the other hand, the new dogma taught by Rousseau, St. Simon, Fourier, and Owen, that human nature is perfect and society corrupts it, seems rather worse than the old theological dogma of a corrupt human nature. Humanity is gradually becoming better, and it will reach not indeed an infinite ideal, but an equilibrium, when it shall have destroyed its three enemies, God, the State, and Property. Proudhon is thus metaphysically and socially an anarchist.1 In the sixth epoch, that of the Balance of Trade, society finds internal regulation an imperfect compensation for the existence of a proletariate, and seeks help from without." Here too we have a "dialectic," a movement towards free trade and a movement towards protection. The monopoly preserved at home is opposed in foreign trade! 3 Proudhon attacks Bastiat," the Achilles of Free Trade," and considers custom-houses to be as necessary to society as machines. The failure of free trade to cure our evils has been practically admitted by the rise of the new enthusiasm for loaninstitutions which are to make everybody a capitalist. This leads him to the seventh epoch, of Credit; credit involves the canonization of cash."5 But to recognise the State in the matter of credit, and refuse to admit its interference in trade, is simply another "contradiction." The State is "the caste of non-producers"; it neither produces nor possesses property and capital. Property is the feature of the eighth epoch; it implies the detachment of man from nature and society, by credit, -that is to say, by making possible such things as loans on the security of property, and enabling the monopolist to stand free of his fellow workers, and live on their labour. "It is the right to use and abuse, and therefore to be a despot.' At one time property was necessary, and even salutary; but it has brought disastrous conse 1 Contrad., I., ch. viii., especially 320-335, 368. 2 Ib., II., ch. ix. 3 Ib., II. 13, cf. 49. 5 Ibid., II. 92, 95–97. 4 Ibid., II. 47, 54, cf. 71. 7 Dr. Diehl (P. J. Proudhon, seine Lehre und sein Leben, Halle, 1888) has well pointed out that the correct interpretation of the definition in the Pandects of "jus utendi et abutendi " is "right to use and to use up," a very different thing from "abuse" in most cases. quences: "It means the depopulation of the earth." Accordingly this epoch is followed by its opposite (the ninth stage), the epoch of Community or Communism, both of which Proudhon, without allowing their distinction from each other,' pronounces utopias and logomachies. He decides against communism by arguments in no way peculiar to himself, laying special stress on its incompatibility with the Family, and "the organic elements of societies" (II. 278). Communism is the religion of poverty" (303, ft.). "Communism in science, as in nature, is synonymous with Nihilism, undividedness, immobility, night and silence" (303, top). It does not see that the economic problem is to secure the greatest possible production and consumption by the greatest possible number of men. It tries like ordinary 66 proprietorship to get the greatest possible nett produce (II. 309). "Whoever appeals to force and to capital in order to organize labour is a liar, because the organization of labour must be the downfall of capital and force." The next (or tenth) stage is that of Population. Malthus spoke demonstrable truth about it, and to him was confided the charge of proclaiming to the world that "Pan is dead"-society is dead, killed by its eternal enemies, monopoly and utopia (II. 311-313). Proudhon, thinks he, for his part, has discovered that the dictum of Malthus (stated before by him to be demonstrable truth) is overturned by the fact that men not only suffer poverty but anticipate it, and that wealth tends to increase faster than population (II. 341, cf. 325). There is discoverable, he says, "a specific virtue which will re-establish the balance between population and production" (II. 328). What is it? Malthus would make marriage a privilege of the well-to-do (II. 351). But Proudhon thinks it possible that humanity may one day become an assemblage of saints, and that the union of the sexes will sink to its proper subordinate position with all, when a change of the conditions of labour 1 Contrad., II. 261. It must be allowed that the "Communistic Manifesto" of Marx and Engels (1848) shows by its title that its authors did not recognise any hard and fast distinction. Engels says elsewhere (see Heinzen, Helden des deutschen Communismus, p. 53) that Communism is not a doctrine, but a movement. has given to the labourer the discipline of education and of the comforts of life, as well as the ennoblement of virtue (II. 390). Powerful as are his descriptions of the evils of present society, and keen as are his perceptions of the drift of the social movements of his day, and his criticisms both of evils and proposed remedies, it must be allowed that his own remedies are shadowed out in vague phrases, and that his Philosophie de la Misère is as intangible as any of the Utopias he censures. He had his fame and its nemesis, the latter in the shape of Karl Marx's most brilliant controversial pamphlet, La Misère de la Philosophie (Brussels, 1847). Later generations will almost wonder at the comparative moderation of this pamphlet, if they remember the utter barbarity which characterized the disputes of social reformers in those days. Their hatred of the capitalists is not expressed with more savagery than their hatred of one another; a difference of opinion as to ways and means is resented and held treason and betrayal, in spite of agreement as to the end in view. If any reader thinks these statements