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

London, January 24, 1865

Dear Sir.

Yesterday I received a letter in which you demand from me a detailed
judgment of Proudhon. Lack of time prevents me from fulfilling your
desire. Added to which I have none of his works to hand. However,
in order to assure you of my good will I will quickly jot down a brief
outline. You can then complete it, add to it or cut it – in short do anything
you like with it. [The editors of Der Social-Demokrat supplied a footnote

Proudhon’s earliest efforts I no longer remember. His school work
about the Langue universelle shows how unceremoniously he tackled
problems for the solution of which he still lacked the first elements of
knowledge.

His first work, Qu’est-ce que la propriété?,
is undoubtedly his best. It is epoch-making, if not because of the novelty
of its content, at least because of the new and audacious way of expressing
old ideas. In the works of the French socialists and communists he knew
 “propriété” had, of course, been not only criticised
in various ways but also “abolished” in a utopian manner. In this
book Proudhon stands in approximately the same relation to Saint-Simon
and Fourier as Feuerbach stands to Hegel. Compared with Hegel, Feuerbach
is certainly poor. Nevertheless he was epoch-making after Hegel
because he laid stress on certain points which were disagreeable
to the Christian consciousness but important for the progress of criticism,
points which Hegel had left in mystic clair-obscur [semi-obscurity].

In this book of Proudhon’s there still prevails, if I may be allowed
the expression, a strong muscular style. And its style is in my opinion
its chief merit. It is evident that even where he is only reproducing old
stuff, Proudhon discovers things in an independent way – that what he
is saying is new to him and is treated as new. The provocative defiance,
which lays hands on the economic “holy of holies,” the ingenious paradox
which made a mock of the ordinary bourgeois understanding, the withering
criticism, the bitter irony, and, revealed here and there, a deep and genuine
feeling of indignation at the infamy of the existing order, a revolutionary
earnestness – all these electrified the readers of Qu’est-ce que la
propriété? and provided a strong stimulus on its first
appearance. In a strictly scientific history of political economy the book
would hardly be worth mentioning. But sensational works of this kind have
their role to play in the sciences just as much as in the history of the
novel. Take, for instance, Malthus’s book on Population.
Its first edition was nothing but a “SENSATIONAL PAMPHLET” and plagiarism
from beginning to end into the bargain. And yet what a stimulus was produced
by this lampoon on the human race!

If I had Proudhon’s book before me I could easily give a few examples
to illustrate his early style. In the passages which he himself
regarded as the most important he imitates Kant’s treatment of the
antinomies – Kant was at that time the only German philosopher
whose works he had read, in translations – and he leaves one with a strong
impression that to him, as to Kant, the resolution of the antinomies is
something “beyond” human understanding, i.e., something that remains
obscure to him himself.

But in spite of all his apparent iconoclasm one already finds
in Qu’est-ce que la propriété’? the contradiction
that Proudhon is criticising society, on the one hand, from the standpoint
and with the eyes of a French small-holding peasant (later petit bourgeois)
and, on the other, that he measures it with the standards he inherited
from the socialists.

The deficiency of the book is indicated by its very title. The
question is so badly formulated that it cannot be answered correctly. Ancient
 “property relations” were superseded by feudal property relations
and these by “bourgeois” property relations. Thus history itself
had expressed its criticism upon past property relations. What Proudhon
was actually dealing with was modern bourgeois property as it exists
today. The question of what this is could have only been answered by a
critical analysis of “political economy,” embracing the totality
of these property relations, considering not their legal
aspect as relations of volition but their real form, that is, as
relations of production. But as Proudhon entangled the whole of
these economic relations in the general legal concept of “property,”
 “la propriété,” he could not get beyond the answer which,
in a similar work published before 1789, Brissot had already given
in the same words: “La propriété’ c’est le vol.”

The upshot is at best that the bourgeois legal conceptions of
 “theft” apply equally well to the “honest” gains of the bourgeois
himself. On the other hand, since “theft” as a forcible violation
of property presupposes the existence of property, Proudhon entangled
himself in all sorts of fantasies, obscure even to himself, about true
bourgeois property.

During my stay in Paris in 1844 I came into personal contact with
Proudhon. I mention this here because to a certain extent I am also to
blame for his “SOPHISTICATION”: as the English call the adulteration
of commercial goods. In the course of lengthy debates often lasting all
night, I infected him very much to his detriment with Hegelianism, which,
owing to his lack of German, he could not study properly. After my expulsion
from Paris Herr Karl Grün continued what I had begun. As a
teacher of German philosophy he also had the advantage over me that he
himself understood nothing about it.

