Karl Marx
On P.-J. Proudhon

Letter to Johann Baptist von Schweitzer

Der Social-Demokrat.
No. 16, 1 February 1865

On P.-J. Proudhon

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. To show you my goodwill, however, I rapidly jot down a short sketch. You may then supplement, add, correct, in short do with it whatever you think fit.

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

His first work, *Qu’est-ce que la Propriété?*, is unquestionably his best work. It is epoch-making, if not through new content, then at least through the new and audacious manner of saying old things. In the works of the French socialists and communists known to him, “property” was naturally not only criticised in manifold ways, but also utopianly “abolished”. In that work, Proudhon relates to Saint-Simon and Fourier roughly as Feuerbach related to Hegel. Compared with Hegel, Feuerbach is altogether poor. Nevertheless, he was epoch-making after Hegel, because he stressed certain points uncomfortable to the Christian consciousness and important for the progress of criticism, which Hegel had left in a mystical chiaroscuro.

If I may put it in this way, that work of Proudhon’s still shows a strong muscularity of style. And I regard its style as its main merit. One sees that even where he only reproduces old matter, Proudhon finds things independently; that what he says was new to him and is accepted as new. Defiant insolence, which lays hands on the economic “holy of holies”, witty paradox with which the common bourgeois understanding is hoaxed, scathing judgement, bitter irony, now and then a deep and true feeling of indignation at the infamy of existing conditions breaking through, revolutionary earnestness – by all these things *Qu’est-ce que la Propriété?* had an electrifying effect and caused a great stir when it first appeared. In a strictly scientific history of political economy, that work would scarcely be worth mentioning. But such sensational writings play their role in the sciences just as well as in novel literature. Take, for example, Malthus’s work on “Population”. In its first edition, it is nothing but a “sensational pamphlet”, and plagiarism from beginning to end into the bargain. And yet what a stir this pasquinade upon the human race caused!

If I had Proudhon’s work before me, it would be easy to demonstrate his first manner with a few examples. In the paragraphs he himself considered the most important, he imitates Kant’s treatment of the antinomies – this was the only German philosopher he knew at that time, from translations – and leaves the strong impression that, like Kant, he regards the resolution of the antinomies as something lying “beyond” human understanding, i.e., something about which his own understanding remains in the dark.

Despite all this apparent storming of heaven, however, one finds already 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-holding peasant (later petit bourgeois), and on the other hand, applies the standard handed down to him by the socialists.

The inadequacy of the work was already indicated in its title. The question was so wrongly put that it could not be answered correctly. The ancient “property relations” had been subsumed in the feudal, the feudal in the “bourgeois”. History itself had thus exercised its critique of past property relations. What Proudhon was really dealing with was existing, modern bourgeois property. The question what this is could only be answered by a critical analysis of “political economy”, which encompasses the whole of those property relations, not in their juridical expression as relations of will, but in their real form, i.e., as relations of production. But by interweaving the totality of these economic relations in the general juridical notion “property” – *la propriété* – Proudhon could not get beyond the answer which Brissot had already given in a similar work, in the same words, before 1789: *La Propriété, c’est le vol.*

At best, all that emerges from this is that the bourgeois juridical notions of “theft” also fit the citizen’s own “honest” acquisition. On the other hand, because “theft” as a forcible violation of property presupposes property, Proudhon entangled himself in all sorts of brain-spinnings, unclear 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 to blame for his “sophistication”, as the English call the adulteration of a commercial article. During long, often night-long debates, I infected him, to his great detriment, with Hegelianism, which, owing to his ignorance of the German language, he could not study properly. What I began, Herr Karl Grün continued after my expulsion from Paris. As a teacher of German philosophy, he had the advantage over me that he himself understood nothing of it.

Shortly before the publication 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, the words occur: “J’attends votre férule critique.” However, this soon fell upon him in a manner (in my work, *Misère de la philosophie, etc.*, Paris, 1847) which ended our friendship forever.

Der Social-Demokrat.
No. 17, 3 February 1865

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?* only now. Indeed, he had only begun his economic studies after the appearance of this work; he had discovered that the question he had raised could not be answered with an invective, but only through 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”, the Hegelian “contradiction” was to appear as the means of development.

