Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

First encounters

Marx, who lived in Paris from October 1843 until December 1845,
first met Proudhon, who returned there from Lyons only in September
1844, while he was working on The Holy Family. Of their first meet-
ings, little is known; Proudhon referred, subsequently and in passing,
to having met during this period ‘a great many Germans who had
admired my work and my accomplishments, my having reached on my
own conclusions which they claimed as theirs’,³⁴ and among these
visitors, presumably, was Marx. For his part, Marx, while he was more
explicit, had a radically different evaluation of the meetings. ‘In the
course of long discussions which sometimes went on all through the
night’, he later disclosed, ‘I infected [Proudhon], to his great detriment,
with a Hegelianism he could not go deeply into because he did not
know German. . . What I had begun Herr Karl Griin continued after
my expulsion from France.’ The tutelary tone of Marx’s recollection -
‘1 mention this here because to a certain extent I am ... to blame for
his “sophistication," as the English call the adulteration of commercial
goods’³⁵ - which was explicitly intended to damage Proudhon’s post-
humous reputation (and which, like Marx’s other attempts, signally
failed to do so) is deliberately deceptive. By 1844 Proudhon was
already a celebrated socialist theoretician with four well-known books
to his name; Marx, like many other German theoreticians on the left
of his generation, had freely admitted admiring him. Marx’s later
recall of their meetings was, like Proudhon’s, less than total, and it




seems likely that the impression it was meant to convey of Marx’s
magnanimous provision of subsequently misunderstood insights, de
haut en bas, was the opposite of what really took place. Not even his
admirers considered Proudhon a good listener.

It is probable that after their initial meetings Marx and Proudhon
saw very little of each other in Paris. (They never met after Marx’s
expulsion and seem to have corresponded only once.) Proudhon,
despite his notoriety, refused to contribute to the ill-fated publishing
venture, the Deutsch-franzdsische Jahrbucher, that had brought Marx
to Paris, even though he was almost alone among his compatriots on
the Left in being unable to refuse to participate on religious grounds.
The only non-German (as opposed to expatriate German) to contribute
to the first issue of the journal was, ironically enough, Bakunin. We
also know that the Paris police file used to expel Marx from France
in 1845 does not mention Proudhon,³⁶ although it is probable that
any sustained contact between the two would have been duly noted
in it.

Yet the first really significant discussions of Proudhon’s ideas in
Marx’s writings, which may be found in The Holy Family and the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, date from this period, although
Proudhon’s ideas are mentioned elsewhere and earlier. All these need
careful appraisal in the light of the most common interpretation of
Marx’s relationship with Proudhon, which would have it that Marx’s
initially favourable (or even ‘enthusiastic’) responses gave way dramati-
cally to a vicious attack in The Poverty of Philosophy (1847) that was
occasioned by, or was the direct outgrowth of, a personal altercation
between the two that had taken place in 1846. The truth is not quite
so simple. As Franz Mehring was later to indicate, to

object that Marx glorified Proudhon in The Holy Family, only
to attack him fiercely a few years later is a facile academic trick.

In The Holy Family, Marx is defending Proudhon’s real achieve-
ments from being obscured and mystified by the empty phrases
of Edgar Bauer. . . Just as Marx attacked Bauer’s theological
limitations, he also attacked Proudhon’s economic limitations,³⁷

before The Poverty of Philosophy was so much as conceived. Mehring’s
claim, its polemical tone notwithstanding, is largely accurate. If we
examine what Marx said about Proudhon before 1846 - bearing in
mind that not all this material was available to Mehring - we find
that Marx’s comments on Proudhon, far from being fulsome, do not
praise him unreservedly or unstintingly at all. They are at least im-
plicitly critical, though in no way hostile; they are sometimes com-
mendatory, always conciliatory. What burned the bridges was not so
much the exchange of letters in 1846, which in and of itself might have


been quite inconclusive, but Proudhon’s book, his System of Economic
Contradictions, or Philosophy of Poverty (1846) which followed in
short order. The hostility of Marx’s response, The Poverty of Phil-
osophy (1847), which had as a kind of prolegomenon a long letter
to Annenkov in 1846,³⁸ was provoked by the economic, philosophical
and political ideas that had been expressed, many of them for the first
time, in Proudhon’s book; but while this hostility outlived the occasion
of its first expression, Marx’s subsequent comments, at times, guardedly
(or grudgingly) praise Proudhon’s earliest writings.

