Twenty years after his ‘Poverty of Philosophy,’ Marx was asked to write an article on Proudhon at his death for Jean Baptista von Schweitzer’s ‘Social-Demokrat.’ This 1865 article stands as Marx’s mature, most complete telling of his personal and political relationship with Proudhon. Here it is reproduced from the appendix of the 1910 Charles H. Kerr edition of ‘Poverty of Philosophy”

‘On Proudhon’ (1865) by Karl Marx from The Poverty of Philosophy. Charles H. Kerr Publishers, Chicago. 1910.

Letter to J B Schweizer

London, January 24, 1865

Sir,

You ask me for a detailed criticism of the works of Proudhon. I regret that I have not the time to comply with your request Moreover, I have none of his writings at hand However, as proof of my goodwill I send you these few hasty notes.

I do not remember the first essays of Proudhon. His schoolboy work on “A Universal Language” shows with what recklessness he grappled with problems for the solution of which he lacked the most elementary knowledge.

His first work: “What is Property?” is very much his best It was an epoch-making book, if not from the novelty of what he said, at least by the freshness and boldness of his manner of putting everything. The French Socialists, with whose writings he was acquainted, had naturally not only criticised property from different points of view, but had, in utopian fashion, suppressed it in his book Proudhon is to Saint Simon and Fourier almost what Feuerbach is to Hegel. Compared with Hegel, Feuerbach is very poor. Nevertheless, after Hegel, he made an epoch, because he accentuated certain points, disagreeable for the Christian conscience and important for philosophic progress, but which had been left by Hegel in an obscure and mystic light.

The style of this writing of Proudhon is, if I may say so, bold and vigorous, and it is its style, in my opinion, which is its great merit. We see that even when he merely reproduces, he discovers that what he says is new to him, and that it serves him as something new.

The provoking audacity with which he lays hands on the economic sanctuary, the brilliant paradoxes by which he ridicules the dull bourgeois commonsense, his incisive criticism, his bitter irony, with here and there a profound and sincere sentiment of revolt against the established order of things, his revolutionary spirit—this it is which electrifies the readers of “What is Property” and made the book on its appearance a powerful revolutionary impulse In a rigorously scientific history of political economy, the work would scarcely be worthy of mention. But these sensational books play a part in the sciences as well as in literature. Take, for example, Malthus’s “Essay on Population.” The first edition was simply a sensational pamphlet, and a plagiarism from one end to the other into the bargain. Yet what an impression has this pasquinade produced on humanity?

If I had before me this book of Proudhon’s it would be easy for me to give some illustrations of his first style. In the chapters which he himself considers the best he imitates the contradictory method of Kant, the only German philosopher that he knew at that time, from translation, and he leaves a strong impression that for him, as for Kant, the solution of these contradictions is “beyond” the human understanding, that is to say, that his understanding is incapable of solving them.

But in spite of its alluring iconoclastism, there is to be found, even in this first work, this contradiction that Proudhon, on one hand, deals with society from the point of view of the petty peasant (later of the petty bourgeois) of France, and on the other he applies the standard which the Socialists have transmitted to him.

Beyond that the very title of the book indicates its insufficiency. The question was too baldly put for it to be answered correctly Graeco-Roman property was replaced by feudal property, and that by bourgeois property. History itself conveys the criticism of the condition of property in the past, the question with which Proudhon had to deal was as to the relations of modern bourgeois property. To the question what were these relations, one could only reply by a critical analysis of political economy, embracing the whole of the relations of property, not in their juridical expression as relations of will, but in their real form as relation of material production. As Proudhon subordinated the whole of these economic relations to the juridical notion of property, he could not go beyond the response which had been already given by Brissot before 1789 and in the same terms- “Property is Robbery.”¹

The conclusion to be drawn from all this is that the juridical notions of the bourgeoisie on robbery apply as well to its honest profits. On the other hand, as robbery, being a violation of property, presupposes property, Proudhon embroils himself in all kinds of confused and fantastic notions with regard to true bourgeois property.

During my stay in Pans, in 1844, I had personal relations with Proudhon I recall this circumstance, because up to a certain point I am responsible for his “sophistication,” a word which the English use for the adulteration of a commodity. In our long discussions— often lasting all through the night—I infected him with Hegelianism, to his great prejudice, since, not knowing German, he could not study the matter thoroughly. What I had begun, Karl Grun, after my expulsion from France, continued. But this professor of German philosophy had the further advantage over me of understanding nothing of what he taught.

A short time before the publication of his second important work, “Philosophic de la Misere,” &c, Proudhon informed me of it in a long and detailed letter, in which among other things he said “I await the blow of your critical rod.” And very soon this fell upon him (in my “Misere de la Philosophie”) in such a fashion as to forever shatter our friendship.

From the foregoing you can see that the “Philosophic de la Misere, ou Systeme des Contradictions Economiques,” ought, in short, to give the answer to the question “What is property?” As a matter of fact, Proudhon did not begin his economic studies until after the publication of this first book, he then discovered that in order to solve the question he had put, it was necessary to reply, not by invective, but by an analysis of modern political economy. At the same time he endeavored to establish the system of “economic categories” by means of dialectic. Hegelian contradiction had to replace the insoluble contradiction of Kant as a means of development.

