[Letter to J. B. von Schweitzer]

["Der Social-Demokrat" Nos. 16, 17 and 18, February 1, 3 and 5, 1865]

London, 24 January 1865

Dear Sir,

Yesterday I received a letter in which you request from me a detailed assessment of Proudhon. Lack of time does not permit me to fulfil your wish. Moreover, I have none of his writings to hand here. However, to show you my good will, I hastily throw together a short sketch. You can then add to it, supplement it, leave things out, in short, do with it whatever you think fit.

I no longer recall Proudhon’s first attempts. His school essay on the “Langue universelle” shows how unabashedly he ventured upon problems for the solution of which he still lacked the most elementary knowledge.

His first work, “Qu’est-ce que la propriété?” [What Is Property?], is unquestionably his best work. It is epoch-making, if not through new content, then surely through the new and audacious way of saying old things. In the works of the French socialists and communists known to him, “property” [propriété] had, of course, not only been criticised in manifold ways but also utopianly “superseded”. In that writing, Proudhon stands in relation to Saint-Simon and Fourier roughly as Feuerbach stands in relation to Hegel. Compared with Hegel, Feuerbach is thoroughly poor. Nevertheless, he was epoch-making after Hegel, because he placed the emphasis on certain points disagreeable to the Christian consciousness and important for the progress of criticism, which Hegel had left in a mystical clair-obscur.

If I may express myself in this way, in that writing of Proudhon’s there still prevails a strong muscularity of style. And I consider its style its chief merit. One sees that even where he merely reproduces old things, Proudhon discovers them independently; that what he says was new to him and passes as new. Defiant provocation, which lays hands on the economic “holy of holies”; witty paradox, with which common bourgeois understanding is mocked; rending judgement; bitter irony, here and there showing through a deep and true feeling of indignation at the infamy of what exists; revolutionary seriousness – through all this “Qu’est-ce que la propriété?” electrified and gave a great impulse upon its first appearance. In a strictly scientific history of political economy, that writing would hardly be worth mentioning. But such sensational writings play their role in the sciences just as much as in novel literature. Take, for example, Malthus’s essay on “Population”. In its first edition it is nothing but a “sensational pamphlet”, and, into the bargain, plagiarism from beginning to end. And yet, what an impulse that pasquinade on the human race gave!

If I had Proudhon’s writing before me, it would be easy to demonstrate his first manner by a few examples. In the paragraphs that he himself considered the most important, he imitates Kant’s treatment of the antinomies – this was the only German philosopher he then knew from translations – and leaves the strong impression that for him, as for Kant, the resolution of the antinomies is something that falls “beyond” human understanding, i.e., something about which his own understanding remains unclear.

Despite all the apparent storming of heaven, one already finds, however, in “Qu’est-ce que la propriété?” the contradiction that Proudhon, on the one hand, criticises society from the standpoint and with the eyes of a French small peasant (later petty bourgeois [petit bourgeois]), and on the other hand applies to it the measure handed down to him by the socialists.

The inadequacy of the writing was already indicated by its title. The question was so wrongly posed that it could not be answered correctly. The ancient “property relations” had perished in the feudal ones, the feudal ones in the “bourgeois” ones. History itself had thus exercised its criticism upon the past property relations. What Proudhon was really concerned with was the existing modern bourgeois property. To the question what this was, the only possible answer was a critical analysis of “political economy”,

which encompasses the whole of those property relations, not in their juridical expression as relations of the will, but in their real shape, i.e., as relations of production. But by tangling the totality of these economic relations into the general juridical notion of “property” [la propriété], Proudhon could not get beyond the answer which Brissot, in similar words, had already given before 1789 in a similar writing: “La propriété c’est le vol” [“property is theft”].

At best, the only thing that emerges from this is that the bourgeois-juridical conceptions of “theft” also apply to the citizen’s own “honest” gains. On the other hand, since “theft”, as the forcible violation of property, presupposes property, Proudhon entangled himself in all sorts of phantasies, obscure even to himself, about true bourgeois property.

During my stay in Paris in 1844, I entered into personal relations with Proudhon. I mention this here because I am to a certain extent also to blame for his “sophistication”, as the English call the adulteration of a commercial article. In the course of long, often overnight debates, I infected him, to his great harm, with Hegelianism, which, given his ignorance of the German language, he could not properly study. What I began, after my expulsion from Paris, Mr Karl Grün continued. As a teacher of German philosophy, he had the advantage over me that he himself understood nothing of it.