What this means is that if we take into account Marx’s comments on
Proudhon that were made after The Poverty of Philosophy, as well as
those made in it and before it, we can see that there is much more
continuity among Marx’s successive criticisms of Proudhon and Proud-
honism than has often been admitted. The criticisms Marx levels so
unrelentingly in The Poverty of Philosophy lack neither precedent nor
subsequent amplification. Marx’s discussions of Proudhon’s ideas, while
they are not as extended, and for that matter not always as venomous
as those advanced in The Poverty of Philosophy, span almost the
entirety of his career. Proudhon is discussed and criticized in the
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, and The Holy Family, defended
against misrepresentations but attacked on other grounds in The Holy
Family and The German Ideology, and given short shrift as one of
many Utopians with reactionary leanings in The Manifesto of the
Communist Party (work on which Marx interrupted in order to write
The Poverty of Philosophy). All these, together with the celebrated
flailing of Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy itself, are just the
beginning. Marx wrote an article about Proudhon in the Neue Rheinische
Zeitung in 1849, and in The Class Struggles in France (1850) he criti-
cized, in passing, Proudhon’s scheme for a ‘people’s bank’. In 1851
Marx sought a publisher for a pamphlet he planned to write attacking
Proudhon’s book, The General Idea of the Revolution, which was
first published in that year (although Marx’s pamphlet, if indeed it
was ever written, seems not to have surfaced).³⁹ In The Eighteenth
Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1851-2) Marx’s criticism of‘doctrinaire
experiments, exchange banks and workers’ associations’ which ‘necess-
arily [suffer] shipwreck’,⁴⁰ was a hit at Proudhonian schemes; and
Marx’s ‘Preface’ to the second edition of this work, which was written
in 1869, after information and rumour about Proudhon’s role in
Louis Napoleon’s coup d’etat had long been circulating, indicates
that Proudhon’s book, The Social Revolution as Demonstrated by the
Coup d’Etat of the Second of December (1852) is ‘worthy of notice’
although his ‘historical reconstruction of the coup inevitably turns
into an historical apology for its hero’⁴¹ (as - ‘inevitably’ or not -
indeed it does). As to Proudhon’s economic ideas, these are discussed
in a series of letters in the 1860s (in particular, those to von Schweitzer


in 1865, Engels in 1866 and Kugelmann in 1866),⁴² but most notably,
and at greatest length, in the Grundrisse (1857-8). Marx criticizes
Proudhon in passing in A Contribution to the Critique of Political
Economy (1859); and many of the points he makes in all these works
are repeated, and sometimes expanded, in Theories of Surplus Value,
vols i and iii (1861-3), and Capital, vol. i (1867) and iii (published
posthumously in 1894).

The length of this list is a tribute to the resilience of Proudhonism
and to the strength of the example set by its founder. Marx’s hope
that he could put paid to Proudhon’s influence once and for all by
writing a book attacking him proved to be unfounded indeed; Marx
was to have frequent cause to regret Proudhon’s considerable influence.
The arch tone Marx adopted in his successive dressings-down of Proud-
hon - it was always Marx’s intention to portray Proudhon as a talkative
little boy all entangled in Platonic metaphysics and anti-working-class
sentiments - was forced and deliberate. In reading these attacks we
should remember that intellectual superiority is one thing, actual
political influence something else again; and that, at the immediate
level, Proudhon enjoyed by 1840, and continued to enjoy until his
death in 1864, the kind of notoriety that was to attach itself to Marx
as a result not so much of the publication of the first volume of Capital
in 1867 as of the Paris Commune in 1871. Although Marx, who became
at this point ‘the Red Terrorist Doctor’ and (in his own words) ‘the
most calumniated man in London’⁴³ was commonly supposed to have
masterminded the Commune by pulling the strings of the International,
in reality the Commune owed precious little to Marxism and a great
deal more, ironically enough, to the Proudhonists, who had already
proved themselves thorns in Marx’s side during the first four years of
the International’s existence, as we shall see. Ultimately, even though
Proudhonism per se (in the form of programmatic mutualism) did not
long survive the savage suppression of the Commune, the influence of
Proudhon’s ideas survived for a long time afterwards, particularly
during the hey-day of anarcho-syndicalism in France, many of whose
main features - that is, its code of practical morality based on work,
its fierce ouvrierisme and fervent belief in ‘le separatisme ouvrier’
(‘pas des mains blanches, seulement les mains calleuses’), its desire to
redefine property as ‘copropriete en main commune’ (though not its
belief in the regenerative power of violence as expressed in its espousal
of the revolutionary general strike) - bear the unmistakable imprint of
Proudhon. Indeed, it is not fanciful to see residual elements of Proud-
honism even today, in the strength in France of the Parti socialiste’s
emphasis on workers’ control as autogestion.

In his 1842 article on ‘Communism and the Ausburger Allgemeine
Zeitung^,44 Marx singles out Proudhon’s work as being ‘penetrating’
(scharfsinnig) and the following year, in a letter to Arnold Ruge that


was to be published in the Deutsch-franzdsische Jahrbucher, Marx made
the following observation:

I am not in favour of raising any dogmatic banner. On the contrary
we must try to help the dogmatists to clarify their propositions
to themselves. Thus communism, in particular, is a dogmatic
abstraction; in which connection, however, I am not thinking of
some imaginary and possible communism, but actually existing
communism as taught by Cabet, Dezamy, Weitling, etc. This
communism is itself only a special expression of the humanistic
principle, an expression which is still infected by it antithesis -
the private [property] system. Hence the abolition of private
property and communism are by no means identical, and it
is not accidental but inevitable that communism has seen other
socialist doctrines - such as those of Fourier, Proudhon, etc. -
arising to confront it because it is itself only a special, one-sided
realization of the socialist principle.⁴⁵

This passage raises issues that are to be expanded upon in later writings
- the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, The Holy Family, The
German Ideology and The Poverty of Philosophy. Not only is Proud-
hon’s anti-communism admitted and recognized; his ‘socialism’ is
interpreted as being in some sense a predictable and appropriate re-
sponse or counterweight to the one-sidedness of the kind of communism
advocated by Weitling and others; and this communism itself is in its
turn seen as imperfect and unsubstantiated. The relationship between
crude communism’s centrepiece, the abolition of private property, and
communism properly so-called, communism in its fuller and more
expansive form, is not one of identity - a point Marx was later to
flesh out in the Manuscripts and The Poverty of Philosophy by indicat-
ing that what crude communism (and, later, Proudhonism itself) lacks,
is any sense of the creation of new needs as a principle of historical
change. Marx was at this time (1844), however, fond of comparing
Proudhon and Weitling and of doing so not always, or not unambigu-
ously, in the latter’s favour. (In ‘The King of Prussia and Social Reform’
Marx makes reference to ‘Weitling’s excellent writings’ which ‘frequently
surpass Proudhon in regard to theory, though they are inferior in
execution’.)⁴⁶ Marx’s admiration for Weitling - which was to continue,
though not for long - should not surprise us; he was to break with
Weitling most reluctantly, even though Weitling recruited among
skilled artisans rather than proletarians and refused even to recognize
the role of an organized working-class movement. But he was a revol-
utionary communist; Proudhon was neither a revolutionary nor a
communist, but enjoyed considerable influence in France. It may be
for this reason that Marx’s comments on his writings were as conciliatory




as they were; but on the other hand Marx did attempt, even in 1844,
to strike some sort of balance of praise and blame.

