'Accordingly, we must abstract from the reasons which cause the division of rent in general into rent proper and capital rent, to find the basic principle underlying the division of rent (surplus value) in general, the principle underlying _the division of the labour product into wage and rent_.'[260] And, in the third _Letter_: 'Ground rent, capital profit and the wage of labour are, let me repeat, revenue. By this means landlords, capitalists and workers must live, must satisfy, that is to say, their immediate human necessities. They must therefore draw their income in the form of goods suitable for this purpose.'[261] The misrepresentation of capitalist economy has never been formulated more crudely, and there is no doubt that Rodbertus claims the palm of 'priority'--not so much over Marx as over all popular economists--with full justification. To leave the reader in no doubt about the utter muddle he has made, he goes on, in the same letter, to rank capitalist surplus value as an economic category on the same level as the revenue of the ancient slave-owner: 'The first state (that of slavery) goes with the most primitive natural economy: that portion of the labour product which is withheld from the income of workers or slaves and forms the master's or owner's property, will undividedly accrue to the one man who owns the land, the capital, the worker and the labour product; there is not even a distinction of thought between rent and capital profits.--The second state entails the most complicated money economy: that portion of the labour product, withheld from the income of the now emancipated workers, and accruing to the respective owners of land, and capital, will be further divided among the owners of the raw material and the manufactured product respectively; the one rent of the former state will be split up into ground rent and capital profits, and will have to be differentiated accordingly.'[262] Rodbertus regards the splitting-up of the surplus value 'withheld' from the workers' 'income' as the most striking difference between exploitation by slavery and modern capitalist exploitation. It is not the specific historical form of sharing out newly created value among labour and capital, but the distribution of the surplus value among the various people it benefits, which, irrelevant to the productive process, is yet the decisive fact in the capitalist mode of production. In all other respects, capitalist surplus value remains just the same as the old 'single rent' of the slave-owner: a private fund for the exploiter's own consumption! Yet Rodbertus again contradicts himself in other places, remembering all of a sudden the constant capital and the necessity for its renewal in the reproductive process. Thus, instead of bisecting the aggregate product into _v_ and _s_, he posits a triple division: _c_, _v_, and _s_. In his third _Letter on Social Problems_ he argues on the forms of reproduction in a slave-economy: