Chapter IV: Controversy with Proudhon

Marx's "Misere de la Philosophie" indicates the culmination of the fist phase of his creative work. In this critical review he makes his position clear with respect not only to Proudhon but to Utopian Socialism in general. It marks also the turning point in the studies of Marx: English political economy occupied henceforth the place which German philosophy had held. The anti-Proudhon controversy is therefore worthy of a fuller treatment.

Pierre Joseph Proudhon (b. 1809 in Besancon, d. 1865 in Paris) was one of the most gifted and most distinguished of social philosophers which the modern proletariat has produced. He was originally a compositor, like his similarly minded English contemporary, John Francis Bray, the author of "Labour's Wrongs," published in 1839, but he had a much greater inclination for study and a more fruitful literary talent. He managed to acquire, self-taught, a knowledge of the classical languages, of mathematics and of science, read assiduously but indiscriminately works on economics, philosophy, and history, and applied himself to social criticism. It is rare for a working man in the West of Europe to feel impelled to make an acquaintance with Kant, Hegel, and Feuerbach as Proudhon did through French translations and through intercourse with German scholars in Paris. He possessed the noble ambition of blending French sprightliness with German thoroughness. But self-instruction failed to give him that intellectual training which is more valuable than knowledge, and which alone gives the power to order and to utilise the information acquired, as well as to submit one's own work to self-criticism. The value of a systematic education does not consist in the main in the acquisition of knowledge but in the training of our intellectual faculties as instruments of inquiry and apprehension, of methodical thinking and of sound judgment, to enable us to find our bearings more easily in the chaos of phenomena, experiences, and ideas. A self-taught man may no doubt attain to this degree of culture, but only if his first attempts at independent creative work are submitted to a strict but kindly criticism, which makes him discipline his thoughts. This was not the case with Proudhon; he lacked mental self-discipline. His first work, "What is Property?" (1840) brought him immediate recognition and strengthened him in his high opinion of his knowledge and his powers, even to the point of making him conceited. When, for example, the French historian, Michelet, disapproved of his dictum, "Property is robbery," Proudhon replied, "Not twice in a thousand years does one come across a pronouncement like that."--("Economic Contradictions," Leipzig, 1847. Vol. II., p. 301.) And yet the idea is as old as Communism itself. Besides all this, the vivacity and exuberance of language for which Proudhon was noted easily blinded him to the shortcomings of his intellectual culture. Thus it often happened that he rediscovered ideas of his predecessors and published them to the world with naive pride. Through page after page of argument he holds the reader in expectation of the explanation, which he is about to give, of the nature of value, which he rightly characterises as the "corner-stone of political economy." At last he will disclose the secret: "It is time to make ourselves acquainted with this power. This power ... is _labour_." His main work, "The System of Economic Contradictions," swarms with philosophical formulae and expressions like thesis, antithesis, antinomies, synthesis, dialectics, induction, syllogisms, etc., as also with Latin, Greek, and Hebrew etymologies; it often wanders into irrelevant theological and philosophical digressions and side issues, not so much with the intention of parading the author's knowledge as from his lack of intellectual discipline and insufficient command of his material. The work in question was to combine German philosophy with French and English political economy, and its author believed that it would secure for him before everything else the admiration of the German Socialists, especially of Marx. He drew the latter's attention to it by letter, and awaited his "rigorous criticism." The criticism came in "Misere de la Philosophie" (Brussels, 1847), but it could no longer fulfil its purpose, as the fundamental difference between the two men had already widened to a gulf that could not be bridged. Marx had almost completed his materialistic, logical, and revolutionary Socialism, Proudhon had laid the foundations of his peaceful Anarchism with its federative economic basis. With his searching analysis, his systematised knowledge, and his great indignation at the presumptuous attacks on every Socialist school and leader, Marx sat in judgment upon Proudhon, exposing him as a dilettante in philosophy and economics, and at the same time sketching in outline his own conception of history and economics.