For a criticism of these two large volumes I must refer you to my reply. I have there, among other things, shown how slightly Proudhon has penetrated the mystery of scientific dialectic, and how far, on the other hand, he shares the illusions of “speculative” philosophy. Instead of regarding the economic categories as the theoretical expressions of the historical relations of production, corresponding to a given degree of the development of material production, his imagination transforms them into “eternal ideas,” existing before any reality, and in this manner he arrives, in a round-about way, at the point from which he started, the point of view of bourgeois economy.²

Then I show how defective and rudimentary is his knowledge of political economy, of which nevertheless, he undertakes the criticism, and how, with the Utopians, he sets himself to seek for a pretended “science” which may furnish him with a ready-made formula for “the solution of the social question,” instead of drawing his science from critical knowledge of the historical movement, the movement which must itself produce the material conditions of social emancipation. What I, above all, denounce, is that M. Proudhon has only imperfect ideas, confused and false with regard to the basis of all political economy—exchange-value—a circumstance which leads him to see the foundation of a new science in a utopian interpretation of the theory of Ricardo. Finally, I sum up my judgment of his point of view in these words:—

“Each economic relation has a good and bad side, that is the single point upon which M. Proudhon does not contradict himself. The good side, he sees explained by the economists, the bad side, he sees denounced by the Socialists. He borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations, he borrows from the Socialists the illusion of seeing in poverty only poverty. He is in agreement with both in wishing to refer it to the authority of science. Science, for him, is reduced to the insignificant proportions of a scientific formula. It is thus that M. Proudhon flatters himself to have made the criticism of both political economy and of communism: he is below both the one and the other. Below the economists, since as a philosopher, who has under his hand a magic formula, he has believed himself able to do without entering into purely economic details, below the Socialists, since he has neither sufficient courage nor sufficient intelligence to raise himself, were it only speculatively, above the bourgeois horizon.

“He wished to soar as man of science above the bourgeoisie and the proletarians, he is only the petty bourgeois, tossed about constantly between capital and labor, between political economy and communism.”

However severe this judgment may appear, I am obliged still to maintain it word for word. But it is important to remember that at the time when I declared and proved theoretically that Proudhon’s book was only the code of petty bourgeois Socialism, this same Proudhon was being anathematized as an arch-revolutionist by the economists and the Socialists of the period. That is the reason why I did not at a later period raise my voice with those who cried out about his “betrayal” of the revolution. It was not his fault if, at first ill-understood by others as well as by himself, he has not fulfilled the hopes which nothing had ever justified,

The “Philosophic de la Misere,” as compared with “Qu’est-ce que la Propriete?” displays very unfavorably all the defects of Proudhon’s manner of exposition. The style is often what the French call bombastic A pretentious and “speculative” piece of fustian, which, represented as German philosophy, presents itself everywhere where Gallic perspicacity is at fault. That which he trumpets in your ears, with the voice of a blustering buffoon, is his own glorification, wearisome nonsense and eternal rodomontade about his pretended “science.” Instead of the true and natural warmth which illumines his first book, in this Proudhon declaims systematically and fails to excite any feeling. Add to this the awkward and disagreeable didactic pedantry, which serves for erudition, of the man who has lost his former pride of being an independent and original thinker, and who now, as a parvenu of science, thinks he should swagger and boast of what he is not and of what he does not possess. After that his sentiments of a tallow chandler, which lead him to attack in a most unseemly and brutal manner—but which is neither discerning, nor profound, nor even just —a man like Cabet, who was always worthy of respect because of his political role in the midst of the proletariat, while he does the amiable towards a Dunnoyer (a Councillor of State, it is true) who has no importance beyond that of having preached, with a comical seriousness, throughout the whole of three great volumes, insupportably tiresome, a hypercriticism thus described by Helvetius: “We desire that the unfortunate should be perfect.”

In fact, the revolution of February happened very unfortunately for Proudhon, who, a few weeks previously, had proved definitely and irrefutably that the “era of revolutions” was past for ever. Nevertheless his attitude in the National Assembly merits nothing but praise, although it proved his lack of intelligence of the situation. After the insurrection of June this attitude was an act of great courage It had further this happy result, that M. Thiers, in his reply to the propositions of Proudhon, which was afterwards published as a book, revealed the mean, petty pedestal upon which the intellectual pillar of the French bourgeoisie was raised. Compared with Thiers, Proudhon assumed the proportions of an ancient colossus.

