Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

Entr’acte: the break

Liberty recognizes no law, no motive, no principle, no cause,
no limit, no end, except itself. . . Placing itself above everything
else, it waits for a chance to escape ... all laws but its own, to




insult everything but itself, to make the world serve its fancies
and the natural order its whims. To the universe that surrounds
it it says: no; to the laws of nature and logic that obsess it: no;
to the senses that tempt it: no; to the love that seduces it: no;
to the priest’s voice, to the prince’s order, to the crowd’s cries:
no, no, no. It is the eternal adversary that opposes any idea and
any force that aims to dominate it; the indomitable insurgent
that has faith in nothing but itself, respect arid esteem for
nothing but itself, that will not abide even the idea of God
except insofar as it recognizes itself in God as its own antithesis.

Proudhon, De la justice dans la revolution et dans VEglise⁷¹

Whatever admiration for Proudhon Marx retained after completing
The Holy Family did not long outlive Marx’s expulsion from Paris in
1845. Yet in 1846 he still regarded Proudhon as a possible collaborator;
in May of that year he wrote to Proudhon from Brussels, the site of his
exile. Marx and Engels had launched a practical project, creating a
chain of international correspondence committees in order to acquaint
working men in various countries with socialist initiatives, proposals
and alternatives. The basic idea behind this project may have owed
something to similar methods already used by the German artisans
in the Workers’ Educational Association in London (where Marx had
visited Engels in 1845); the idea was to solicit the support of prominent
socialists and labour leaders in establishing various national and regional
committees, and in preparing international reports and exchanges of
information. While the scheme, by virtue of its international scope, was
in effect a prototype of the later International Working Men’s Associ-
ation, which was to be founded in 1864, and while it suggests how
quick and far-sighted Marx was in seeing the possibilities of international
proletarian organization (with which he had only just become ac-
quainted), it was none the less probably premature. The response to
Marx’s initiative in 1846 was in general unenthusiastic and desultory;
some contacts, none of them really new, were made in Germany, and
one (with Proudhon) in France. Marx’s hopes of circulating new develop-
ments in socialist theory and of exchanging views and airing differences
across national boundaries were, for the time being, doomed to disap-
pointment, so that Marx and Engels instead concentrated their energies
in the direction of a pre-existing body, the League of the Just. They
hoped to convert what was in 1846 still a secret, conspiratorial artisan-
communist Bund into a more open, democratic Communist League
which would, in the words of what was to be its international pro-
gramme (The Manifesto of the Communist Party) disdain to conceal
its views or its existence from the world.

All this, however, was in the future when Marx wrote to Proudhon




in 1846, although the letter presented itself as part of a much broader
initiative. ‘1 have organized’, says Marx to Proudhon

a continuous correspondence with the German Communists and
Socialists, which is to take up both the discussion of scientific
questions and the supervision of popular publications as well as
socialist propaganda, which can be carried on in Germany by this
means. It will be the chief aim of our correspondence, however,
to put the German socialists in contact with the French and
English socialists; to keep the foreigners posted on the socialist
movements that are going to take place in Germany, and to
inform the Germans in Germany of the progress of socialism in
France and in England. In this way, it will be possible to air
differences of opinion. We can achieve an exchange of ideas and
an impartial criticism. It will be a step forward for the socialist
movement in its ‘literary’ expression, a step towards shaking off
national limitations. At the moment of action it is certainly of
great importance for each of us to be informed on the state of
affairs abroad as well as at home.

Besides the communists in Germany our correspondence would
also embrace the German socialists in Paris and London. Our
connections with England have already been established; as for
France, we are all of the opinion that we could not find a better
correspondent there than you. As you know, the English and
Germans have up till now appreciated you more than your own
fellow countrymen.

So you see, it is only a question of initiating a regular
correspondence and of assuring it the facilities for following
the social movement in the various countries. . ⁷²

Proudhon reacted to Marx’s initiative cautiously and guardedly. The
reasons for his reservations are not hard to find. To begin with, Marx
appended to an otherwise conciliatory letter a postscript tactlessly
denouncing Proudhon’s friend Karl Grim. The terms of Marx’s in-
temperate denunciation (‘ . . . a literary swindler, a charlatan . . . the
man is dangerous. . . Therefore beware of this parasite . . . ’) can have
done nothing to inspire in Proudhon a belief in Marx’s good faith, and
had the ill-judged rhetorical effect of undercutting the tone of Marx’s
letter, with its exhortations that we should all reason together. This
postscript (which is omitted, incidentally, from the Marx-Engels
Selected Correspondence) was on any reckoning a blunder; in view of
it, we should wonder not at the reserved nature of Proudhon’s reply,
but that he replied at all, particularly since there was still more in
Marx’s ‘feeler’ to perturb him. Marx’s reference, be it unguarded or
deliberate, to ‘national limitations’ must have cut close to the bone,




since Proudhon, of all people, was certainly subject to them (and was
to remain so); but perhaps Proudhon was disarmed by Marx’s subse-
quent, flattering (and inaccurate) mention of Proudhon’s international
reputation. Most seriously of all, Marx’s reference to ‘the moment of
action’ was - duly or unduly - provocative, and Proudhon seized upon
it. The moment of action means, of course, revolutionary action, any
reference to which could not fail to disturb Proudhon, who regarded his
own earlier flirtation with it as something best forgotten and buried.

Accordingly, while he expressed a willingness to participate, in a
limited way, in the correspondence (which on the face of it was all that
Marx had requested), Proudhon agreed to do so in a manner that made
clear his suspicions as well as his reservations. What he says - with much
more care than Marx had seen fit to employ - in his reply has a prescient,
almost prophetic ring (one which has misled some commentators in
some respects); his response reveals, in embryo, the differences of
principle which were to divide him and his followers (and, for that
matter, Bakunin and his followers) from what they were to call ‘auth-
oritarian socialism’.

[Although] my ideas on matters of organization and realization
are at the moment quite settled, at least as far as principles are
concerned, I believe that it is my duty, as it is the duty of all
socialists, to maintain for some time yet an attitude of criticism
and doubt; in short, I profess an almost absolute economic
anti-dogmatism.

By all means let us work together to discover the laws of
society, the ways in which these laws are realized and the process
by which we might discover them. But, for God’s sake, when we
have demolished all a priori dogmatisms, let us not think of
indoctrinating the people in our turn. Let us not fall into your
compatriot Martin Luther’s inconsistency... Let us not make
further work for humanity by creating another shambles. I
applaud with all my heart your idea of bringing to light all
opinions; let us give the world the example of a learned and
far-sighted tolerance [une tolerance savante et prevoyante],
but let us not, just because we are at the head of a movement,
make ourselves the leaders of a new intolerance, let us not pose
as the apostles of a new religion, even if it be the religion of
logic, the religion of reason. Let us gather together and
encourage all protests, let us get rid of all exclusivity and
mysticism; let us never regard a question as exhausted, and
when we have used our last argument, let us begin again, if
necessary, with eloquence and irony. On that condition, 1 will
gladly join your association. Otherwise - no!

I have also some observations to make about the phrase in




your letter, ‘at the moment of action.’ Perhaps you retain the
opinion that no reform is at present possible without a coup de
main, without what used to be called a revolution but which is
really nothing but a shock. That opinion, which I understand,
which I excuse and would willingly discuss, having myself shared
it for a long time, my most recent studies have made me completely
abandon. I believe we have no need of it if we are to succeed,
and that consequently we should not put forward revolutionary
action as a means of social reform, because that supposed means
would simply be an appeal to force, to arbitrariness, in short a
contradiction. I put the problem in this way: how do we bring
about the return to society, by an economic combination, of the
wealth which was withdrawn from society by another economic
combination? In other words, through political economy we must
turn the theory of property against property in such a way as to
produce what you German socialists call community and which
for the moment I shall restrict myself to calling liberty or equality.
Now I think I know the way in which this problem may be very
quickly solved. Therefore I prefer to have property burn little
by little, rather than give it new strength by making a Saint
Bartholomew’s Day of property owners.. . This, my dear phil-
osopher, is my present position. If it happens that I am mistaken
and you give me a good caning [la ferule], I shall submit with
good grace while awaiting my revenge. I must add in passing that
this also seems to be the feeling of the French working class. Our
proletarians are so thirsty for knowledge that they would ill
receive us if we gave them only blood to drink. In short, it
would in my opinion be very bad policy to use the language of
extermination. Rigorous enough measures will come; for this
the people need no exhortation.⁷³

Proudhon adds that he is engaged in writing a book that will explain
in detail his plans for peaceable reform (which, in the event, The
System of Economic Contradictions was conspicuously not to ac-
complish); that he sincerely regrets ‘the minor divisions which would
appear to exist already in German socialism of which your complaint
against M. Grim gives me proof; and that it would give him ‘much
pleasure’ to see Marx reverse his judgment - ‘for you were in an angry
frame of mind when you wrote to me’. Proudhon finally presses home
an advantage, in a confrontation not without its undercurrents, by
asking Marx to help sell his forthcoming book, not so much for Proud-
hon’s own sake, as for that of Griin, who wished to translate it.

Marx’s response to Proudhon’s book, which appeared the following
year (though not in Griin’s translation, which never materialized), was
of course very different; the ‘cane’ (la ferule) to which Proudhon had


referred, in all apparent playfulness, descended with a vengeance.
Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy: Response to ‘The Philosophy of
Poverty' of M. Proudhon drew blood, and was clearly intended to do
so. It hurt in such a way that no gracious reply would have been humanly
possible; Proudhon, in the event, did not reply publicly at all. This
subsequent development (and, indeed, other subsequent developments)
poses a real temptation to anyone who would take it upon himself to
adjudicate the issues raised in what was, beneath the surface, a highly
charged exchange of letters - particularly since this altercation provides
the only exchange of letters between Marx and Proudhon that is
available. The temptation is to overdramatize what was, admittedly,
in its way a dramatic confrontation by arguing, with the benefit of
hindsight, that Proudhon in his letter had indicated in advance, as it
were, how intolerant, dogmatic and authoritarian Marx could be.
But to do so would be to lapse into prolepsis; Marx’s ‘authoritarianism’
(as opposed to his theoretical impatience and intolerance of doctrines
he considered - often with good cause - to be deficient) in 1846 had
yet to emerge. Marx was in 1847 to take up some of the themes - the
ideas about political economy, and Proudhon’s reformism - that Proud-
hon had touched on in his letter; but it is probable that he would have
done so even if the exchange of letters had never taken place. Here, it
is difficult to be definitive; but Proudhon’s views of political economy,
reform and violence were to be expressed clearly enough in his book,
and it does need to be remembered that Marx in The Poverty of Phil-
osophy (the only full-length work on economics Marx published before
1859) was concerned primarily to advance economic arguments against
Proudhon, and all of these arguments, it can be shown, had been fore-
shadowed in Marx’s earlier critical comments on Proudhon - comments
that were in fact by no means as ‘enthusiastic’ as some have imagined.
What this means is that the celebrated altercation of 1846 in reality
played a much smaller role in setting up the eventual battle-lines than
has, too easily, been assumed.

