Brussels, 28 December [1846] Rue 
d@Orléans, 42, Faubourg Namur 

My dear Mr Annenkov, 

You would long since have had a reply to your letter of 
1 November had not my _ bookseller delayed sending me 
Mr Proudhon’s book, Philosophie de la misére, until last week. I 
skimmed through it in two days so as to be able to give you my 
opinion straight away. Having read the book very cursorily, I 
cannot go into details but can only let you have the general 
impression it made on me. Should you so desire, I could go into it 
in greater detail in another letter. 

To be frank, I must admit that I find the book on the whole 
poor, if not very poor. You yourself make fun in your letter of the 
‘little bit of German philosophy’ paraded by Mr Proudhon in this 
amorphous and overweening work, but you assume that the 
economic argument has remained untainted by the philosophic 
poison. Therefore I am by no means inclined to ascribe the faults 
of the economic argument to Mr _ Proudhon’s philosophy. 
Mr Proudhon does not provide a false critique of political economy 
because his philosophy is absurd—he produces an absurd 
philosophy because he has not understood present social condi- 
tions in their engrénement,* to use a word which Mr Proudhon 
borrows from Fourier, like so much else. 

Why does Mr Proudhon speak of God, of universal reason, of 
mankind’s impersonal reason which is never mistaken, which has 
at all times been equal to itself and of which one only has to be 
correctly aware in order to arrive at truth? Why does he indulge 
in feeble Hegelianism in order to set himself up as an esprit fort?? 

He himself provides the key to this enigma. Mr Proudhon sees 
in history a definite series of social developments; he finds 
progress realised in history; finally, he finds that men, taken as 
individuals, did not know what they were about, were mistaken as 
to their own course, i. e. that their social development appears at 
first sight to be something distinct, separate and independent of 
their individual development. He is unable to explain these facts, 

4 intermeshing - > Literally: strong intellect 

and the hypothesis of universal reason made manifest is ready to 
hand. Nothing is easier than to invent mystical causes, i.e. phrases 
in which common sense is lacking. 

But in admitting his total incomprehension of the historical 
development of mankind—and he admits as much in making use 
of high-flown expressions such as universal reason, God, etc.— 
does not Mr Proudhon admit, implicitly and of necessity, his 
inability to understand economic development? 

What is society, irrespective of its form? The product of man’s 
interaction upon man. Is man free to choose this or that form of 
society? By no means. If you assume a given state of development 
of man’s productive faculties, you will have a corresponding form 
of commerce and consumption. If you assume given stages of 
development in production, commerce or consumption, you will 
have a corresponding form of social constitution, a corresponding 
organisation, whether of the family, of the estates or of the 
classes—in a word, a corresponding civil society. If you assume 
this or that civil society, you will have this or that political system, 
which is but the official expression of civil society. This is 
something Mr Proudhon will never understand, for he imagines 
he’s doing something great when he appeals from the state to civil 
society, i. e. to official society from the official epitome of society. 

Needless to say, man is not free to choose his productive 
forces—upon which his whole history is based—for every produc- 
tive force is an acquired force, the product of previous activity. 
Thus the productive forces are the result of man’s practical 
energy, but that energy is in turn circumscribed by the conditions 
in which man is placed by the productive forces already acquired, 
by the form of society which exists before him, which he does not 
create, which is the product of the preceding generation. The 
simple fact that every succeeding generation finds productive 
forces acquired by the preceding generation and which serve it as 
the raw material of further production, engenders a relatedness in 
the history of man, engenders a history of mankind, which is all 
the more a history of mankind as man’s productive forces, and 
hence his social relations, have expanded. From this it can only be 
concluded that the social history of man is never anything else 
than the history of his individual development, whether he is 
conscious of this or not. His material relations form the basis of all 
his relations. These material relations are but the necessary forms 
in which his material and individual activity is realised. 