This balance is most noticeably struck in the Economic and Phil-
osophic Manuscripts, a work some of whose passages about Proudhon
Marx was to copy, more or less verbatim, into The Holy Family in
1845. In the Manuscripts Marx identifies Proudhon with ‘advocates
of piecemeal reform’ not only because of his desire ‘to raise wages and
thereby improve the condition of the working class’ but also, more
specifically, because Proudhon regarded ‘equality of wages as the aim
of the social revolution’.⁴⁷ Equality as a political goal is, according
to Marx, what distinguished Proudhon, and by extension French
socialism in general, from other thinkers and theories, and, Marx
goes on, ‘Proudhon should be appreciated and criticized from this
point of view’.⁴⁸ On the one hand, Proudhon sees the need to abolish
capital ‘as such’ and has come down on the right side of a fundamental
divide: ‘political economy begins with labour as the real soul of pro-
duction and then goes on to attribute nothing to labour and everything
to private property. Proudhon, faced by this contradiction, has decided
in favour of labour against private property’⁴⁹ All to the good; but
what Proudhon fails to see are the dimensions of this ‘contradiction’.
He does not appreciate that wages ‘are only a necessary consequence
of the alienation of labour’. Hence, what Proudhon advocates,

an enforced increase in wages (disregarding the other difficulties,
and especially that such an anomaly could only be maintained
by force) would be nothing more than a better remuneration
of slaves and would not restore, either to the worker or to the
work, their human significance or worth.

Even the equality of wages which Proudhon demands would
only change the relation of the present-day worker to his work
into a relation of all men to work. Society would then be
conceived as an abstract capitalist.⁵⁰

We shall find that this criticism of Proudhon, in particular, is wholly
cognate with those that were to be advanced in The Holy Family and
The Poverty of Philosophy alike, and that what Marx finds praise-
worthy in Proudhon in The Holy Family (and The German Ideology)
he nevertheless tempered with some real criticisms. Yet Marx never,
before The Poverty of Philosophy, dismisses Proudhon out of hand,
and the reasons for his restraint ought, briefly, to detain us. To begin
with, Marx always defended Proudhon against his German critics -
against Karl Griin and Stirner in The German Ideology as well as
against Edgar Bauer in The Holy Family. Marx, in a letter to Feuerbach
prior to The Holy Family, contrasts Bauer’s ‘sad and supercilious
intellectualism’ with Proudhon’s doctrine, commenting that Bauer’s




approach one-sidedly fails to appreciate the ‘practical needs’ that are
the point of departure for Proudhon’s arguments, and which credit
and fortify them. As to the arguments themselves, Marx found ‘great
scientific advance’ in Proudhon’s view that

political economy moves in a continuous contradiction to its basic
premise, private property, a contradiction analogous to that of
the theologian who constantly gives a human interpretation to
religious ideas and thereby contradicts his fundamental assumption,
the superhuman character of religion.

Marx goes on to credit Proudhon, whose First Memoir (What is Prop-
perty ?) he describes in exaggerated terms as a ‘scientific’ manifesto of
the French proletariat written by one who was himself a proletarian,
with having made the important discovery that contemporary relations
of production had nothing human about them as they actually operated.
Marx praises Proudhon further for having advocated action and not
reform as a remedy for this state of affairs.⁵¹

Such a summary should give us pause since, as Haubtmann points
out, it scarcely does justice to the arguments of the First Memoir. To
begin with, the action it advocates is not revolutionary action. What
is Property? also propounds such notions as the material force of ideas
and invokes ‘Justice’ as a kind of demiurge - less forcefully, it is true,
than some of Proudhon’s later writings - in the corresponding belief
that sheer knowledge of moral laws could stimulate, invigorate and
cause social progress of a distinctly non-revolutionary kind. Putting
to one side the actual merit, or otherwise, of these notions, it is quite
safe to say that they could hardly have commended themselves to
Marx; yet The Holy Family largely ignores them. Marx - uncharacter-
istically, as it came to seem - held his fire and reserved his wrath for
other targets, and did so, we must presume, because of what he con-
sidered to be the fundamental importance of Proudhon’s achievement.
In the light of this, Marx considered What is Property? to have marked
a real step forward in social analysis, an evaluation to which he was
subsequently to adhere, as we shall see.