Nor indeed is it the only easy assumption it is possible to make. It
is tempting to allow oneself to be carried away by Proudhon’s profes-
sion of tolerance and open-mindedness. Yet to take this at its face
value, to polarize the exchange between Proudhon and Marx by casting
Proudhon as the personification of these virtues, is to prejudge later,
more momentous confrontations in far too innocent a manner. The
superiority of an open exchange of views over an authoritarian
stifling of opinion need not be laboured; indeed, it was all that Marx
(whatever his views of Grim) has pressed for in his letter. But it does
need to be borne in mind that while Marx, no doubt tactlessly as well
as inadvertently, gave Proudhon every opportunity of displaying
tolerance in his letter back, no controversialist - and Proudhon was
nothing if not a controversialist-could be more intolerant and dogmatic




than Proudhon himself, as many a French socialist of some other
persuasion could (and did) attest. Marx, for the most part, was not on
the receiving end of Proudhon’s celebrated rancour, since Proudhon’s
sights were set firmly within the French horizon; Proudhon’s uncharac-
teristic silence in the face of Marx’s published attacks on him was
simply a recognition that Marx’s assaults could make no real difference.
Proudhon in the 1840s was a celebrated theoretician, and Marx was
not; The Philosophy of Poverty was translated into German almost
immediately on its appearance, and Marx’s The Poverty of Philosophy
was translated into German only after Marx’s death, almost four
decades after it first appeared. Proudhon could afford not to call
attention to an obscure book by an obscure author; and Marx, as he
emerged from obscurity, had frequent occasion to regret the influence
of Proudhon. Marx’s Proudhonist enemies in the International, as we
shall observe, were by virtue of their Proudhonism to be no less ‘dog-
matic’ or ‘intolerant’ than Marx himself. The historical and dramatic
ironies were to run deep;but we shall not be able to plumb them unless
we recognize that the International, which was never intended to be
an ideologically monolithic, or univocal, body, turned into one partly
because of Marx, partly because of his Proudhonist enemies and their
heirs, and partly because of the outcome of successive confrontations
that escaped the control of either side.

The Poverty of Philosophy and beyond

Marx’s attempt to destroy Proudhon’s reputation as a theorist, once
and for all, by writing a book attacking him, in 1847, was in its way
guileless as well as unseemly, ill-judged as well as venomous. The
shortcomings of Proudhon’s System of Economic Contradictions,
which appeared in two volumes (running close to 1,000 pages) in
1846, struck him as being so blatantly outrageous as to demand an
unkind, blistering response. Marx’s patience, never foremost among
his qualities, had been undercut; indeed it had reached its breaking
point. It is no accident that The Poverty of Philosophy was the only
book Marx wrote in French and had published in Paris; even so, what
was in many ways an attempt at character assassination misfired; Marx
failed to discredit Proudhon, at least among the latter’s most immediate
and important audience. As far as the development of French (and by
extension European) socialism was concerned, Proudhon’s influence
seems to have been diminished or deflected not one whit by the un-
doubted intellectual power, and equally undoubted personal malice,
of Marx’s withering attack. It would be tempting (but peremptory)
to conclude that Marx, by creating a backlash of sympathy for Proud-
hon in France, inadvertently succeeded in augmenting Proudhon’s




reputation. Such a conclusion would not be without a certain poetic
justice. The truth of the matter, however, is more prosaic. Proudhon’s
reputation needed no enhancing; and Marx’s book, unlike Proudhon’s,
failed to sell many copies.

Proudhon, even though he never replied in print to Marx’s scornful
attack, was, not surprisingly, cut to the quick by it. He described
The Poverty of Philosophy (in the margins of his own copy) as ‘a tissue
of vulgarity, of calumny, of falsification and of plagiarism’. Fond, as
ever, of accusing others of jealousy of his own intellectual achieve-
ments, Proudhon added that

what Marx’s book really means is that he is sorry that
everywhere I have thought the way he does, and said so
before he did. Any determined reader can see that it is Marx
who, having read me, regrets thinking like me. What a man!