For an assessment of his two-volume, thick work, I must refer you to my counter-critique. 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 transforming the economic categories, instead of comprehending them as theoretical expressions of historical relations of production, corresponding to a particular stage of development of material production, into pre-existing, eternal ideas, and how, by this detour, he arrives back at the standpoint of bourgeois economy.*

* “En disant que les rapports actuels – les rapports de la production bourgeoise – sont naturels, les économistes font entendre que ce sont là des rapports dans lesquels se crée la richesse et se développent les forces productives conformément aux lois de la nature. Donc ces rapports sont eux-mêmes des lois naturelles indépendantes de l’influence du temps. Ce sont des lois éternelles qui doivent toujours régir la société. Ainsi il y a eu de l’histoire, mais il n’y en a plus.” (p. 113 of my work.) (When the economists say that present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural, they imply that these are relations in which wealth is created and productive forces develop in conformity with the laws of nature. 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 a history, but there is none anymore.)

I further show how thoroughly defective and partly even schoolboyish his acquaintance with “political economy” is, the critique of which he undertook, and how he, with the utopians, goes hunting for a so-called “science” by means of 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, it is shown how Proudhon remains in the dark, wrong and half-hearted 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.

I sum up my judgement on his general standpoint as follows:

“Chaque rapport économique a un bon et un mauvais côté: c’est le seul point dans lequel M. Proudhon ne se dément pas. Le bon côté, il le voit exposé par les économistes; le mauvais côté, il le voit dénoncé par les socialistes. Il emprunte aux économistes la nécessité des rapports éternels; il emprunte aux socialistes l’illusion de ne voir dans la misère que la misère (au lieu d’y voir le côté révolutionnaire, subversif, qui renversera la société ancienne). Il est d’accord avec les uns et les autres en voulant s’en référer à l’autorité de la science. La science, pour lui, se réduit aux minces proportions d’une formule scientifique; il est l’homme à la recherche des formules. C’est ainsi que M. Proudhon se flatte d’avoir donné la critique et de l’économie politique et du communisme: il est au-dessous de l’une et de l’autre. Au-dessous des économistes, puisque comme philosophe, qui a sous la main une formule magique, il a cru pouvoir se dispenser d’entrer dans des détails purement économiques; au-dessous des socialistes, puisqu’il n’a ni assez de courage, ni assez de lumières pour s’élever, – ne serait-ce que spéculativement – au-dessus de l’horizon bourgeois. Il veut planer en héros de science au-dessus des bourgeois et des prolétaires – il n’est que le petit bourgeois, ballotté constamment entre le capital et le travail, entre l’économie politique et le communisme.”

(“Every economic relation has a good and a bad side: this is the only point on which M. Proudhon does not slap his own face. The good side he sees emphasised by the political economists. The bad side he sees denounced by the socialists. He borrows from the political economists the necessity of eternal relations; he borrows from the socialists the delusion of seeing nothing in misery but misery (instead of discerning in it the revolutionary, destructive side which will overthrow the old society). He agrees with the latter and with the former, by appealing to the authority of science. For him, science shrinks to the tiny proportions of a scientific formula: he is the man on the hunt for formulas. In this way, M. Proudhon flatters himself that he has delivered a critique both of political economy and of communism – yet he stands below the one as below the other. Below the political economists, because, as a philosopher who has a magic formula in his hands, he believes himself exempt from entering into the purely economic particulars; below the socialists, because he has neither the courage nor the intellectual clarity to raise himself – even if only speculatively – above the bourgeois horizon. He aspires to hover above the bourgeoisie and the proletarians as a hero of science – and he is only the petty bourgeois, constantly tossed back and forth between capital and labour, between political economy and communism.”)

Harsh as the foregoing judgement sounds, I must still today subscribe to every word of it. At the same time, however, one should bear in mind that at the time when I declared Proudhon’s book to be the codex of the socialism of the petit bourgeois and proved this theoretically, Proudhon was still being condemned as an ultra-arch-revolutionary by political economists and by socialists alike. For that reason, later on, I too never joined in the outcry about his “betrayal” of the revolution. It was not his fault if, originally misunderstood both by others and by himself, he failed to fulfil unwarranted hopes.

*) l. c. p. 119, 120.