Marx's verdict is damning, yet one cannot but acknowledge that Proudhon, in spite of his obvious insufficiency, had endeavoured, honestly and zealously, to extricate himself from Capitalism as well as from Utopianism, and to outline a scheme for an economic order, in which men, such as he had found them, might lead a free, industrious, and righteous life. The task which Proudhon had set himself was the same as that which engaged the attention of Marx, the criticism of political economy and of the sentimental Utopian Socialism. That is the key-note of Proudhon's system, and it is sounded in almost every chapter. He lacked, however, the requisite knowledge and the historical sense which alone could have made him equal to his task. The whole of his criticism consists virtually in the complaint that riches and poverty accumulate side by side, and that the economic categories--use value, exchange value, division of labour, competition, monopoly, machinery, property, ground rent, credit, tax, etc.--manifest contradictions. Proudhon's special problem was the following: "The workers of any country produce yearly goods to the value, let us say, of 20 milliards. But if the workers, as consumers, wish to buy back these goods they have to pay 25 milliards. The workers are thus cheated out of a fifth. That is a terrible contradiction."--("What is Property?" Chap. IV.; "Economic Contradictions," Vol. I., pp. 292-93.) This statement of the problem shows that Proudhon had no inkling of the essential features of the question of value, in spite of the fact that he cites Adam Smith, David Ricardo, etc., whom he must therefore have read. Had he really understood these economists and taken up his critical attitude towards them from the standpoint of justice, he would have stated the problem somewhat as follows: "The workers of any country produce yearly goods to the value, say, of 20 milliards. For their work, however, they receive as wages a quantity of goods of the value of only 10 or 12 milliards. Is that just?" Only this way of stating the question could possibly have revealed to him the nature of wages, of value, of profit, of capital and its contradictions. Proudhon sees the perpetration of fraud or robbery in the sphere of exchange and not in that of production, and he does not ask himself how, if labour produces goods to the value of only 20 milliards, they can be exchanged at a value of 25 milliards, and what is responsible for the increase of five milliards. The other contradictions which he brings forward are not indeed new, but they are ingeniously treated. For example: the essence of exchange-value is labour, which creates wealth; but the more the wealth produced, the less becomes its exchange-value. Or this: the division of labour is, according to Smith, one of the most effective means of increasing wealth, but the further the division of labour proceeds the lower sinks the workman, being reduced to the level of an unintelligent automaton engaged in the performance of a fractional operation. The same thing holds good for machinery. So, too, competition stimulates effort, but brings much misery in its train by leading to adulteration, sharp practices, and strife between man and man. Further, taxation should be proportional to riches, in reality it is proportional to poverty. Or again, private ownership of land ought to increase productivity; in practice it deprives the farmer of the land. In this way he runs to earth the contradictions in political economy, and so we find everywhere the words thesis and anti-thesis or antinomies (contradictions between two well-established propositions). And out of this contradiction springs poverty. The solution or the synthesis is the creation of an economic order which shall preserve the good elements in this category and eliminate the bad ones, and so satisfy the demands of justice. And that is what Socialism cannot do. "For the economic order is based upon calculations of an inexorable justice and not upon those angelic sentiments of brotherhood, sacrifice, and love which so many well-meaning Socialists of the present time are endeavouring to awake in the people. It is useless for them to preach, after the example of Jesus Christ, the necessity for sacrifice, and to set an example of it in their own lives: selfishness is stronger than they and can only be restrained by rigid justice and immutable economic law. Humanitarian enthusiasm may cause upheavals which are conducive to the progress of civilisation, but such emotional crises, like the fluctuations in value, simply result in the establishing of law and order on a more rigid and more restricted basis. Nature or the Deity planted mistrust in our hearts, having no faith in the love of man for his fellow men; and though I say it to the shame of the human conscience (for our hypocrisy must be confronted with it sooner or later), every disclosure which science has made to us concerning the designs of providence with respect to the progress of society points to a deeply rooted hatred of mankind on God's part."--("System of Economic Contradictions or the Philosophy of Poverty," Vol. I., p. 107.) Just as severely does he denounce the institution of Trade Unionism and its methods of warfare, together with State politics, as indeed the working of class organisation and of the State generally. The only way to realise social justice is to create a society of producers who exchange their goods among one another according to their equivalents in labour and carry on work in adequate relationship to the production of wealth, or, to put it clearly, to establish an order where supply and demand balance one another.

