'It makes no difference from this general and national point of view that greater or smaller parts of the aggregate national product are now owned in all the various phases of production by private persons who must not be numbered among the producers proper, and that the latter always manufacture this national aggregate product as servants--without sharing in the ownership of their own product--of these few owners.' Certain peculiarities of the relations within the society as a whole no doubt result from this, namely (1) the institution of 'exchange' as an intermediary, and (2) the inequality in the distribution of the product. 'Yet all these consequences do not affect the movements of national production and the shaping of the national product which are always the same, now as ever (under the rule of communism), no more than they alter in any respect, as far as the _national point of view_ is concerned, the contrast between capital and income so far established.' Sismondi had laboured in the sweat of his brow, as had Smith and many others, to disentangle the concepts of capital and income from the contradictions of capitalist production. Rodbertus has a simpler method and abstracts from the specific forms determined by capitalist production for society as a whole; he simply calls the means of production 'capital' and the article of consumption 'revenue' and leaves it at that. 'The essential influence of ownership in land and capital applies only to individuals having traffic with one another. If the nation is taken as a unit, the effects of such ownership upon the individuals completely disappear.'[273] We see that as soon as Rodbertus comes up against the real problem, the capitalist aggregate product and its movements, he exhibits the Utopian's characteristic obtuseness in respect of the historical peculiarities of production. Marx's comment on Proudhon, that 'speaking of society as a whole, he pretends that this society is no longer capitalist' therefore fits him like a glove. The case of Rodbertus again exemplifies how every economist before Marx had been at a loss when it came to harmonising the concrete aspects of the labour process with the perspective of capitalist production which regards everything in terms of value, to mediating between the forms of movement performed by individual capitals and the movement of social capital. Such efforts as a rule vacillate from one extreme to another: the shallow approach of Say and MacCulloch, recognising only the conceptions of individual capital, and the Utopian approach of Proudhon and Rodbertus who recognise only those of the process of labour. That is the context in which Marx's penetration appears in its true light. His diagram of simple reproduction illuminates the entire problem by gathering up all these perspectives in their harmony and their contradictions, and so resolves the hopeless obscurities of innumerable tomes into two rows of figures of striking simplicity.