Mr Proudhon confuses ideas and things. Man never renounces 
what he has gained, but this does not mean that he never 

renounces the form of society in which he has acquired certain 
productive forces. On the contrary. If he is not to be deprived of 
the results obtained or to forfeit the fruits of civilisation, man is 
compelled to change all his traditional social forms as soon as the 
mode of commerce ceases to correspond to the productive forces 
acquired. Here I use the word commerce in its widest sense—as we 
would say Verkehr in German. For instance, privilege, the 
institution of guilds and corporations, the regulatory system of the 
Middle Ages, were the only social relations that corresponded to 
the acquired productive forces and to the pre-existing social 
conditions from which those institutions had emerged. Protected 
by the corporative and regulatory system, capital had accumulated, 
maritime trade had expanded, colonies had been founded—and 
man would have lost the very fruits of all this had he wished to 
preserve the forms under whose protection those fruits had 
ripened. And, indeed, two thunderclaps occurred, the revolutions 
of 1640 and of 1688. In England, all the earlier economic forms, 
the social relations corresponding to them, and the political system 
which was the official expression of the old civil society, were 
destroyed. Thus, the economic forms in which man _ produces, 
consumes and exchanges are transitory and historical. With the 
acquisition of new productive faculties man changes his mode of 
production and with the mode of production he changes all the 
economic relations which were but the necessary relations of that 
particular mode of production. 

It is this that Mr Proudhon has failed to understand, let alone 
demonstrate. Unable to follow the real course of history, Mr 
Proudhon provides a phantasmagoria which he has the presump- 
tion to present as a dialectical phantasmagoria. He no longer feels 
any need to speak of the seventeenth, eighteenth or nineteenth 
centuries, for his history takes place in the nebulous realm of the 
imagination and soars high above time and place. In a word, it is 
Hegelian trash, it is not history, it is not profane history—history 
of mankind, but sacred history——history of ideas. As seen by him, 
man is but the instrument used by the idea or eternal reason in 
order to unfold itself. The evolutions of which Mr Proudhon 
speaks are presumed to be evolutions such as take place in the 
mystical bosom of the absolute idea. If the veil of this mystical 
language be rent, it will be found that what Mr Proudhon gives us 
is the order in which economic categories are arranged within his 
mind. It would require no great effort on my part to prove to you 
that this arrangement is the arrangement of a very disorderly 
mind. 

Mr Proudhon opens his book with a dissertation on value which 
is his hobby-horse. For the time being I shall not embark upon an 
examination of that dissertation. 

The series of eternal reason’s economic evolutions begins with 
the division of labour. For Mr Proudhon, the division of labour is 
something exceedingly simple. But was not the caste system a 
specific division of labour? And was not the corporative system 
another division of labour? And is not the division of labour in the 
manufacturing system, which began in England in the middle of 
the seventeenth century and ended towards the end of the 
eighteenth century, likewise entirely distinct from the division of 
labour in big industry, in modern industry? 

Mr Proudhon is so far from the truth that he neglects to do 
what even profane economists do. In discussing the division of 
labour, he feels no need to refer to the world market. Well! Must 
not the division of labour in the fourteenth and _ fifteenth 
centuries, when there were as yet no colonies, when America was 
still non-existent for Europe, and when Eastern Asia existed 
only through the mediation of Constantinople, have been utterly 
different from the division of labour in the seventeenth century, 
when colonies were already developed? 

And that is not all. Is the whole internal organisation of nations, 
are their international relations, anything but the expression of a 
given division of labour? And must they not change as the division 
of labour changes? 

Mr Proudhon has so little understood the question of the 
division of labour that he does not even mention the separation of 
town and country which occurred in Germany, for instance, 
between the ninth and twelfth centuries. Thus, to Mr Proudhon, 
that separation must be an eternal law because he is unaware 
either of its origin or of its development. Throughout his book he 
speaks as though this creation of a given mode of production were 
to last till the end of time. All that Mr Proudhon says about the 
division of labour is but a résumé, and a very superficial and very 
incomplete résumé at that, of what Adam Smith and a thousand 
others said before him. 

The second evolution is machinery. With Mr Proudhon, the 
relation between the division of labour and machinery is a wholly 
mystical one. Each one of the modes of the division of labour had 
its specific instruments of production. For instance, between the 
mid-seventeenth and mid-eighteenth century man did not make 
everything by hand. He had tools and very intricate ones, such as 
looms, ships, levers, etc., etc. 

Thus nothing could be more absurd than to see machinery as 
deriving from the division of labour in general. 

In passing I should also point out that, not having understood 
the historical origin of machinery, Mr. Proudhon has still less 
understood its development. Up till 1825—-when the first general 
crisis occurred—it might be said that the requirements of 
consumption as a whole were growing more rapidly than 
production, and that the development of machinery was the 
necessary consequence of the needs of the market. Since 1825, the 
invention and use of machinery resulted solely from the war 
between masters and workmen. But this is true only of England. 
As for the European nations, they were compelled to use 
machinery by the competition they were encountering from the 
English, in their home markets as much as in the world market. 
Finally, where North America was concerned, the introduction of 
machinery was brought about both by competition with other 
nations and by scarcity of labour, i.e. by the disproportion 
between the population and the industrial requirements of North 
America. From this you will be able to see what wisdom Mr 
Proudhon evinces when he conjures up the spectre of competition 
as the third evolution, as the antithesis of machinery! 

Finally, and generally speaking, it is truly absurd to make 
machinery an economic category alongside the division of labour, 
competition, credit, etc. 

Machinery is no more an economic category than the ox who 
draws the plough. The present use of machinery is one of the 
relations of our present economic system, but the way in which 
machinery is exploited is quite distinct from the machinery itself. 
Powder is still powder; whether you use it to wound a man or to 
dress his wounds. 

Mr Proudhon surpasses himself in causing to grow inside his 
own brain competition, monopoly, taxes or police, balance of 
trade, credit and property in the order I have given here. Nearly 
all the credit institutions had been developed in England by the 
beginning of the eighteenth century, before the invention of 
machinery. State credit was simply another method of increasing 
taxes and meeting the new requirements created by the rise to 
power of the bourgeois class. Finally, property constitutes the last 
category in Mr Proudhon’s system. In the really existing world, on 
the other hand, the division of labour and all Mr Proudhon’s 
other categories are social relations which together go to make up 
what is now known as property; outside these relations bourgeois 
property is nothing but a metaphysical or juridical illusion. The 

property of another epoch, feudal property, developed in a wholly 
different set of social relations. In establishing property as an 
independent relation, Mr Proudhon is guilty of more than a 
methodological error: he clearly proves his failure to grasp the 
bond linking all forms of bourgeois production, or to understand 
the historical and transitory nature of the forms of production in 
any one epoch. Failing to see our social institutions as historical 
products and to understand either their origin or their develop- 
ment, Mr Proudhon can only subject them to a dogmatic critique. 

Hence Mr Proudhon is compelled to resort to a fiction in order 
to explain development. He imagines that the division of labour, 
credii, machinery, etc., were all invented in the service of his idée 
fixe, the idea of equality. His explanation is sublimely naive. These 
things were invented for the sake of equality, but unfortunately 
they have turned against equality. That is the whole of his 
argument. In other words, he makes a gratuitous assumption and, 
because actual development contradicts his fiction at every turn, 
he concludes that there is a contradiction. He conceals the fact 
that there is a contradiction only between his idées fixes and the 
real movement. 

Thus Mr Proudhon, chiefly because he doesn’t know history, 
fails to see that, in developing his productive faculties, i.e. in 
living, man develops certain inter-relations, and that the nature of 
these relations necessarily changes with the modification and the 
growth of the said productive faculties. He fails to see that 
economic categories are but abstractions of those real relations, that 
they are truths only in so far as those relations continue to exist. 
Thus he falls into the error of bourgeois economists who regard 
those economic categories as eternal laws and not as historical laws 
which are laws only for a given historical development, a specific 
development of the productive forces. Thus, instead of regarding 
politico-economic categories as abstractions of actual social rela- 
tions that are transitory and historical, Mr Proudhon, by a mystical 
inversion, sees in the real relations only the embodiment of those 
abstractions. Those abstractions are themselves formulas which 
have been slumbering in the bosom of God the Father since the 
beginning of the world. 

