Karl Marx
The Poverty of Philosophy
Foreword
M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In
France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a
good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher,
because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists. Being both
German and economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double
error.
The reader will understand that in this thankless task we have often had to
abandon our criticism of M. Proudhon in order to criticize German philosophy,
and at the same time to give some observations on political economy.
Karl Marx
Brussels, June 15, 1847
M. Proudhon's work is not just a treatise on political economy, an ordinary
book; it is a bible. "mysteries", "Secrets Wrested from the Bosom of God",
"Revelations" - it lacks nothing. But as prophets are discussed nowadays more
conscientiously than profane writers, the reader must resign himself to going
with us through the arid and gloomy eruditions of "Genesis", in order to ascend
later, with M. Proudhon, into the ethereal and fertile realm of super-socialism.
(See Proudhon, Philosophy of Poverty, Prologue, p.III, line 20.)
Fredrick Engels
The Poverty of Philosophy - Preface
Preface to the First German Edition
The present work was produced in the winter of 1846-47, at a time when Marx had
cleared up for himself the basic features of his new historical and economic
outlook. Proudhon's Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la
misère, which had just appeared, gave him the opportunity to develop these basic
features, setting them against the views of a man who, from then on, was to
occupy the most important place among living French socialists. Since the time
in Paris when the two of them had often spent whole nights discussing economic
questions, their paths had increasingly diverged: Proudhon's book proved that
there was already an unbridgeable gulf between them. To ignore it was at that
time impossible, and so Marx put on record the irreparable rupture in this reply
of his.
Marx's general opinion of Proudhon is to be found in the this preface and
appeared in the article, which is appended to Berlin Social-Demokrat Nos 16, 17
and 18 for 1865. It was the only article Marx wrote for that paper; Herr von
Schweitzer's attempts to guide it along feudal and government lines, which
became evident soon afterwards, compelled us to publicly terminate our
collaboration after only few weeks. [1]
For Germany, the present work has at this precise moment a significance which
Marx himself never imagined. How could he have known that, in trouncing
Proudhon, he was hitting Rodbertus, the idol of the careerists of today, who was
unknown to him even by name at that time?
This is not the place to deal with relations between Marx and Rodbertus; an
opportunity for that is sure to present itself to me very soon. [2] Suffice it
to note here that when Rodbertus accuses Marx of having "plundered" him and of
having "freely used in his Capital without quoting him" his work Zur Erkenttnis,
he allows himself to indulge in an act of slander which is only explicable by
the irksomeness of unrecognised genius and by his remarkable ignorance of things
taking place outside Prussia, and especially of socialist and economic
literature. Neither these charges, nor the above-mentioned work by Rodbertus
ever came to Marx's sight; all he knew of Rodbertus was the three Sociale Briefe
and even these certainly not before 1858 or 1859.
With greater reason Rodbertus asserts in these letters that he had already
discovered "Proudhon's constituted value" before Proudhon; but here again it is
true he erroneously flatters himself with being the first discoverer. In any
case, he is thus one of the targets of criticism in the present work, and this
compels me to deal briefly with his "fundamental" piece: Zur Erkenntnis unsrer
staatswirthschaftlichen Zustände, 1842, insofar as this brings forth
anticipations of Proudhon as well as the communism of Weitling likewise (again
unconsciously) contained in it.
Insofar as modern socialism, no matter of what tendency, starts out from
bourgeois political economy, it almost without exception takes up the Ricardian
theory of value. The two propositions which Ricardo proclaimed in 1817 right at
the beginning of his Principles,
1) that the value of any commodity is purely and solely determined by the
quantity of labour required for its production, and
2) that the product of the entire social labour is divided among the three
classes: landowners (rent), capitalists (profit) and workers (wages)
These two propositions had ever since 1821 been utilised in England for
socialist conclusions [3], and in part with such pointedness and resolution that
this literature, which had then almost been forgotten and was to a large extent
only rediscovered by Marx, remained unsurpassed until the appearance of Capital.
About this another time. If, therefore, in 1842 Rodbertus for his part drew
socialist conclusions from the above propositions, that was certainly a very
considerable step forward for a German at that time, but it could rank as a new
discovery only for Germany at best. That such an application of the Ricardian
theory was far from new was proved by Marx against Proudhon, who suffered from a
similar conceit.
"Anyone who is in any way familiar with the trend of political economy in
England cannot fail to know that almost all the socialists in that country have,
at different periods, proposed the equalitarian (i.e. socialist) application of
Ricardian theory. We could quote for M. Proudhon: Hodgskin, Political Economy,
1827; William Thompson, An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of
Wealth Most Conducive to Human Happiness, 1824; T. R. Edmonds, Practical Moral
and Political Economy, 1828, etc., etc., and four pages more of etc. We shall
content ourselves with listening to an English Communist, Mr. Bray ... in his
remarkable work, Labour's Wrongs and Labour's Remedy, Leeds, 1839."
And the quotations given here from Bray on their own put an end to a good part
of the priority claimed by Rodbertus.
At that time Marx had never yet entered the reading room of the British Museum.
Apart from the libraries of Paris and Brussels, apart from my books and
extracts, he had only examined such books as were obtainable in Manchester
during a six-week journey to England we made together in the summer of 1845. The
literature in question was, therefore, by no means so inaccesible in the forties
as it may be now. If, all the same, it always remained unknown to Rodbertus,
that is to be ascribed solely to his Prussian local bigotry. He is the actual
founder of specifically Prussian socialism and is now at last recognised as
such.
However, even in his beloved Prussia, Rodbertus was not to remain undisturbed.
In 1859, Marx's A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part I, was
published in Berlin. Therein, among the economists' objections to Ricardo, the
following was put forward as the second objection (p. 40):
"If the exchange value of a product equals the labour time contained in the
product, then the exchange value of a working day is equal to the product it
yields, in other words, wages must be equal to the product of labour. But in
fact the opposite is true."
On this there was the following note:
"This objection, which was advanced against Ricardo by economists, was later
taken up by socialists. Assuming that the formula was theoretically sound, they
alleged that practice stood in conflict with the theory and demanded that
bourgeois society should draw the practical conclusions supposedly arising from
its theoretical principles. In this way at least English socialists turned
Ricardo's formula of exchange value against political economy."
In the same note there was a reference to Marx's Misère de la philosophie, which
was then obtainable in all the bookshops.
Rodbertus, therefore, had sufficient opportunity of convincing himself whether
his discoveries of 1842 were really new. Instead he proclaims them again and
again and regards them as so incomparable that it never occurs to him that Marx
might have drawn his conclusions from Ricardo independently, just as well as
Rodbertus himself. Absolutely impossible! Marx had "plundered" him - the man
whom the same Marx had offered every opportunity to convince himself how long
before both of them these conclusions, at least in the crude form which they
still have in the case of Rodbertus, had previously been enunciated in England!
The simplest socialist application of the Ricardian theory is indeed that given
above. It has led in many cases to insights into the origin and nature of
surplus value which go far beyond Ricardo, as in the case of Rodbertus among
others. Quite apart from the fact that on this matter he nowhere presents
anything which has not already been said at least ...
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