This comment is interesting in the light of claims that have been ad-
vanced to the effect that Proudhon, in his later ventures into economics,
took cognizance (in his inimitable manner) of the criticisms Marx had
levelled at the System of Economic Contradictions, but this is an issue
we cannot enter into here. Proudhon’s only subsequent comments
(in writing) about Marx are contained, perhaps fortunately, in the
privacy of notebooks that remained unpublished during Proudhon’s
lifetime; these are generally straightforwardly anti-Semitic in character.
The exception proving the rule was Proudhon’s (again private) charac-
terization of Marx as ‘the tapeworm of socialism’ (‘le tenia de social-
isme’)⁷⁴ - a reference to Marx’s tendency to infiltrate socialist move-
ments that in their origin owed nothing to his efforts.

Even this kind of comment was not, however, a response in kind
to Marx’s attack in The Poverty of Philosophy, the tone and bearing
of which is in some respects difficult to adjudicate. Marx attacks
Proudhon’s claims to be either a philosopher or an economist at all,
on the grounds of his sloppy dialectics and ridiculous economic theory.
Marx’s arch avant-propos sets the tone as well as the terms of what is
to follow.

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.⁷⁵

\nd protest he does, throughout some 200 pages. On the one hand,




Marx’s actual criticisms of Proudhon can readily enough be docu-
mented; they are those of a rigorous and conscientious thinker attacking
someone who has not done his homework, who does not exhibit the
intellectual equipment appropriate to the task he was unwise enough
to set himself, who - in a word - is intellectually pas serieux. The
indignation of a serious scholar who believes that a philosophy of
action (or even of reform) can be based only on the firmest of theor-
etical grounds is not something that in and of itself invites accusations
of dogmatism (and certainly not an accusation of jealousy, as Proudhon
himself thought - unless it is jealousy of Proudhon’s popularity as
opposed to his intellect). On the other hand, plangent and bombastic
attempts at character assassination are by their very nature unsavoury
enough to rebound on their perpetrators; and this is the case quite
apart from the fact that Proudhon had already proved himself equally
capable of this kind of character assassination (as Etienne Cabet, Louis
Blanc and Louis-Auguste Blanqui, to name but three, had occasion to
find out), and quite apart from the intellectual content of the theor-
etical argument Marx brought to bear on Proudhon’s book.

To frame the issue in this way is to recognize that we need to ask,
at this juncture, what it was that prompted Marx to attack Proudhon’s
book at all. Far from being on the face of it aimed in Marx’s direction,
or in any way directly provocative, the System of Economic Con-
tradictions does not even mention him by name. Proudhon’s concerns
and targets, here as elsewhere, were in the first instance French; yet
they were by the same token anti-communist concerns and, often,
communist targets. While Proudhon’s anti-communism had not been
far below the surface in What is Property?, where he had assailed the
Babouvists, six years later his language was much more extravagant.
Returning to the fray in 1846, Proudhon once again selected Babeuf
as a whipping-boy, and attacked his communaute des biens as ‘nothing
but the exaltation of the state, the glorification of the police’,⁷⁶ adding
that

mankind, like a drunkard, flounders and hesitates between two
abysses, property on the one hand, community [i.e. community
of goods of the type Babeuf had propounded] on the other. ..
Capital and power - the subordinate organs of society - are the
gods which socialism adores; if they did not exist, socialism
would invent them.⁷⁷

The intemperance of such a claim suggests that Proudhon was setting
about raising the stakes, particularly since his target was not just
communism of the Babouvist variety. He proceeded to argue against
revolutionary communism and reformist state socialism (his bellwether
for the latter being Louis Blanc) that ‘the abolition of the exploitation


of man by man and the abolition of government are one and the same
thing’.⁷⁸ While bourgeois society and its theoretical expression, political
economy, consummated egoism and theft, neither revolutionary
communism nor state socialism provided any viable alternative, as each
would in its own way consummate monopoly and collectivity. The
socialism of Blanc and the communism of Cabet alike are denounced
by Proudhon as dictatorial, subversive of personal freedom and the
supremacy of the individual, and destructive of healthy family life.
Proudhon’s railing and flailing against socialism and communism is
such that, in the words of Marx’s letter of 1846 to Annenkov,

he bursts into violent explosions of rage, vociferation and
righteous wrath (irae hominis probi), foams at the mouth, curses,
denounces, cries shame and murder, beats his breast and boasts
before man and God that he is not defiled by the socialist
infamies.⁷⁹

This sounds exaggerated only to those unacquainted with Proudhon’s
System, a book which even his staunchest defenders find difficult to
justify.