But here our good Mr Proudhon falls prey to severe intellectual 
convulsions. If all these economic categories are emanations of 
God’s heart, if they are the hidden and eternal life of man, how is 
it, first, that there is any development and, secondly, that Mr 
Proudhon is not a conservative? He explains these evident 
contradictions in terms of a whole system of antagonisms. 

In order to explain this system of antagonisms, let us take an 
example. 

Monopoly is good because it is an economic category, hence an 
emanation of God. Competition is good because it, too, is an 
economic category. But what is not good is the reality of monopoly 
and the reality of competition. And what is even worse is that 
monopoly and competition mutually devour each other. What is to 
be done about it? Because these two eternal thoughts of God 
contradict each other, it seems clear to him that, in God’s bosom, 
there is likewise a synthesis of these two thoughts in which the 
evils of monopoly are balanced by competition and vice versa. The 
result of the struggle between the two ideas will be that only the 
good aspects will be thrown into relief. This secret idea need only 
be wrested from God and put into practice and all will be for the 
best; the synthetic formula concealed in the night of mankind’s 
impersonal reason must be revealed. Mr Proudhon does not 
hesitate for a moment to act as revealer. 

But take a brief glance at real life. In present-day economic life 
you will find, not only competition and monopoly, but also their 
synthesis, which is not a formula but a movement. Monopoly 
produces competition, competition produces monopoly. That 
equation, however, far from alleviating the difficulties of the 
present situation, as bourgeois economists suppose, gives rise to a 
situation even more difficult and involved. Thus, by changing the 
basis upon which the present economic relations rest, by abolishing 
the present mode of production, you abolish not only competition, 
monopoly and their antagonism, but also their unity, their 
synthesis, the movement whereby a true balance is maintained 
between competition and monopoly. 

Let me now give you an example of Mr Proudhon’s dialectics. 

Freedom and slavery constitute an antagonism. There is no need 
for me to speak either of the good or of the bad aspects of 
freedom. As for slavery, there is no need for me to speak of its 
bad aspects. The only thing requiring explanation is the good side 
of slavery. I do not mean indirect slavery, the slavery of 
proletariat; I mean direct slavery, the slavery of the Blacks in 
Surinam, in Brazil, in the southern regions of North America. | 

Direct slavery is as much the pivot upon which our present-day 
industrialism turns as are machinery, credit, etc. Without slavery 
there would be no cotton, without cotton there would be no 
modern industry. It is slavery which has given value to the 
colonies, it is the colonies which have created world trade, and 
world trade is the necessary condition for large-scale machine 

industry. Consequently, prior to the slave trade, the colonies sent 
very few products to the Old World, and did not noticeably 
change the face of the world. Slavery is therefore an economic 
category of paramount importance. Without slavery, North 
America, the most progressive nation, would be transformed into 
a patriarchal country. Only wipe North America off the map and 
you will get anarchy, the complete decay of trade and modern 
civilisation. But to do away with slavery would be to wipe America 
off the map. Being an economic category, slavery has existed in all 
nations since the beginning of the world. All that modern nations 
have achieved is to disguise slavery at home and import it openly 
into the New World. After these reflections on slavery, what will 
the good Mr Proudhon do? He will seek the synthesis of liberty 
and slavery, the true golden mean, in other words the balance 
between slavery and liberty. 

