London, 26 June 1884 

Dear Kautsky, 

The anti-Rodbertus ms.?°* goes back tomorrow by registered mail. 
I found little that called for comment and have made a few pencilled 
notes. Apart from these I would add the following: 

1) Roman Law is the consummation of the law of simple, i.e. of 
precapitalist, commodity production, though the latter also embodies 
much of the legal system of the capitalist period. Exactly, that is, 
what our burghers needed at the time of their rise and, in accordance 
with local common law, did not get. 

On p. 10 there are several things I object to: 1. Surplus value is 

the exception only in the case of production by slaves and serfs. It 
ought to read surplus product, most of which is directly consumed but 
not valorised. 

2) As regards the means of production, the matter is not quite as 
you say. In all societies based on a division of labour that has evolved 
naturally, the product, and hence also to some extent the means of 
production, dominates the producer— on occasion at any rate —as 
did, in the Middle Ages, the soil the peasant who was simply an ap- 
purtenance of the land and the tool the guild handicraftsman. Divi- 
sion of labour is the direct domination of the instruments of labour 
over the worker, although not in the capitalist sense. 

Much the same applies to the concluding bit on the means of pro- 
duction. 

1) You should not separate agriculture any more than technology 
from political economy, as you do on pp. 21 and 22. Rotation of 
crops, artificial fertilisers, the steam engine, the power loom, cannot 
be separated from capitalist production any more than the tools of 
the savage and the barbarian from his production. The tools of the 
savage condition his society just as much as do more modern ones ca- 
pitalist society. What your view boils down to is that, while produc- 
tion does indeed determine the social institution today, it did not do so 
before capitalist production existed, because tools had not as yet been 
guilty of original sin. 

The moment you say means of production, you say society and 
a society determined by, amongst other things, those means of produc- 
tion. Means of production as such, extraneous to society and without 
influence over it, exist no more than does capital as such. 

But how the means of production, which, at earlier periods, includ- 
ing that of simple commodity production, exercised only a very mild 
domination compared with now, came to exercise their present de- 
spotic domination, is something that calls for proof and yours strikes 
me as inadequate, since it fails to mention one pole, namely the crea- 
tion of a class which no longer had any means of production of its 
own, or, therefore, any means of subsistence, and hence was compel- 
led to sell itself piecemeal. 

In the case of Rodbertus’ positive proposals, emphasis ought to be 
laid on his Proudhonism — after all he proclaimed himself Proud- 
hon 1, the forerunner of the French Proudhon. Constituted value, in- 
vented by Rodbertus as early as 1842,7°° is to be established. His 
proposals here are lamentably retrograde by comparison with Bray 

and with Proudhon’s exchange bank. The worker is to get only '/, of 
the product, but that is assured! We can discuss this later. 

Repose (physical) is suiting me splendidly; I get better every day 
and this time the cure will be complete. The dictation of the 2nd book 
of Capital is going ahead splendidly. We* have already reached 
Part II -—but there are big gaps. The editing is only provisional, of 
course, but that too will get done. I can see my way ahead, cela suffit.” 

Ede’s letter received with thanks. You will have to be patient with 
my letter-writing; I mustn’t get run down again and a frightful 
amount of work and correspondence is piling up. 

My regards to you both, 

Your 

Wage Labour and Capital will go off as soon as the comparison is 
done, perhaps tomorrow.*