v. Kirchmann and Rodbertus both started, were bound to start, from the fact of crises. Here the problem of enlarged reproduction of aggregate capital, the problem of accumulation, was completely identified with the problem of crises and side-tracked in an attempt to find a remedy for the crises, although the historical experience of fifty years had shown all too clearly that crises, as witnessed by their periodical recurrence, are a necessary phase in capitalist reproduction. One side now sees the remedy in the complete consumption of the surplus value by the capitalist, that is to say in refraining from accumulation, the other in stabilisation of the rate of surplus value by legislative measures which comes to the same thing, i.e. renouncing accumulation altogether. This special fad of Rodbertus' sprang from his fervent and explicit belief in an unlimited capitalist expansion of the productive forces and of wealth, without accumulation of capital. At a time when capitalist production was developed to a degree which was soon to enable Marx to make his fundamental analysis, the last attempt of bourgeois economics to cope with the problem of reproduction degenerated into absurd and puerile Utopianism. FOOTNOTES: [257] _Schriften_, vol. iii, p. 176. [258] Op. cit., vol. i, pp. 53, 57. [259] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 206. [260] Ibid., vol. i, p. 19. [261] Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 110. [262] Ibid., p. 144. [263] _Schriften_, vol. ii, p. 146. [264] Ibid., p. 155. [265] Ibid., p. 223. [266] _Schriften_, vol. ii, p. 226. [267] Ibid., p. 156. [268] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 40. [269] Op. cit., vol. ii, p. 25. [270] _Schriften_, vol. i, p. 250. [271] Ibid., p. 295. Rodbertus reiterates during a lifetime the ideas he had evolved as early as 1842 in his _Towards the Understanding of Our Politico-Economic Conditions_. 'Under present conditions, we have, however, gone so far as to consider not only the wage of labour part of the costs of the goods, but also rents and capital profits. We must therefore refute this opinion in detail. It has a twofold foundation: (_a_) a wrong conception of capital which counts the wage of labour as part of the capital just like materials and tools, while it is on the same level as rent and profit; (_b_) a confusion of the costs of the commodity and the advances of the entrepreneur or the costs of the enterprise' (_Towards the Understanding of Our Politico-Economic Conditions_, Neubrandenburg & Friedland, G. Barnovitz, 1842, p. 14).