Note 910 — Chapter II · : STATE SOCIALISM

Occasionally Rodbertus admits for the sake of hypothesis or demonstration that prices do coincide with the labour cost; but his essential theory has no need of any such hypothesis, and it really plays quite an auxiliary or subordinate rôle. It is in the course of his exposition of the theory concerning the distribution of unearned income between landed proprietors and capitalists (quite an erroneous theory, by the way) that he is driven to admit that “the exchange value of each completed product, as well as of each portion of the product, is equal to its labour value.” (Third Sozial Brief, Schriften, vol. ii, p. 101.)