Shortly before the appearance of his second important work, “Philosophie de la misère, etc.”, Proudhon himself announced it to me in a very detailed letter, in which, among other things, these words occur: “J’attends votre férule critique” [“I await your stern criticism”]. Indeed, this soon fell upon him (in my writing “Misère de la philosophie, etc.”, Paris 1847) in a manner that put an end to our friendship forever.

From what has been said here you will see that Proudhon’s “Philosophie de la misère ou Système des contradictions économiques” actually contained the answer to the question “Qu’est-ce que la propriété?” for the first time. In fact, it was only after the publication of this writing that he had begun his economic studies; he had discovered that the question he had raised could not be answered with an invective, but only by an analysis of modern “political economy”. At the same time, he attempted to present the system of economic categories dialectically. In place of Kant’s insoluble “antinomies”, Hegel’s “contradiction” was to appear as the means of development. For an assessment of his two-volume, bulky work, I must refer you to my counter–writing. In it I showed, among other things, how little he had penetrated into the secret of scientific dialectics; how, on the other hand, he shares the illusions of speculative philosophy by not comprehending the economic categories as theoretical expressions of historical relations of production corresponding to a particular stage of development of material production, but instead prattles them into pre-existing, eternal ideas; and how, by this roundabout route, he arrives back again at the standpoint of bourgeois economy.(1)

I further show how utterly deficient and in part even schoolboyish is his acquaintance with the “political economy” whose criticism he undertook, and how he, together with the utopians, goes hunting after a so-called “science” from which a formula for the “solution of the social question” is to be spun out a priori, instead of deriving science from the critical knowledge of the historical movement, a movement which itself produces the material conditions of emancipation. In particular, however, it is shown how Proudhon remains unclear, false, and superficial about the foundation of the whole: exchange-value, and indeed mistakes the utopian interpretation of Ricardo’s theory of value for the basis of a new science. On his general standpoint I pass the following summary judgement:

“Every economic relation has a good side and a bad side; this is the only point on which Mr Proudhon does not give himself the lie. He sees the good side emphasised by the economists; the bad side denounced by the socialists. He borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations; he borrows from the socialists the illusion of seeing in misery nothing but misery (instead of seeing therein the revolutionary, destructive side which will overthrow the old society){1}. He is in agreement with both, while seeking to rely on the authority of science. Science for him reduces itself to the dwarfish dimensions of a scientific formula; he is the man on the hunt for formulas. Accordingly, Mr Proudhon flatters himself that he has given the criticism of both political economy and communism – he stands far below both. Beneath the economists, because as a philosopher who has a magic formula at hand he believes he can dispense with entering into the purely economic details; beneath the socialists, because he has neither sufficient courage nor sufficient insight to raise himself, even if only speculatively, above the bourgeois horizon.... He wants to hover as a man of science above bourgeoisie and proletariat;
he is only the petty bourgeois, continually tossed back and forth between capital and labour, between political economy and communism.”(2)

Harsh though the above judgement sounds, I must still today underwrite every word of it. At the same time, however, let it be borne in mind that at the time when I declared Proudhon’s book to be the codex of the socialism of the petty bourgeois [petit bourgeois] and proved this theoretically, Proudhon was still being denounced as an ultra-arch-revolutionary by political economists and by socialists alike. That is why later I never joined in the outcry over his “betrayal” of the revolution. It was not his fault if, originally misunderstood by others as by himself, he did not fulfil unjustified hopes.

In the “Philosophie de la misère”, all the defects of Proudhon’s manner of presentation stand out very unfavourably in contrast to “Qu’est-ce que la propriété?”. The style is often what the French call ampoulé [bombastic]. Highflown speculative mumbo-jumbo, purporting to be German-philosophical, makes its regular appearance where his Gallic acuteness fails. A market-crier’s, self-praising, braggart tone, and especially the forever so disgusting blathering about and false flaunting of “science”, incessantly grate on the ear. In place of the real warmth which illuminates the first writing, here at certain places one systematically works oneself up into a declaimed, fleeting heat. Add to this the clumsy, repellent erudition-mongering of the autodidact, whose native pride in original, independent thinking is already broken, and who now, as a parvenu of science, fancies he has to give himself airs with what he is not and does not have. Then the mentality of the petty bourgeois, who, for instance, attacks a man like Cabet, respectable on account of his practical attitude towards the French proletariat, with indecent brutality – neither sharp nor profound nor even correct – while, in contrast, he behaves obligingly towards, for example, a Dunoyer (a “Councillor of State”, to be sure), although the whole significance of that Dunoyer consists in the comic seriousness with which, throughout three thick, insufferably tedious volumes, he preached the rigorism that Helvetius characterises thus: “On veut que les malheureux soient parfaits” (One demands that the unfortunate be perfect).