exaggerated, let him glance at a page or two of Die Opposition (Mannheim, 1846), edited by Karl Heinzen, and containing diatribes by the editor, Ruge, Oppenheim, Nauwerk, etc., against Proudhon and others, or of the same Heinzen's book on Helden des deutschen Communismus (Bern, 1848),' or of the Heilige Familie, by Engels and Marx (Frankfurt, 1844), written against Bruno Bauer, Faucher, Jungnitz, Edgar, etc. Heinzen said of Marx that his function in life was to bury his friends, Proudhon among the number. Marx had once been friendly to Proudhon. He had hailed his question, "Qu'est ce que la Propriété ?" as a worthy modern parallel to the question of Sièyes "Qu'est ce que le tiers état ?" He considers that Proudhon has once for all unmasked the inhuman character of Political Economy. Proudhon, however, sometimes spoke of his 1 Ex pede Herculem. In this latter book he compares Marx by turns to an ape and to a mouse (p. 68). 2 Heilige Familie, 36. By an odd slip he puts Say for Sièyes. The question, however, was not new; and the answer, "Property is Theft," had been given by Brissot "La Propriété et le Vol," 1780. tory as built on an eternal foundation, a God who is guiding humanity, and who is Righteousness. "We need only apply logically the law that Proudhon himself sets up, the realizing of righteousness by means of its negation, in order to rise above this Absolute too in history. If Proudhon does not go so far, it is due to his misfortune in being born not in Germany but in France" (39, 40). So wrote Marx in 1844; but in 1847 the tone is very different. He begins by a serious and most effective criticism of Proudhon's discussion of Value, showing that all that is sound in Proudhon on that subject is to be found in Ricardo, whom Proudhon does not take the trouble to understand. "Posterity will find it very simplehearted in M. Proudhon to give, as a revolutionary theory of the future, a theory which Ricardo has scientifically expounded as relating to the bourgeois society of his own day, and to take as a solution of the antinomy between utility and value what Ricardo and his school have long ago presented as the scientific formula for only one factor of the antinomy, value in exchange.' Proudhon neglects the ruling power of demand which instead of an already constituted ratio of proportionality gives us only a continual movement towards such. In comparison with Ricardo, Proudhon is a mere rhetorician. When Ricardo reduces the value of labour itself to the cost of the labourer's maintenance, the cynicism lies not in his words, but in the things he is expressing. Proudhon, by making the labourer's reward always proportional to the hours of labour, would prevent the labourer from receiving the occasional gain that comes from the fluctuations in demand.3 Marx shows even in this early work signs of that wide (if not always accurate) acquaintance with economical literature so abundantly displayed afterwards in his Kapital. If he borrows from English socialists, he acknowledges the debt. Bray in particular is praised for his analysis of industrial conditions,-though Marx points out that Bray stops short of State Socialism, 1 Mis. de la Phil. pp. 20, 21, cf. 44. 2 Ibid., pp. 25, 27; + E.g. Mis. de la Phil., pp. Edmonds, Hopkins, Thompson. 3 Ibid., p. 90. 49, 50, he quotes Atkinson, Bray, He meant Hodgskin. See Prof. Anton Menger, Recht auf den vollen Arbeitsertrag (2nd ed. 1891), p. 52n. would allow individual accumulation, and regards common ownership of the means of production only as an ultimate and far-off end.1 Finally, Marx goes on to say, Proudhon has credited kings and princes with having given to the precious metals their unique position as money;-but all history shows that these potentates were themselves swayed by "economic conditions," and could do no more than give voice to them. Money, like other things, has a commercial value exactly and rigorously determined. It is as vain to cry "Cursed coin," as "Cursed corn." Το Marx then turns to Proudhon's metaphysics. explain the genesis of economical categories, Proudhon has taken up the logic of Hegel, the method of position, negation, and synthesis (negation of negation). This method (says Marx) is the abstraction of movement, i.e. it is movement or process regarded in the light of pure reason alone, or an assertion followed by its contradictory, followed by the union of the two contradictories in a reconciling third notion. Proudhon, however, never succeeds in taking more than the first two steps; and in order to get steps or stages at all he needs to treat as successive social facts that are necessarily coexistent. He has nothing of Hegel's dialectic but the verbal phrases of it. We do not find in his pages that the categories themselves pass into their opposites, and thence into a new category; Proudhon makes the transition for them. opposes "good" to "evil" and asks himself how to get a minimum of evil. Proudhon himself allows that this apparent logic is a scaffolding which may be removed without damage to his argument. The logical order is not, he confesses, the same as the historical. In fact Proudhon has not gone through idealism to history; he has never understood idealism at all.3 He It hardly needed Proudhon's own later admissions to 1 Mis. de la Phil., pp. 50-58. The book cited is, Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy, or the Age of Might and the Age of Right, by J. F. Bray (Leeds), 1839. 2 Mis. de la Phil., pp. 50, 67, 71; cf. Emerson's lines: "Things are in the saddle and ride mankind." 3 Mis. de. la Phil., pp. 97, 98, 100 to 103, 104 to 106. Théorie de la Propriété (1865), quoted by Diehl, P. J. Proudhon (1888), p. 91. Ꮓ |