Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE. Collectivist Socialism rests on economic doctrines propounded by Rodbertus and Marx. By designating these doctrines " new " (p. 43) I am not to be understood as attributing to them any other novelty than that of development and of application. They were mainly exaggerations of, or inferences from, doctrines of earlier economists; they were certainly not "new" economic truths. Neither Rodbertus nor Marx was successful in discovering such truths. They were both, however, learned, laborious, and able students of economic science; and, by their critical acumen, their dialectic vigour, and their ingenuity, they have, at least indirectly, greatly contributed to its progress. The views of the former on the distribution of wealth, and of the latter on the evolution of capitalist production, were of a kind admirably calculated to stimulate to fruitful economic investigation. I can here only touch briefly on the chief features of Marx's teaching as to labour. That teaching was drawn mainly from English economists—Locke, Adam Smith, Ricardo, Bray, Thompson, Hall, fec. Without Ricardo there would have been no Marx. The essential content of the Marxian economics is the Ricardian economics. Marx received Ricardo's exposition of economics as generally correct, narrowed still further what was already too narrow in it, exaggerated what was excessive, and made applications of it which Ricardo had not foreseen. Sismondi, the Saint-Simonians, and Proudhon were his precursors among French economists. His criticism of Capitalism owes, of course, a good deal to Fourier. TTis whole system presupposes the truth of the idea that there is a radical class distinction, an essential social antinomy within the present industrial regime, between bourgeoisie and proletariat, or peuple...