What is crucial, according to Marx in 1845, to Proudhon’s argument
is its comprehensiveness; what makes Proudhon’s work valuable is
Proudhon’s readiness to make connections and draw links. He

takes the human semblance in economic relations seriously and
sharply opposes it to their inhuman reality [wirkliche
Unmenschlichkeit] ... He is therefore consistent in representing
as the falsifier of economic relations not this or that kind of
private property .. . but private property taken in its entirety
[auf universelle Weise].⁵²


Proudhon’s generalization of private property, as private property
relations pervading society, is what commended his book to Marx; it
had the effect of highlighting the political economists’ uneasy vacil-
lations between the human bearing and origin of their subject-matter
and the deterministic, non-human objective laws which they used to
describe and characterize its actual operation - a contradiction which
Marx’s own writings on economics were also to be concerned to investi-
gate. Marx’s conclusions, however, were to be very different; just how
different we shall see presently. For the time being, it is important to
recognize that Marx was in his early estimations - and even to a lesser
extent in his later appraisals - of Proudhon not loath to give credit
where credit was due. Proudhon, indeed, according to Marx, had not
simply drawn connections between private property relations and
wage-labour but had also characterized these connections as (in some
sense) dialectical ones. Marx and Proudhon, again, were to differ on
the nature and meaning of dialectical connections; but Marx in 1845
had no quarrel with Proudhon’s consideration of private property
relations and the growth of the proletariat as opposite sides of the
same coin.

Political economy proceeded from the wealth that the movement
of private property was supposed to create ... to considerations
which were an apology for private property, whereas Proudhon
proceeds from the opposite side which political economy
sophistically conceals, from the property bred by the movement
of private property, to his considerations, which are a negation
of private property.⁵³

This, the directionality of Proudhon’s analysis (which was, of course,
similar to that of Marx), together with the links Proudhon had per-
ceived between private property, the system of social relations built
on its foundation, and the growth of the proletariat as a loose antithesis
to these relations, sufficed for Marx, who ignored what he would later
regard as serious deficiencies in Proudhon’s actual definitions of these
social forces. On balance, the book’s virtues seemed to Marx to out-
weigh its defects and he was happy to commend it on this basis; indeed,
twenty years later we find Marx doing the same thing in a letter about
Proudhon to J.B. von Schweitzer, the publication of which he had good
reason to anticipate and sanction. Proudhon’s

first work, What is Property? is undoubtedly his best. It is
epoch-making, if not from the novelty of its content, at
least by the new and audacious way of coming out with
everything. Of course ‘property’ had been not only
criticized in various ways but also ‘done away with’ in




the utopian manner by the French socialists and communists
whose work he knew. In this book Proudhon’s relation to
Saint-Simon and Fourier is about the same as that of Feuerbach
to Hegel. Compared with Hegel Feuerbach is extremely poor.

All the same he was epoch-making after Hegel because he laid
stress on certain points which were disagreeable to the Christian
consciousness but important to the progress of criticism, and
which Hegel had left in mystic semi-obscurity.

Proudhon’s still strong muscular style, if I may be allowed the
expression, prevails in this book. And its style in my opinion is
its chief merit.

Even where he is still reproducing old stuff, one can see that
Proudhon has found it out for himself, that what he is saying
is new to him and ranks as new. The provocative defiance laying
hands of the economic ‘holy of holies,’ the brilliant paradox
which made a mock of the ordinary bourgeois mind, the
withering criticism, the brilliant irony, and, revealed here and
there behind these, a deep and genuine feeling of indignation at
the infamy of the existing order-all these electrified readers
of What is Property? and produced a great sensation on its first
appearance. In a strictly scientific history of political economy
the book would be hardly worth mentioning. But sensational
works of this kind play their part in the sciences...

