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

2

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,

3 Ibid., p. 90.

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.

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.

4 Théorie de la Propriété (1865), quoted by Diehl, P. J. Proudhon (1888), p. 91.

Ꮓ

convince us that Marx is right on this point. For his own part Marx himself, though he understood Hegel as well as any Hegelian is ever acknowledged by any other to understand him, played with Hegel's terms, and did not really try to convert the dialectic into an economic as well as metaphysical method.1

His own economic position is given in outline in the Poverty of Philosophy. The Economists (he says) have a peculiar way of proceeding; they recognize only two kinds of institutions, those of art and those of nature. To the economists the institutions of feudalism are artificial, those of modern bourgeoisie natural, as, to the theologians, their own religion is from God and every other is man's invention.3 The present arrangements by which wealth is created and productive forces utilized are natural laws' independent of time, 'eternal laws which must always rule society. History (in their view) once existed but exists no more. It existed once because there were once feudal institutions with arrangements for production quite different from the present. Feudalism (Marx allows) had also a proletariate of its own, the serfs. It had its 'good' and 'bad' elements, the latter being in the end victorious, for they are the elements that create movement by evoking conflict. To eliminate the bad would be to kill the germ from which present civil society has grown. Once successful, the bourgeois society crushed not only all the old economic forms of feudal life, but the civic and political relations corresponding. Rightly to judge of production under feudalism, we must consider it as founded on a struggle of classes, which went on till the one class was victorious. The mode of production and the industrial system which developed through this struggle are far from being eternal laws. The changes occurring in the productive powers of men brought about changes in the industrial system; to preserve the new powers of production the traditional forms of the old must be destroyed; once these were destroyed, the class once revolutionary became con

servative; thereupon a new antagonism of classes began to develope. There is a new proletariate, in conflict with the bourgeoisie; and the conflict flows necessarily from the new economic conditions. . "From day to day it becomes more clear that the system of production under the bourgeoisie has a double-sided character; under the same system, in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; and under that in which powers of production develope there are developed also 'powers of repression.' The result is that the wealth of the middle class is only produced by the continual destruction of the wealth of its individual members and the consequent increase of the proletariate."

We

The

As the antagonism comes more clearly to light, different schools of economists begin to show themselves. have first the Fatalists, classical and romantic. former (as Adam Smith and Ricardo) live at a time when the struggle with feudal survivals is not yet over; their mission is simply to show how as a matter of fact wealth is acquired in the bourgeois society, to formulate the new laws and categories, and to show their relation to the old. Poverty is to them simply the pain that accompanies a new birth whether in nature or in industry. The latter belong to our own time, when the contrast of the wealthy and the proletariate is complete. They use a tone of superiority and disdain towards the working classes. "They copy the doctrines of their predecessors; and the indifference, which with their predecessors had something of naïveté, has with them something of coquetry."

After the fatalists we have the Humanitarians, who take to heart the bad side of present arrangements, and try to alleviate the sufferings and lessen the antagonism. They advise the workers to be temperate, to work hard, and to have small families, and they advise the employers to put enthusiasm and humanity into their business. Their doctrines are full of distinctions between theory and practice, principles and conclusions, ideas and applications of them, good sides and bad sides of everything. Fully developed, the humanitarian becomes the Philanthropic school, which denies the necessity of antagonism and would make all men capitalists. The theories of these Philanthropists depend on abstraction from the

unpleasant parts of the reality. They think to preserve bourgeois categories without the contrasts inseparable therefrom. They fancy themselves in opposition to the bourgeoisie and are really more at one with it than the other schools are.

Lastly, the Socialists and Communists are the theorists of the proletariate as the Economists are of the middle classes. Since the whole character of bourgeois production is not yet fully developed, the proletariate is not yet a compact class with a political programme; the material conditions for the emancipation of the proletariate are not yet fully formed; and the form to be taken by the new society is not yet discernible. Hence the Socialists and Communists are as yet Utopians who seek to meet the needs of the oppressed classes by improvising systems and running after schemes of social regeneration. "But, in proportion as history goes forward and with it the struggle of the proletariate becomes sharper and sharper, they need no longer look for science in their own minds; they have only to note well the movement passing before their own eyes and make themselves the organs of it." Till then they will see nothing but distress in the distress around them, without seeing in it the revolutionary side, the subversive movement which is to overturn the old society. "When science is produced by the historical movement and associates itself therewith in full consciousness of cause and effect, from that moment it ceases to be doctrinaire and becomes revolutionary.'

Even in 1847 we see that Marx had a clear view of the work before him. In his later books, the Criticism of Political Economy (1859), and especially Das Kapital (1867), he accomplished much of it. England, in which he lived during the last half of his life, was the country where the peculiarities of modern industry had most fully shown themselves; and Das Kapital, whatever may happen to its arguments, is likely to hold its place as a storehouse of references to the facts of English industry from the end of last century to the middle of the present. Towards the Economists, Marx is in these later books

1 Misère de la Phil., p. 119.