Lederer’s 1906 essay is a compact internal critique of Marx rather than a general polemic. He reads Capital by isolating four connected pressure points: the law of value, the role of competition, the formation of a uniform profit rate, and the relation between industrial and merchant capital. His opening frames the project as a test of Marx’s own foundations.
Im Folgenden soll versucht werden, einige Stellen des Marxschen Systems, die zugleich zu den Grundlagen desselben gehören, kritisch zu beleuchten.
English translation: In what follows, an attempt shall be made to examine critically several passages of the Marxian system that at the same time belong to its foundations.
The central claim is that Marx’s labor theory cannot remain a pure theory of labor embodied in commodities once social need, proportional production, and market realization are admitted. Lederer emphasizes passages in Marx where labor counts as value-forming only when allocated in the right social quantity. Overproduction in one branch shows that labor-time alone cannot determine value: goods must also correspond to effective demand and usable social wants.
Nicht die Arbeit an sich ist es also, welche Werte schafft, sondern nur die in bestimmter Proportion und Quantität auf die gesellschaftlichen Bedürfnisse verwendete Arbeit.
English translation: It is thus not labor as such that creates values, but only labor applied in a definite proportion and quantity to the needs of society.
From this point Lederer moves toward marginal-utility reasoning. Marx’s own discussion of “social need,” he argues, already makes value depend on the relation between quantities of goods and wants, not simply on production conditions. But Lederer also resists treating social need as an abstract collective fact. It is composed of individual needs mediated by income, distribution, monopoly, and purchasing power.
Das gesellschaftliche Bedürfnis ist also ein komplexer Tatbestand, der noch einer weiteren Analyse bedarf.
English translation: Social need is thus a complex state of affairs which stands in need of further analysis.
This leads into the critique of competition. Marx brackets competition analytically, yet Lederer argues that competition is precisely what must explain production prices, average profit, and the realization of surplus. Without a theory of demand and scarcity, competitive pressure would seem to drive prices toward costs and undermine the persistence of profit. Marginal utility supplies part of the missing limit, but Lederer insists that market form, monopoly, and necessity goods can transform price formation into a question of power.
The third section attacks Marx’s derivation of the general rate of profit. Lederer follows the Böhm-Bawerk line that Marx assumes capital mobility and equalization rather than demonstrating them. The analogies to shareholders or lenders do not prove an actual mechanism, and empirical markets display differentiated rates by branch, scale, risk, and turnover. Thus the theory of production prices rests on an unproved equalization premise.
Marx hat die allgemeine Profitrate angenommen, ohne sich näher darauf einzulassen, ihre Entstehungsweise darzulegen; ebenso führte er keinen Beweis aus der Erfahrung dafür.
English translation: Marx assumed the general rate of profit without going into detail about how it arises; nor did he furnish any empirical proof for it.
The final section concerns merchant capital. Lederer argues that, once average profit and turnover are accepted, commercial capital affects prices in ways analogous to industrial capital. Marx’s sharp distinction depends on the axiom that only industrially employed labor is productive, not on observable price relations. The article’s significance lies in combining an internal Marx critique with Austrian value theory and an institutional sensitivity to monopoly and distribution. Lederer does not deny exploitation as a historical possibility; he denies that it can be deduced from labor as the sole source of value.
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