But in spite of all his apparent iconoclasm one already finds
in What is Property? the contradiction that Proudhon is
criticizing society, on the one hand, from the standpoint and
with the eyes of a French small peasant (later petty bourgeois)
and, on the other, with the standards derived from his inheritance
from the socialists. . ,⁵⁴

Marx s praise of Proudhon in this letter subsequently turns to scorn;
and even when it was originally advanced in The Holy Family it was
praise of a distinctly guarded variety. Proudhon, Marx makes clear,
fails to infer the right kind of conclusion from the connection he
quite rightly perceives between proletariat and property. Putting to
one side the question of how incompletely Proudhon defined the
proletariat (a question Marx dealt with much more fully and adequately
in The Poverty of Philosophy), it is clear that in The Holy Family
Marx recognized that Proudhon’s admittedly expansive definition of
property was nevertheless defective. Proudhon, says Marx, sees property
not as the realization of the forces of one’s own being (‘meine eigenen
Wesenkrafte zu betatigen und zu verwirklichen’) but as something
excluding the claims of others (‘den Andern auszuschliessen’).⁵⁵ Whether
or not this latter is a particularly French conception of property, as
seems likely, Marx recognized that what Proudhon, in particular,




built upon it, his solution to the problem of property, which amounts
to untrammelled equality of opportunity to hold property in small,
more or less equal and non-exploitative amounts, is a solution that
remains firmly locked within an alien framework.

Proudhon’s desire to abolish non-owning and the old form of
owning is exactly identical to his desire to abolish the practically-
alienated relation of man to his objective essence, to abolish the
political-economic expression of human self-alienation. Since,
however, his criticism of political economy is still bound to the
premises of political economy, the reappropriation of the
objective world is still conceived in the political-economic form
of possession. Proudhon indeed does not oppose owning to
non-owning, as Critical Criticism [here, Edgar Bauer] makes him
do, but [instead opposes] possession to the old form of owning
private property. He declares possession to be a ‘social
function’... Proudhon did not succeed [however] in giving this
thought appropriate development. The idea of equal possession
is a political-economic one and therefore is itself still an alienated
[entfremdete] expression for the principle that the object as
being for man, as the objectified being of man, is at the same
time the existence of man for other men, his human relation to
other men, the social relation of man to man. Proudhon abolishes
political-economic estrangement within political-economic
estrangement [hebt die national-okonomische Entfremdung
innerhalb der national-okonomischen Entfremdung auf] ,⁵⁶

This somewhat abstruse passage requires some elucidation if we are
to see how important it is. Marx’s ‘First Critical Comment’ on Proud-
hon in The Holy Family describes What is Property? as ‘a criticism of
political economy from the standpoint of political economy’ on the
grounds that ‘the first criticism of any science is necessarily implicated
in the premises of the science it is criticizing’. It is in this sense that
What is Property? ‘is as important for modern political economy as
Sieyes’ What is the Third Estate? is for modern politics’. Each blazes a
trail, opens up further possibilities for investigation by emblazoning
a new concept; neither is in principle unsurpassable or likely to remain
unsurpassed. Indeed ‘Proudhon’s work will be scientifically surpassed
by criticism [on the part] of political economy, even of political econ-
omy as conceived by Proudhon. This task only becomes possible
through Proudhon himself. . .’.⁵⁷ Marx proceeds to indicate that
whereas ‘all developments in political economy presuppose private
property’ which ‘basic proposition is regarded as an unassailable fact
needing no further examination’, Proudhon


subjects the basis of political economy, private property, to a
critical examination, in fact the first resolute, ruthless and at the
same time scientific examination. This is the great scientific
advance he made, an advance revolutionizing political economy
and making possible for the first time a real science of political
economy.⁵⁸