Mr Proudhon understands perfectly well that men manufacture 
worsted, linens and silks; and whatever credit is due for un- 
derstanding such a trifle! What Mr Proudhon does not under- 
stand is that, according to their faculties, men also produce the 
social relations in which they produce worsted and linens. Still less 
does Mr Proudhon understand that those who produce social 
relations in conformity with their material productivity also 
produce the ideas, categories, i.e. the ideal abstract expressions of 
those same social relations. Indeed, the categories are no more 
eternal than the relations they express. They are historical and 
transitory products. To Mr Proudhon, on the contrary, the prime 
cause consists in abstractions and categories. According to him it is 
these and not men which make history. The abstraction, the category 
regarded as such, i.e. as distinct from man and his material activity, 
is, of course, immortal, immutable, impassive. It is nothing but an 
entity of pure reason, which is only another way of saying that an 
abstraction, regarded as such, is abstract. An admirable tautology! 

Hence, to Mr Proudhon, economic relations, seen in the form of 
categories, are eternal formulas without origin or progress. 

To put it another way: Mr Proudhon does not directly assert 
that to him bourgeois life is an eternal truth: he says so indirectly, by 
deifying the categories which express bourgeois relations in the 
form of thought. He regards the products of bourgeois society as 
spontaneous entities, endowed with a life of their own, eternal, the 
moment these present themselves to him in the shape of 
categories, of thought. Thus he fails to rise above the bourgeois 
horizon. Because he operates with bourgeois thoughts and 
assumes them to be eternally true, he looks for the synthesis of 

those thoughts, their balance, and fails to see that their present 
manner of maintaining a balance is the only possible one. 

In fact he does what all good bourgeois do. They all maintain 
that competition, monopoly, etc., are, in principle—i.e. regarded 
as abstract thoughts—the only basis for existence, but leave a 
great deal to be desired in practice. What they all want is 
competition without the pernicious consequences of competition. 
They all want the impossible, i.e. the conditions of bourgeois 
existence without the necessary consequences of those conditions. 
They all fail to understand that the bourgeois form of production 
is an historical and transitory form, just as was the feudal form. 
This mistake is due to the fact that, to them, bourgeois man is the 
only possible basis for any society, and that they cannot envisage a 
state of society in which man will have ceased to be bourgeois. 

Hence Mr Proudhon is necessarily dectrinaire. The historical 
movement by which the present world is convulsed resolves itself, 
so far as he is concerned, into the problem of discovering the right 
balance, the synthesis of two bourgeois thoughts. Thus, by 
subtlety, the clever fellow discovers God’s secret thought, the unity 
of*two isolated thoughts which are isolated thoughts only because 
Mr Proudhon has isolated them from practical life, from 
present-day production, which is the combination of the realities 
they express. In place of the great historical movement which is 
born of the conflict between the productive forces already 
acquired by man, and his social relations which no longer 
correspond to those productive forces, in the place of the terrible 
wars now imminent between the various classes of a nation and 
between the various nations, in place of practical and violent 
action on the part of the masses, which is alone capable of 
resolving those conflicts, in place of that movement—vast, 
prolonged and complex—Mr Proudhon puts the cacky-dauphin 
movement !** of his own mind. Thus it is the savants, the men able 
to filch from God his inmost thoughts, who make history. All the 
lesser fry have to do is put their revelations into practice. 

Now you will understand why Mr Proudhon is the avowed 
enemy of all political movements. For him, the solution of 
present-day problems does not consist in public action but in the 
dialectical rotations of his brain. Because to him the categories are 
the motive force, it is not necessary to change practical life in 
order to change the categories; on the contrary, it is necessary to 
change the categories, whereupon actual society will change as a 
result. 

In his desire to reconcile contradictions Mr Proudhon does not 

ask himself whether the very basis of those contradictions ought 
not to be subverted. He is exactly like the political doctrinaire who 
wants a king and a chamber of deputies and a chamber of peers as 
integral parts of social life, as eternal categories. Only he seeks a 
new formula with which to balance those powers (whose balance 
consists precisely in the actual movement in which one of those 
powers is now the conqueror now the slave of the other). In the 
eighteenth century, for instance, a whole lot of mediocre minds 
busied themselves with finding the true formula with which to 
maintain a balance between the social estates, the nobility, the 
king, the parliaments,'*’ etc., and the next day there was neither 
king, nor parliament, nor nobility. The proper balance between 
the aforesaid antagonisms consisted in the convulsion of all the 
social relations which served as a basis for those feudal entities and 
for the antagonism between those feudal entities. 

