ABSTRACT
The second theoretical polemics about the problem of accumulation
was also started by current events. If the first English crisis and its
attendant misery of the working class had stimulated Sismondi’s
opposition against the classical school, it was the revolutionary
working-class movement arisen since which, almost twenty-five years
later, provided the incentive for Rodbertus’ critique of capitalist pro-
duction. The risings of the Lyons silk weavers and the Chartist move-
ment in England were vastly different from the shadowy spectres raised
by the first crisis, and the ears of the bourgeoisie were made to ring
with their criticism of the most wonderful of all forms of society. The
first socio-economic work of Rodbertus, probably written for the
Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung in the late thirties but not published by that
paper, bears the significant title, The Demands of the Working Classes,
and
begins as follows:
‘What do the working classes want? Will the others be able to keep it
from them? Will what they want be the grave of modern civilisation?
Thoughtful people have long realised that a time must come when
history would put this question with great urgency. Now, the man