However, Marx continues, ‘Proudhon does not grasp the wider
forms of private property - for example, wages, trade, value, price,
money etc. - as themselves forms of private property’. Instead he
‘uses these economic premises against political economists’; and while
‘this is entirely in keeping with his historically justified standpoint’⁵⁹
of acting as a catalyst making possible future change, it is not an
approach that in and of itself is likely to supply answers to the prob-
lems posed by the ubiquity of private property relations. Because the
inhumane realities of the capitalist system belie the innocent and
humane protestations of the political economists, these are forced to
take refuge in various face saving expedients

they . . . tackle private property in some partial form as the
falsifier of wages which are rational in themselves, namely in
the conception they have formed of wages, or as the falsifier
of value which is rational in itself, or as the falsifier of trade,
rational in itself. Thus Adam Smith occasionally attacks the
capitalists, Destutt de Tracy the bankers, Simonde de Sismondi
the factory system, Ricardo landed property, and almost all
modern economists attack the non-industrial capitalists who
regard property as merely a consumer.⁶⁰

Proudhon alone will have none of this. As a way of pointing up the
contradiction between the humane presuppositions of the political
economists (the ‘free’ labour contract, the determination of value by
costs of production alongside the social utility of the object produced)
and the inhumane outcome of their application, Proudhon takes the
humane presupposition at its face value.

He took seriously the humane appearance of economic
conditions and sharply confronted it with their inhumane
reality. He demanded that these conditions should be in
actuality what they are in conception, or rather that their
conception should be abandoned and their actual inhumanity
be established.⁶¹

Proudhon’s approach, while it does highlight contradictions, never-
theless is one that runs risks. His thought, which in one sense (as Marx




admits) an advance on classical political economy, in another sense
actually falls behind it. In his discussions of contract - contract, as we
have seen, being a mainstay of his thought - he takes the notion more
seriously than had the political economists themselves. ‘Proudhon
does not misuse this relation in the sense of political economy,’ Marx
charges; ‘indeed, he takes as real what political economists admit is
illusory and nominal - the freedom of the contracting parties.’⁶² While
such freedom had in fact long been supplanted by compulsion, a fact
which is highlighted by Proudhon’s argument, Proudhon’s solution, as
disarming as it is drastic, is simply that of its restitution, so that the
freedom of the contracting parties, which had been revealed as a
myth, would fulfil its promise by being made real. Plekhanov followed
in Marx’s footsteps when he indicated that ‘politically, [Proudhon’s]
programme is only the application to public relations of a concept
(the “contract”) drawn from the domain of the private right of a
society of producers of commodities’;⁶³ what has often been over-
looked, however, is that the footsteps in which Plekhanov was to
tread trace out a path through The Holy Family as well as The Poverty
of Philosophy.

Contract, despite its centrality in Proudhon’s thought, is not, how-
ever, the whole story. Proudhon also took the political economists at
their word - more seriously than they took themselves in a certain
sense - in other respects. On the one hand by deriving the value of a
product and the measure of wages from labour-time, Proudhon accord-
ing to Marx ‘makes the human side the decisive factor’ instead of ‘the
ponderable power of capital and landed property’ and in so doing
reinstates man in his rights; but, on the other hand, he does so in a
contradictory (widerspruchsvolle) manner. While all the essential defi-
nitions (Wesenbestimmungen) of human activity are recognized through-
out Proudhon’s formulations, they are nevertheless encountered there
only in an alien form.⁶⁴ One of the reasons why this, according to
Marx, is so is that Proudhon, in counterposing ‘the human side’ to
‘the ponderable power of capital and landed property’, is insufficiently
drastic. He thinks that developments within capitalism have a tendency
to mitigate its worst excesses, and thinks so on the scantiest of evidence;
he has a tendency, in other words, to grasp at straws, to adopt panaceas
that he thinks will bring about changes, without tracing these back to
their root causes. Changes in interest rates are a case in point:

The diminution in the interest of money, which Proudhon regards
as the annulling of capital and as the tendency to socialize capital,
is really and immediately ... only a symptom of the victory of
working capital over extravagant wealth-i.e. the transformation
of all private property into industrial capital. It is a total victory
of private property over all those of its qualities which are still




in appearance human, and the complete subjection of the
owner of private property to the essence of private property
-labour. . . The decrease in the interest-rate is therefore a
symptom of the annulment of capital only inasmuch as it is
a symptom of the rule of capital in the process of perfecting
itself-of the estrangement in the process of becoming
fully-developed and therefore of hastening to its annulment.

