Fourth Observation 


Let us see now to what modifications M. Proudhon subjects 
Hegel’s dialectics when he applies it to political economy. 

For him, M. Proudhon, every economic category has two 
sides—one good, the other bad. He looks upon these categories as 
the petty bourgeois looks upon the great men of history: Napoleon 
was a great man; he did a lot of good; he also did a lot of harm. 

The good side and the bad side, the advantages and the drawbacks, 
taken together form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in every 
economic category. 

The problem to be solved: to keep the good side, while eliminating 
the bad. 

Slavery is an economic category like any other. Thus it also has its 
two sides. Let us leave alone the bad side and talk about the good side 
of slavery. Needless to say we are dealing only with direct slavery, 
with Negro slavery in Surinam, in Brazil, in the Southern States of 
North America. 

Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as 
machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have no cotton; without 
cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that gave the 
colonies their value; it is the colonies that created world trade, and it 
is world trade that is the precondition of large-scale industry. Thus 
slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. 

Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, 
would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe North 
America off the map of the world, and you will have anarchy—the 
complete decay of modern commerce and civilisation. Cause slavery 
to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of 
nations.* 


* This was perfectly correct for the year 1847. At that time the world trade of the 
United States was limited mainly to import of immigrants and industrial products, and 
export of cotton and tobacco, i.e., of the products of southern slave labour. The 
Northern States produced mainly corn and meat for the slave States. It was only when 
the North produced corn and meat for export and also became an industrial country, 
and when the American cotton monopoly had to face powerful competition, in In- 


168 Karl eon 


Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always 
existed among the institutions of the peoples. Modern nations have 
been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they 
have imposed it without disguise upon the New World. 

What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate 
the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, 
eliminate the bad. 

Hegel has no problems to formulate. He has only dialectics. 
M. Proudhon has nothing of Hegel’s dialectics but the language. For 
him the dialectic movement is the dogmatic distinction between good 
and bad. 

Let us for a moment consider M. Proudhon himself as a category. 
Let us examine his good and his bad side, his advantages and his 
drawbacks. ; 

If he has the advantage over Hegel of setting problems which he 
reserves the right of solving for the greater good of humanity, he has 
the drawback of being stricken with sterility when it is a question of 
engendering a new category by dialectical birth-throes. What 
constitutes dialectical movement is the coexistence of two contradic- 
tory sides, their conflict and their fusion into a new category. The 
very setting of the problem of eliminating the bad side cuts short the 
dialectical movement. It is not the category which is posed and 
opposed to itself, by its contradictory nature, it is M. Proudhon who 
gets excited, perplexed and frets and fumes between the two sides of 
the category. 

Caught thus in a blind alley, from which it is difficult to escape by 
legal means, M. Proudhon takes a real flying leap which transports 
him at one bound into a new category. Then it is that to his 
astonished gaze is revealed the serial relation in the understanding. 

He takes the first category that comes handy and attributes to it 
arbitrarily the quality of supplying a remedy for the drawbacks of the 
category to be purified. Thus, if we are to believe M. Proudhon, 
taxes remedy the drawbacks of monopoly; the balance of trade, the 
drawbacks of taxes; landed property, the drawbacks of credit. 

By taking the economic categories thus successively, one by one, 
and making one the antidote to the other, M. Proudhon manages to 
make with this mixture of contradictions and antidotes to contradic- 


tions, two volumes of contradictions, which he rightly entitles: Le 
Systéme des contradictions économiques. 


dia, Egypt, Brazil, etc., that the abolition of slavery became possible. And even then 
this led to the ruin of the South, which did not succeed in replacing the open Negro 
slavery by the disguised slavery of Indian and Chinese coolies, F. E. [ Note to the German 
edition, 1885.]