Shortly before the appearance of Proudhon’s second important work,
the Philosophie de la misère, etc., he himself announced
this to me in a very detailed letter in which he said, among other things:
"J’attends votre férule critique." This criticism, however,
soon dropped on him (in my Misère de la philosophie, etc.,
Paris, 1847), in a way which ended our friendship for ever.

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

From what I have said here, you can see that Proudhon’s
Philosophie de la misère ou Système des contradictions
èconomiques first contained the real answer to the question
Qu’est-ce que la propriété? In fact it was only after
the publication of this work that he had begun his economic studies; he
had discovered that the question he had raised could not be answered by
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", the Hegelian “contradiction" was to be introduced
as the means of development.

For an estimate of his book, which is in two fat volumes, I must
refer you to the refutation I wrote. There I have shown, among other things,
how little he had penetrated into the secret of scientific dialectics and
how, on the contrary, he shares the illusions of speculative philosophy,
for instead of regarding economic categories as the theoretical expression
of historical relations of production, corresponding to a particular stage
of development in material production, he garbles them into pre-existing
eternal ideas, and how in this roundabout way he arrives once more
at the standpoint of bourgeois economy. [“When the economists say that
present-day relations – the relations of bourgeois production – are natural,
they imply that these are the relations in which wealth is created and
productive forces developed in conformity with the laws of nature. These
relations therefore are 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).]

I show furthermore how extremely deficient and at times even schoolboyish
is his knowledge of “political economy” which he undertook to criticise,
and that he and the utopians are hunting for a so-called “science”
by means of which a formula for the “solution of the social question” is
to be devised a priori, instead of deriving science from a critical
knowledge of the historical movement, a movement which itself produces
the material conditions of emancipation. My refutation shows in
particular that Proudhon’s view of exchange-value, the basis of
the whole theory, remains confused, incorrect and superficial, and that
he even mistakes the utopian interpretation of Ricardo’s theory
of value for the basis of a new science. With regard to his general point
of view I have summarised my conclusions thus:

 “Every economic relation has a good and a bad side, it is the one point
on which M. Proudhon does not give himself the lie. He sees the good side
expounded by the economists; the bad side he sees denounced by the socialists.
He borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations; he borrows
from the socialists the illusion of seeing in poverty nothing but poverty
(instead of seeing in it the revolutionary, destructive aspect which will
overthrow the old society). He is in agreement with both in wanting to
fall back upon the authority of science. Science for him reduces itself
to the slender proportions of a scientific formula; he is the man in search
of formulas. Thus it is that M. Proudhon flatters himself on having given
a criticism of both political economy and of communism: he is beneath them
both. Beneath the economists, since as a philosopher who has at his elbow
a magic formula, he thought he could dispense with going into purely economic
details; beneath the socialists, because he has neither courage enough
nor insight enough to rise, be it even speculatively, above the bourgeois
horizon....

“He wants to soar as the man of science above the bourgeois and
the proletarians; he is merely the petty bourgeois, continually
tossed back and forth between capital and labour, political economy and
communism."

Severe though the above judgment may sound I must even now endorse every
word of it. At the same time, however, one has to bear in mind that when
I declared his book to be the code of socialism of the petit bourgeois
and proved this theoretically, Proudhon was still being decried as an ultra-arch-revolutionary
both by political economists and by socialists. That is why later on I
never joined in the outcry about his "treachery" to the revolution.
It was not his fault that, originally misunderstood by others as well as
by himself, he failed to fulfil unjustified hopes.

Der Social-Demokrat, No. 18, February 5, 1865

In the Philosophie de la misère all the defects of Proudhon’s
method of presentation stand out very unfavourably in comparison with Qu’est-ce
que la propriété? The style is often what the French
call ampoule. High-sounding speculative jargon, purporting to
be German-philosophical, appears regularly on the scene when his Gallic
astuteness fails him. A noisy, self-glorifying, boastful tone and especially
the twaddle about “science” and sham display of it, which are always
so unedifying, are continually jarring on one’s ears. Instead of the genuine
warmth which permeates his first work, he here systematically works himself
up into a sudden flush of rhetoric in certain passages. There is in addition
the clumsy repugnant show of erudition of the self-taught, whose natural
pride in his original reasoning has already been broken and who now, as
a parvenu of science, feels it necessary to give himself airs with
what he neither is nor has. Then the mentality of the petty bourgeois who
for instance makes an indecently brutal attack, which is neither shrewd
nor profound nor even correct, on a man like Cabet – worthy of
respect for his practical attitude towards the French proletariat and on
the other hand pays compliments to a man like Dunoyer (a “State
Councillor,” it is true) although the whole significance of this Dunoyer
lay in the comic zeal with which, throughout three fat, unbearably boring
volumes, he preached a rigorism characterised by Helvetius as follows:
 “On veut que les malheureux soient parfaits” (It is demanded that
the unfortunate should be perfect).