Marx's answer to the "Philosophy of Poverty" is indicated at once by the title "The Poverty of Philosophy." He deals first of all with the economic details of Proudhon's work, and proves with documentary evidence that the theses and antitheses it contains partly spring from a half-understood reading of English and French political economists, and in part have been taken direct from the English Communists. Marx already displays in this section an extensive knowledge of economic literature. Then he confronts Proudhon's philosophical and social theories with his own deductions and gives many positive results. Marx's main object was to induce the Socialists to give up their Utopianism and think in terms of realism, and to regard social and economic _categories_ in their historical setting:

"Economic _categories_ are only the theoretical expressions, ideal conceptions of the conditions of production obtaining in society.... Proudhon has grasped well enough that men manufacture cloth, linen, etc., under certain conditions of production. But what he has not grasped is that these social conditions themselves are just as much human products as cloth, linen, etc. Social conditions are intimately bound up with productive power. With the acquisition of new productive power men change their methods of production, and with the change in the methods of production, in the manner of obtaining a livelihood, they change their social conditions. The hand-mill gives rise to a society with feudal lords, the steam-mill to a society with industrial capitalists. But the same men who shape the social conditions in conformity with the material means of production, shape also the principles, the ideas, the _categories_ in conformity with their social conditions. Consequently these ideas, these _categories_, are just as little eternal as are the conditions to which they give expression. They are the transitory and changing products of history. We are living in the midst of a continuous movement of growth in productive power, of destruction of existing social conditions, of formation of ideas."--("Poverty of Philosophy," Stuttgart, 1885, pp. 100-101.)

Here it should, above all, be noticed that Marx ascribes to industrialism a powerful revolutionary effect, and that he characterises the different forms of society by their different methods of labour. Or, as he says later in "Capital," "not _what_ is produced, but _how_ it is produced distinguishes the various forms of society." What he means to say, then, is that ideas and systems are limited by their time, that they are conditioned by the prevailing means of production. To understand them one must study the times which have preceded them, as well as investigate the ideas and systems themselves, and find out whether new forms have not arisen which stand in contradiction or in contrast to the old one. Or, as Marx says:

"Feudalism, too, had its proletariat--the villeinage--which contains all the germs of the middle class. Feudal production, too, had two contradictory elements which are likewise characterised as the 'good' and 'bad' sides of feudalism without regard to the fact that it is always the 'bad' side which triumphs ultimately over the 'good' side. It is the bad side which calls into being the movement which makes history, in that it brings the struggle to a head. If, at the time of the supremacy of feudalism, the economists, in their enthusiasm for knightly virtues, for the beautiful harmony between rights and duties, for the patriarchal life of the towns, for the flourishing home industries in the country, for the development of industry organised in corporations, companies and guilds, in a word, for everything which forms the finer side of feudalism, had set themselves the problem of eliminating everything which could throw a shadow on this picture--serfdom, privileges, anarchy--where would it all have ended? They would have destroyed every element which called forth strife, they would have nipped in the bud the development of the middle class. They would have set themselves the absurd problem of blotting out history.

"When the middle class had come to the top, neither the good nor the bad side of feudalism come into question. The productive forces, which had been developed under feudalism through its agency, fell to its control. All old economic forms, the legal relations between private individuals, which corresponded to them, the political order, which was the official expression of the old society, were shattered."

"Those Socialists and social revolutionaries who regard the hardships and struggles of society as an absolute evil and plan the construction of a society comprised solely of good elements, have not grasped the meaning of the history of mankind. They think abstractly. They misjudge both the past and the present.

"Hence to form a correct judgment of production under feudalism one must consider it a method of production based upon contradiction. One must show how wealth was produced within this contradiction, how productive power developed contemporaneously with the antagonism of classes, how one of these classes, the bad side, the social evil, constantly increased until the material conditions for its liberation were fully ripe.