This is indeed the only way in which that which exists affirms
its opposite.

The dispute between economists over luxury and saving is,
therefore, only a dispute between that political economy which
has become clearly aware of the nature of wealth and that
political economy which is still burdened with romantic,
anti-industrial memories.⁶⁵

Marx’s point, in the words of another passage from the Economic and
Philosophic Manuscripts - that ‘everything which Proudhon interprets
as the growing power of labour as against capital is simply the growing
power of labour in the form of capital, industrial capital, as against
capital which is not consumed as capital, industrially’⁶⁶ - presages later
attacks on Proudhon in the Grundrisse and Theories of Surplus Value,
where Proudhon (whose attacks had now broadened into an advocacy
of manipulation of interest rates, people’s banks and credit associations)
is again accused of mistaking the effect for the cause.

... the demand raised by M. Proudhon, that capital should not
be loaned out and should bear no interest, but should be sold
like a commodity for its equivalent amounts at bottom to no
more than the demand that exchange-value should never
become capital, but always remain simple exchange value;
that capital [in other words] should not exist as capital. This
demand, combined with the other, that wage labour should
remain the general basis of production, reveals a happy
confusion with regard to the simplest economic concepts. . .

His chatter about considerations of fairness and right
amounts only to this, that he wants to use the relation of
property or of law corresponding to simple exchange as the
measuring rod for the relation of property and law at a
higher stage of exchange-value . . ,⁶⁷

Marx’s tone had changed by 1859, but the tenor of Marx’s accusations
remained remarkably similar to that we encounter in 1844. The same
is true of Marx’s critical comments on Proudhon in Theories of Surplus
Value (1861-3): ‘wanting to preserve wage-labour, and thus the basis
of capital, as Proudhon does, and at the same time to eliminate the


“drawbacks” by abolishing a secondary form of capital, reveals the nov-
ice’.⁶⁸ What Marx is urging against Proudhon, in the 1860s and the 1840s
alike, is that total problems demand total solutions, at the level of
causes, not simply at the level of selected secondary epiphenomena;yet

superficial criticism [Marx means Proudhonism] -in the same
way as it wants to maintain commodities and combats money -
now turns its wisdom and reforming zeal against interest-
bearing capital without touching upon real capitalist
production, but merely attacking one of its consequences.

This polemic against interest-bearing capital, undertaken
from the standpoint of capitalist production . . . today
parades as ‘socialism’ . . ⁶⁹

What emerges from these comments on Proudhon made on either
side of the altercation that reached its apogee in The Poverty of Phil-
osophy is that Marx’s criticisms have a consistency and continuity that
too rarely have been acknowledged as such. As Marx put it in The Holy
Family, Proudhon’s ‘criticism of political economy is still captive to
the premises of political economy’ so that he ‘abolishes economic
estrangement within economic estrangement’. By the time of The
German Ideology, Proudhon, ‘from whom the communists have ac-
cepted nothing but his criticism of property’, is defended by Marx
against ‘true socialist’ misrepresentations of his thought, but is never-
theless criticized on different, but by now familiar grounds: he ‘opposes
the illusions cherished by jurists and economists to their practice’ yet
‘criticizes political economy from the standpoint of political economy
and law from the legal standpoint’⁷⁰ (a reference, inter alia, to his
notion of contract). Proudhon, according to Marx, considers private
property expansively, as a system of private property relations per-
vading an emergent capitalist society, but he does not derive from this
potentially far-reaching appraisal of the permeation of society by
property relations the need for thoroughgoing revolutionary change.
Instead he settles from the earliest for schemes that are less than
appropriate, schemes that propose to mitigate some of the most con-
spicuous abuses of the system without proceeding to the heart of the
matter. ‘He has done all that a criticism of political economy from the
standpoint of political economy can do’ - an evaluation to which we
shall have cause to return.