not worried; and if Rodbertus held his own presentation to be briefer and clearer, Marx could also allow him this indulgence. Indeed, Marx believed that the whole matter started and finished with this letter of Rodbertus.

Marx was particularly inclined to let the matter lie because, as I know for a fact, he had been quite unaware of Rodbertus’s literary activity up till around 1859, by which time his own Critique of Political Economy was finished not only in outline, but even in the most important details. Marx began his economic studies in Paris in 1843 with the great English and French writers; of the Germans, he was familiar only with Rau and List,† and that was enough. Neither Marx nor I had any word of Rodbertus’s existence until 1848, when we had to criticize his speeches as a Berlin deputy, and his actions as a minister, in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. We were so ignorant that we had to ask the Rhineland deputies who this Rodbertus was, who had suddenly become a minister. But that Marx already knew very well, even without Rodbertus’s help, ‘how the capitalist’s surplus-value is derived’, is shown by The Poverty of Philosophy, 1847, and by his lectures on Wage-Labour and Capital, delivered in Brussels in 1847 and published in 1849 in the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, nos. 264-269. It was only around 1859, via Lassalle,* that Marx discovered there was also an economist Rodbertus, and he then found the latter’s Third Social Letter in the British Museum.

These are the facts of the case. What then about the material of which Marx is supposed to have ‘robbed’ Rodbertus?

‘I showed in the third of my Social Letters how the capitalist’s surplus-value is derived, essentially the same way as Marx, only clearer and more briefly.’

This then is the decisive point, the theory of surplus-value, and it is hard to say what else there is in Marx that Rodbertus could have claimed as his property. Rodbertus here declares that he was the true founder of the theory of surplus-value, and that Marx ‘robbed’ him of it.

Now what does the Third Social Letter tell us as to the origin of surplus-value? Simply that ‘rent’ (which is how he lumps together ground-rent and profit) does not arise as an ‘addition’ to the value of a commodity, but rather ‘as a result of a deduction of value suffered by wages, in other words because wages only amount to a part of the value of the product’, and if labour is sufficiently productive, ‘they do not need to be equal to the natural exchange-value of the product, so that some of this still remains over for capital replacement (!) and rent’. We are not told what ‘natural exchange-value of the product’ it is which does not leave anything over for ‘capital replacement’, i.e. for the replacement of raw material and the wear and tear of tools.

Fortunately we are able to confirm the impression Rodbertus’s epoch-making discovery made on Marx.