Der Social-Demokrat.
No. 18, 5 February 1865
In the Philosophie de la Misère, all the defects of Proudhon’s mode of presentation stand out very unfavourably, in contrast to Qu’est-ce que la Propriété? The style is often what the French call ampoulé. High-flown speculative gibberish, purporting to be German-philosophical, appears as a rule wherever his Gallic sharpness of understanding runs out. A charlatanesque, self-adulating, swaggering tone, in particular the ever so unedifying cant about, and false parade with, “science”, rings incessantly in one’s ears. Instead of the genuine warmth that suffuses the first work, here, in certain passages, he systematically declaims his way into a fevered heat. On top of this, the clumsy, repellent learned pretensions of the autodidact, whose native pride in original independent thought has already been broken, and who now, as a parvenu of science, feels he must puff himself up with what he is not and does not have. Then, the disposition of the petty bourgeois who, for instance, attacks a man like Cabet – respectable on account of his practical stance towards the French proletariat – with indecent brutality, neither sharp nor deep, nor even correct, yet, on the other hand, makes himself agreeable towards, e.g., a Dunoyer (a “State Councillor”, indeed), although the whole significance of that same Dunoyer consisted in the comical seriousness with which, over three fat, unbearably tedious volumes, he preached the rigorism that Helvetius characterises thus: On veut que les malheureux soient parfaits. (They demand that the unfortunate be perfect.)

The February revolution came, in fact, very inconveniently for Proudhon, since he had proved irrefutably just a few weeks earlier that “the era of revolutions” was over forever. His appearance in the National Assembly, however little insight it proved into the actual circumstances, deserves all praise. After the June insurrection, it was an act of great courage. In addition, it had the favourable effect that M. Thiers, in his reply to Proudhon’s proposals, which was then published as a separate pamphlet, proved to all Europe what an infant-catechism-pedestal the intellectual pillar of the French bourgeoisie stood upon. Compared to M. Thiers, Proudhon did indeed swell into an antediluvian colossus.

Proudhon’s discovery of “gratuitous 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. Heft 1. Berlin 1859 (p. 59–64), one will find the proof that the theoretical foundation of his view springs from a misapprehension of the first elements of bourgeois “political economy”, namely of the relation of commodities to

money, while the practical superstructure was mere reproduction of much older and far better elaborated plans. That the credit system, exactly as it served, e.g., in England at the beginning of the 18th and later again of the 19th century, to transfer wealth from one class to another, can, under certain economic and political circumstances, serve to accelerate the emancipation of the working class, is not subject to the slightest doubt, 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 alleged abolition of interest, the basis of the transformation of society – that is a thoroughly petty-bourgeois fantasy. One finds this fantasy, in fact, further padded out, already among the economic spokesmen of the English petty bourgeoisie of the seventeenth century.

Proudhon’s polemic with 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 burlesque bluster when his opponent applies force to him.

A few years ago, Proudhon wrote a prize essay – I think commissioned by the Lausanne government – on “Taxes”. Here even the last trace of genius vanishes. Nothing remains but the petit bourgeois tout pur.

As regards Proudhon’s political and philosophical writings, they all exhibit the same contradictory, double-edged character as the economic works. Moreover, 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 considered it appropriate to show themselves superior to the bourgeois Voltairianism of the 18th and the German godlessness of the 19th century through religiosity. If Peter the Great struck down Russian barbarism with barbarism, Proudhon did his best to strike down French phrase-mongering with the phrase.

His work on the coup d’état, in which he coquettes with L. Bonaparte and in fact strives to make him palatable to the French workers, and his last work against Poland, in which he goes in for cretin-like cynicism in honour of the Tsar, are to be characterised not only as bad works, but as base ones – base ones corresponding, however, to the petty-bourgeois standpoint.

Proudhon has often been compared with Rousseau. Nothing could be more false. Rather, he bears a resemblance to Nic. Linguet, whose Théorie des Lois Civiles is, by the way, a very brilliant book.

Proudhon had a natural inclination for dialectics. But since he never grasped the really

scientific dialectic, he got no further than sophistry. In fact, this hung together with his petty-bourgeois standpoint. The petty bourgeois, like the historian Raumer, is composed of “on the one hand” and “on the other hand”. So it is in his economic interests, and consequently in his politics, his religious, scientific, and artistic views. So it is in his morality, so in everything. He is the living contradiction. If, like Proudhon, he is a clever man, he will soon learn to play with his own contradictions and 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, as with all vain people, the question becomes one merely of the success of the moment, of the sensation of the day. Thus, the simple moral tact that always kept a Rousseau, for example, free from even the semblance of compromise with the existing powers is necessarily extinguished.

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

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

Your wholly devoted
Karl Marx.