The last economic acts and achievements of Proudhon were his discovery of “Free Credit,” and of the “People’s Bank” which should realise it in my work “Zur Kritik der Politischen OEkonomie” (“Criticism of Political Economy”), Berlin, 1859 (PP 59-64), you will find the proof that these Proudhoman ideas are based upon a complete ignorance of the first elements of bourgeois political economy—the relation between commodity and money—while their practical realisation was nothing but the reproduction of better elaborated projects of a much earlier period. There is no doubt, there is indeed evidence to show, that the development of credit, which has served in England in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and more recently in this, to transfer wealth from one class to another, might also serve, in certain political and economic conditions, to accelerate the emancipation of the working class. But to consider interest-bearing capital as the principal form of capital, and to wish to make of a particular application of credit—the pretended abolition of the rate of interest— to think to make that the basis of the social transformation—that was indeed a petty chandler’s fantasy. Moreover, we find that had been already elaborated con amore among the spokesmen of the small shopkeeping class of England in the seventeenth century. The polemic of Proudhon against Bastiat with reference to interest-bearing capital (1850) is far below his “Philosophic de la Misere.” He succeeds in allowing himself to be beaten even by Bastiat, and cries and blusters every time that his adversary deals him a blow.

Some years ago Proudhon wrote a thesis on imposts, published in opposition to my theories by the Government of the Canton of Vaud In that work was extinguished the last ray of genius, nothing of him remains but the petty bourgeois pure and simple.

The political and philosophical writings of Proudhon have all the same dual and contradictory character which we have found in his economic work. Besides, they have only a local importance, limited to France. His attacks upon the religion and the Church had always a great local value in a period when the French Socialists boasted of their religious sentiments as of something superior to the Voltairianism of the eighteenth century and the German atheism of the nineteenth. If Peter the Great overthrew Russian barbarism by barbarity, Proudhon did his best to overthrow French commonplace by commonplaces.

The works which cannot be regarded merely as bad writings, but are simply vile trash, which, however, were quite in keeping with the petty chandler sentiment—were, his book on the Coup d’Etat, in which he coquets with Louis Bonaparte, and endeavors to make him acceptable to the French workmen, and that against Poland, which, in honor of the Czar, he treats with the cynicism of an idiot.

Proudhon has often been compared to Jean Jacques Rousseau. Nothing could be more erroneous. He resembles rather Nicolas Linguet, whose “Theorie des Lois Civiles” is, moreover, a work of genius.

The nature of Proudhon leads him to dialectics. But having never comprehended scientific dialectic, he gets no further than sophistry. In fact, that arises from his petty bourgeois point of view. The petty bourgeois, precisely like our own historian Raumer, always speaks of one side and of the other side. Two opposing, contradictory currents dominate his material interests, and in consequence his religious, scientific and artistic views, his morality, and in fact his whole being. If he is besides, like Proudhon, a man of intellect, he will very soon be able to juggle with his own contradictions and to elaborate them in striking, noisy, if sometimes brilliant, paradoxes. Scientific charlatanism and political compromises are inseparable from such a point of view. There is, in such case, only a single motive, individual vanity, and as with all vain people, there is no question of anything beyond the mere effect of the moment, the success of the hour. In this is necessarily lost the simple moral tact which would preserve a Rousseau, for example, from all compromise, even apparent, with the powers that be.

Perhaps posterity will say, to distinguish this most recent phase of French history, that Louis Bonaparte was its Napoleon, and Proudhon its Rousseau-Voltaire.

Yours, &c,

Karl Marx.

1. In saying that existing conditions—the conditions of bourgeois production—are natural, the economists give it to be understood that these are the relations in which wealth is created and the productive forces are developed conformably to the laws of nature Thus these relations are themselves natural laws, independent of the influence of time They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any.

2. Brissot de Warville, “Recherches sur le droit de propri£t6 et sur le vol,” &c Berlin 1782 (In the sixth volume of the “Bibliotheque du ligislateur,” by Brissot de Warville.)

The Poverty of Philosophy by Karl Marx. Charles H. Kerr Publishers, Chicago. 1910.

The first English language edition Marx’s 1847 response Proudhon’s ‘The Philosophy of Poverty’ was a 1900 London-published translation by Harry Quelch. From that edition came the first U.S. publication by the Kerr Cooperative in 1910. The Kerr edition includes a new introduction by Quelch, an 1884 preface by Engels from the first German edition (Marx wrote the original in French and published it in Belgium), and several appendices; including a letter by Marx to the German Social Democrat press on Prodhoun from 1865, and Marx’s 1849 speech on free trade. Online text of a later translation also linked here.

Contents: Introduction by Harry Quelch, Preface by Engels (1884), Author’s Preface (1847), Foreword, I) A Scientific Discovery, The Antithesis of Use Value and Exchange Value, Constituted Value of Synthetic Value, Application of the Law of the Proportionality of Value, II) The Metaphysics of Political Economy, The Method, Division of Labour and Machinery, Competition and Monopoly, Property or Ground Rent, Strikes and Combinations of Workers, Appendices: Proudhon Judged by Marx (1865), John Gray and his Theory of Labor Notes by Marx (1859), Freed Trade by Marx (1849). 230 pages.

The Charles H. Kerr publishing house was responsible for some of the earliest translations and editions of Marx, Engels, and other leaders of the socialist movement in the United States. Publisher of the Socialist Party aligned International Socialist Review, the Charles H Kerr Co. was an exponent of the Party’s left wing and the most important left publisher of the pre-Communist US workers movement.

PDF of book: https://archive.org/download/povertyofphiloso0000marx_u4i7/povertyofphiloso0000marx_u4i7.pdf