The February Revolution came indeed very inopportunely for Proudhon, since only a few weeks earlier he had irrefutably proved that “the era of revolutions” was over for ever. His appearance in the National Assembly, however little insight into the prevailing conditions it displayed, deserves every praise. After the June insurrection it was an act of great courage. It had, moreover, the fortunate consequence that Monsieur Thiers, in his reply to Proudhon’s proposals—subsequently published as a separate pamphlet—demonstrated to the whole of Europe upon what a small children’s catechism pedestal this intellectual pillar of the French bourgeoisie stood. Faced with Monsieur Thiers, Proudhon indeed swelled up into an antediluvian colossus.

Proudhon’s discovery of “crédit gratuit” | “interest-free credit” | and the “people’s bank” (banque du peuple) based upon it were his last economic “deeds”. In my work “Zur Kritik der Politischen Oekonomie” (A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy), Part One, Berlin 1859 (pp. 59-64), the proof will be found that the theoretical basis of his view arises from a misapprehension of the first elements of bourgeois “political economy”, namely the relation of commodities to money, while the practical superstructure was merely a reproduction of much older and far better worked-out plans. That the credit system, just as, for example, it served at the beginning of the eighteenth and later again of the nineteenth century in England to transfer wealth from one class to another, can, under certain economic and political conditions, serve to accelerate the emancipation of the working class, is not subject to the slightest doubt and is self-evident. But to regard interest-bearing capital as the principal form of capital, but to want to make a particular application of the credit system—the pretended abolition of interest—the basis of the transformation of society, is a thoroughly philistine fantasy. This fantasy, therefore, further elaborated, is indeed already to be found among the economic spokesmen of the English petty bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century. Proudhon’s polemic against Bastiat (1850) concerning interest-bearing capital stands far below the “Philosophie de la misère”. He manages to be beaten even by Bastiat, and bursts into buffoonish blustering when his adversary deals him a blow.

A few years ago, Proudhon wrote a prize essay—I believe at the instigation of the government of Lausanne—on “Taxes”. Here the last trace of genius is extinguished. Nothing remains but the petit bourgeois tout pur | the petty bourgeois of the purest water.

As for Proudhon’s political and philosophical writings, they all display the same contradictory, twofold character as his economic works. At the same time, they have only local-French value. His attacks on religion, the Church, etc., however, possess great local merit at a time when the French socialists thought it appropriate to surpass the bourgeois Voltairianism of the eighteenth century and the German godlessness of the nineteenth by religiosity. If Peter the Great struck down Russian barbarism with barbarism, Proudhon did his best to strike down the French phrase-mongering with the phrase.

Must be designated as not merely bad writings but as infamies—yet infamies appropriate to the petty-bourgeois standpoint—are his pamphlet on the “Coup d’état”, in which he coquettes with Louis Bonaparte and indeed strives to make him palatable to the French workers, and his last work against Poland, in which he displays a cretinous cynicism in honour of the Tsar.

Proudhon has often been compared with Rousseau. Nothing can be more false. He bears a greater resemblance to Nicolas Linguet, whose “Théorie des loix civiles” is, by the way, a very brilliant book.

Proudhon was by nature inclined to dialectic. But since he never grasped the really scientific dialectic, he got no further than sophistry. In fact, this was bound up with his petty-bourgeois standpoint. Like the historian Raumer, the petty bourgeois is composed of on-the-one-hand and on-the-other-hand. Thus in his economic interests and hence in his politics, his religious, scientific and artistic views. Thus in his morality, so in everything [in allem]. He is the living contradiction. If, like Proudhon, he is a clever fellow, he will soon learn to play with his own contradictions and to elaborate them, according to circumstances, into striking, noisy, sometimes scandalous, sometimes brilliant paradoxes. Scientific charlatanism and political accommodation are inseparable from such a standpoint. There remains only one driving motive, the vanity of the subject, and the only question, as with all vain people, is success for the moment, the sensation of the day. In this way the simple moral tact that always kept a Rousseau, for example, far from any apparent compromise with the existing powers is necessarily extinguished.

Perhaps posterity will characterise the most recent phase of Frenchdom by noting that Louis Bonaparte was its Napoleon and Proudhon its Rousseau-Voltaire.

You must now yourself assume the responsibility for having imposed upon me, so soon after the man’s death, the role of the judge of the dead.

Your very obedient

Karl Marx

*Footnotes by Karl Marx.*

(1) “When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they thereby imply that these are relations in which the creation of wealth and the development of the productive forces proceed in accordance with natural laws. These relations are therefore 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.” (p. 113 of my work.)

(2) loc. cit., pp. 119, 120.