Because Mr Proudhon posits on the one hand eternal ideas, the 
categories of pure reason, and, on the other, man and his practical 
life which, according to him, is the practical application of these 
categories, you will find in him from the very outset a dualism 
between life and ideas, between soul and body—a dualism which 
recurs in many forms. So you now see that the said antagonism is 
nothing other than Mr Proudhon’s inability to understand either 
the origin or the profane history of the categories he has deified. 

My letter is already too long for me to mention the absurd case 
Mr Proudhon is conducting against communism. For the present 
you will concede that a man who has failed to understand the pre- 
sent state of society must be even less able to understand either 
the movement which tends to overturn it or the literary expression 
of that revolutionary movement. 

The only point upon which I am in complete agreement with Mr 
Proudhon is the disgust he feels for socialist sentimentalising. I 
anticipated him in provoking considerable hostility by the ridicule 
I directed at ovine, sentimental, utopian socialism. But is not Mr 
Proudhon subject to strange delusions when he opposes his 
petty-bourgeois sentimentality, by which I mean his homilies about 
home, conjugal love and suchlike banalities, to socialist sentimen- 
tality which—as for instance in Fourier’s case—is infinitely more 
profound than the presumptuous platitudes of our worthy 
Proudhon? He himself is so well aware of the emptiness of his 
reasoning, of his complete inability to discuss such things, that he 
indulges in tantrums, exclamations and irae hominis probi,* that he 

a the anger of an upright man 

fumes, curses, denounces, cries pestilence and infamy, thumps his 
chest and glorifies himself before God and man as being innocent 
of socialist infamies! It is not as a critic that he derides socialist 
sentimentalities, or what he takes to be sentimentalities. It is as a 
saint, a pope, that he excommunicates the poor sinners and sings 
the praises of the petty bourgeoisie and of the miserable 
patriarchal amorous illusions of the domestic hearth. Nor is this in 
any way fortuitous. Mr Proudhon is, from top to toe, a 
philosopher, an economist of the petty bourgeoisie. In an 
advanced society and because of his situation, a petty bourgeois 
becomes a socialist on the one hand, and economist on the other, 
i.e. he is dazzled by the magnificence of the upper middle classes 
and feels compassion for the sufferings of the people. He is at one 
and the same time bourgeois and man of the people. In his heart 
of hearts he prides himself on his impartiality, on having found 
the correct balance, allegedly distinct from the happy medium. A 
petty bourgeois of this kind deifies contradiction, for contradiction 
is the very basis of his being. He is nothing but social contradiction 
in action. He must justify by means of theory what he is in 
practice, and Mr Proudhon has the merit of being the scientific 
exponent of the French petty bourgeoisie, which is a real merit 
since the petty bourgeoisie will be an integral part of all the 
impending social revolutions. 

With this letter I should have liked to send you my book on 
political economy,” but up till now I have been unable to have 
printed either this work or the critique of German philosophers 
and socialists* which I mentioned to you in Brussels. You would 
never believe what difficulties a publication of this kind runs into 
in Germany, on the one hand from the police, on the other from 
the booksellers, who are themselves the interested representatives 
of all those tendencies J attack. And as for our own party, not only 
is it poor, but there is a large faction in the German communist 
party which bears me a grudge because I am opposed to its 
utopias and its declaiming. 

Ever yours 
Charles Marx 

P.S. Perhaps you may wonder why I should be writing in bad 
French rather than in good German. It is because I am dealing 
with a French writer. 

* K. Marx and F. Engels, The German Ideology. 

You would greatly oblige me by not keeping me waiting too 
long for a reply, as I am anxious to know whether you understand 
me wrapped up as I am in my barbarous French.