"Does that not show clearly enough that the means of production, the conditions under which productive power is developed, are anything but eternal laws, that they rather correspond to a definite stage in the evolution of mankind and of its productive power, and that a variation in the productive power of mankind necessarily brings about a variation in its conditions of production?

"The middle class begins with a proletariat, which in its turn is itself a remnant of the feudal proletariat. In the course of its historical development the middle class necessarily develops its contradictory character, which on its first appearance is more or less veiled, existing only in a latent form. In proportion as the middle class develops, there develops in its bosom a new proletariat, a modern proletariat; and a struggle arises between the proletarian class and the middle class, a struggle which, before being felt, observed, estimated, understood, acknowledged, and finally openly proclaimed on both sides, issues in the meanwhile only in partial and transitory conflicts and acts of destruction."

In a special chapter Marx shows the necessity and the historical significance of the Trade Unions, which in spite of all the apprehensions and warnings of Utopians and Economists the workers have gone on establishing and perfecting, in order to be able to withstand the domination of capital. That means the gathering together of the divided interests and activities of the workers in a vast class movement, standing in opposition to the middle class; which, however, does not exclude the possibility of conflicting interests within the classes themselves, though these shall be put aside as soon as class is brought against class:

"From day to day it becomes clearer then that the conditions of production, among which the middle class moves, have not a simple, uniform character but one which involves conflicting elements; that the same conditions which produce wealth produce also poverty; that the same conditions which tend to the development of productive power develop also the power of repression; that these conditions only create bourgeois wealth, i.e., the wealth of the middle class, at the cost of the continued destruction of the wealth of individual members of this class and the creation of an ever-increasing proletariat."--("Poverty of Philosophy," 1885, pp. 116-118, 177 sq.)

This antithetical character of capitalist society has for its effect that the political economists, who are the philosophers of the existing order, lose their bearings, while the Socialists, who are the philosophers of the proletariat, look round for means to relieve the distress. They condemn class struggles,[4] build Utopias and plan schemes of salvation, whereas the only real solution, because it is the only one which arises from the actual conditions, must be to further the organisation of the oppressed class and make it conscious of the objects of its struggles. For out of these struggles the new society will arise, and that, of course, can only happen when productive power has reached a high stage of development. Or as Marx himself proceeds:

"An oppressed class is a vital condition of any society founded upon class antagonism. The liberation of the oppressed class necessarily includes, therefore, the creation of a new society. In order that the oppressed class may be able to free itself, a stage must be reached in which the already acquired powers of production and the prevailing social institutions can no longer exist side by side. Of all the instruments of production, the greatest productive force is the revolutionary class itself. The organisation of the revolutionary elements as a class presupposes the existence in perfected form of all the productive forces that could in any way be developed in the bosom of the old society. Does this mean that after the collapse of the old order of society there will be a new class domination culminating in a new political power? The condition of the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of all classes, as the condition of the emancipation of the third estate, of the middle class, was the abolition of all the three estates. The working class will, in the course of its evolution, replace the old middle-class society by an association excluding classes and their antagonism, and there will no longer be any real political power,[5] because it is just this political power which is the official expression of class antagonism within the community.

"Meanwhile the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, a struggle which, when brought to its highest expression, means a complete revolution. And can one indeed be surprised that a society founded upon class antagonism should, at its final dissolution, issue in brutal conflict and collision of man against man? Let it not be said that the social movement excludes the political. There never was a political movement which was not at the same time a social movement.

"Only in an order of things where there are no classes and no class antagonism will social evolution cease to be political revolution. Until then the last word of social science on the eve of every general reconstruction of society must ever be: 'Fight or die; bloody war or annihilation. Thus are we confronted with the inexorable question.'--(George Sand)."

With this battle-cry "The Poverty of Philosophy" comes to a close. It is the prologue to the "Communist Manifesto," which in itself is but a popular version of the positive doctrines developed in the controversy against Proudhon.

FOOTNOTES:

[4] The Socialists of those times were the Owenites and the Fourierists, who condemned all class struggles, Trade Unionist strikes, and Labour politics.

[5] Marx means the State.

III.

YEARS OF AGITATION AND VARYING FORTUNES.