The February Revolution certainly came at a very inconvenient
moment for Proudhon, who had irrefutably proved only a few weeks before
that “the era of revolutions” was past for ever. His speech in the
National Assembly, however little insight it showed into existing conditions,
was worthy of every praise. After the June insurrection it was an
act of great courage. In addition it had the fortunate consequence that
M. Thiers, by his reply opposing Proudhon’s proposals, which was
then issued as a special booklet, proved to the whole of Europe what infantile
catechism served this intellectual pillar of the French bourgeoisie as
a pedestal. Compared with M. Thiers, Proudhon indeed swelled to
the size of an antediluvian colossus.

Proudhon’s discovery of “crédit gratuit” and the
 “people’s bank” (banque du peuple), based upon it, were his last
economic “deeds.” My book A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy, Part I, Berlin, 1859 (pp. 59-64) contains the proof that the
theoretical basis of his idea arises from a misunderstanding of the basic
elements of bourgeois “political economy,” namely of the relation between
commodities and money, while the practical superstructure
was simply a reproduction of much older and far better developed schemes.
That under certain economic and political conditions the credit system
can be used to accelerate the emancipation of the working class, just as,
for instance, at the beginning of the eighteenth, and again later, at the
beginning of the nineteenth century in England, it facilitated the transfer
of wealth from one class to another, is quite unquestionable and self-evident.
But to regard interest-bearing capital as the main form of capital
and to try to make a particular form of the credit system comprising the
alleged abolition of interest, the basis for a transformation of society
is an out-and-out petty-bourgeois fantasy. This fantasy, further
diluted, can therefore actually already be found among the economic
spokesmen of the English petty bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century.
Proudhon’s polemic with Bastiat (1850) about interest-bearing capital is
on a far lower level than the Philosophie de la misère. He
succeeds in getting himself beaten even by Bastiat and breaks into burlesque
bluster when his opponent drives his blows home.

A few years ago Proudhon wrote a prize essay on Taxation, the
competition was sponsored, I believe, by the government of Lausanne. Here
the last flicker of genius is extinguished. Nothing remains but the petit
bourgeois tout pur.

So far as Proudhon’s political and philosophical writings are
concerned they all show the same contradictory, dual character as his economic
works. Moreover their value is purely local, confined to France. Nevertheless
his attacks on religion, the church, etc., were of great merit locally
at a time when the French socialists thought it desirable to show by their
religiosity how superior they were to the bourgeois Voltairianism of the
eighteenth century and the German godlessness of the nineteenth. Just as
Peter the Great defeated Russian barbarism by barbarity, Proudhon did his
best to defeat French phrase-mongering by phrases.

His work on the Coup d’état, in which he flirts
with Louis Bonaparte and, in fact, strives to make him palatable to the
French workers, and his last work, written against Poland, in which
for the greater glory of the tsar he expresses moronic cynicism, must be
described as works not merely bad but base, a baseness, however, which
corresponds to the petty-bourgeois point of view.

Proudhon has often been compared to Rousseau. Nothing
could be more erroneous. He is more like Nicolas Linguet, whose
Théorie des loix civiles, by the way, is a very brilliant
book.

Proudhon had a natural inclination for dialectics. But as he never
grasped really scientific dialectics he never got further than sophistry.
This is in fact connected with his petty-bourgeois point of view. Like
the historian Raumer, the petty bourgeois is made up of on-the-one-hand
and on-the-other-hand. This is so in his economic interests and therefore
in his politics, religious, scientific and artistic views. And likewise
in his morals, IN EVERYTHING. He is a living contradiction. If, like Proudhon,
he is in addition an ingenious man, he will soon learn to play with his
own contradictions and develop them according to circumstances into striking,
ostentatious, now scandalous now brilliant paradoxes. Charlatanism in science
and accommodation in politics are inseparable from such a point of view.
There remains only one governing motive, the vanity of the subject,
and the only question for him, as for all vain people, is the success of
the moment, the éclat of the day. Thus the simple moral sense, which
always kept a Rousseau, for instance, from even the semblance of compromise
with the powers that be, is bound to disappear.

Posterity will perhaps sum up the latest phase of French development
by saying that Louis Bonaparte was its Napoleon and Proudhon its Rousseau-Voltaire.

You yourself have now to accept responsibility for having imposed
upon me the role of a judge of the dead so soon after this man’s death.

Yours very respectfully,

Karl Marx