The Poverty of Philosophy itself pays relatively little attention to
Proudhon’s fervent and unrestrained anti-communism; even its final
section on ‘Strikes and Combinations of Workers’, which leads up to
an exhortation to revolutionary violence, is concerned in the main
with stressing the political importance of militant trade unionism.
Marx’s restraint, which is not carried over into his comments on Proud-
hon as an economist and dialectician, can probably be explained by
what he had said in 1846 to Annenkov: ‘a man who has not under-
stood the present state of society may be expected to understand still
less the movement which is tending to overthrow it’⁸⁰ - the truth of
which statement Marx regards as self-evident. Proudhon is most no-
tably criticized in The Poverty of Philosophy not directly for his
anti-communism but for his economics and dialectics; and the text has
come down to us mainly as a classic and concise statement of Marxist
economic theory.

Yet the political stakes in Marx’s ‘Anti-Proudhon’ should be borne
in mind, since they are not so much ‘background’ to a discussion taking
place on some altogether different terrain as implied throughout the
discussion itself. One reason why this is so was provided by Proudhon
himself in the System when he argued that communism ‘reproduces
... all the contradictions of liberal political economy’.⁸¹ Marx, who in
the period since Proudhon’s first criticisms of communism had publicly
sided with the communists, and who could scarcely have been expected
to remain aloof from Proudhon’s revamped attack in the System,
sought to establish the opposite claim: that communism alone does


not reproduce all the contradictions of classical political economy,
whereas Proudhon fails to understand them.

1. 
   Dialectics
   

My aim is not to write a moral treatise, any more than a philosophy
of history. My task is more modest: first we must get our bearings,
then everything else will follow automatically.

Proudhon, De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans I 'Eglise (1858)⁸²

The Poverty of Philosophy, true to Marx’s avant-propos (and indeed to
its very title), had as its aim the discrediting of Proudhon’s dialectics
as well as his economics. Like his subsequent attack on the very different
Manichaean dialectics of Bakunin, the focus of Marx s attack on Proud-
hon serves to indicate the continued hold of Hegel on Marx’s thought.
Hegel himself does not escape lightly in the second half of The Poverty
of Philosophy (though this cannot be our main concern here), but
Proudhon’s somewhat high-handed attempts to correct Hegel fare much
worse. Marx’s basic objection to Proudhon in this connection is that
in his argumentation ‘high-sounding speculative jargon, [that is] sup-
posed to be German-philosophical, appears regularly on the scene
whenever his Gallic acuteness of understanding fails him’.⁸³ The ‘jargon’
in question, as Marx went on to indicate in his letter to Schweitzer
(1865) was not always even Hegelian. The relevant shift within the
sequence of Proudhon’s writings took place in 1846 when, in his
System of Economic Contradictions, Proudhon ‘attempted to present
the system of economic categories dialectically. In place of Kant’s
insoluble “antinomies,” the Hegelian “contradiction” was to be intro-
duced as the means of development’.⁸⁴

As part of Proudhon’s argument in What is Property? (1840),

in the passages which he himself regarded as the most important
he imitates Kant’s treatment of the 'antinomies’ - Kant, whose
works he read in translation, was at that time the only German
philosopher he knew - and he leaves one with the strong
impression that to him, as to Kant, the resolution of antinomies
is something ‘beyond’ the human understanding, i.e. something
about which his own understanding is in the dark.⁸⁵

Marx, whose point here is that a mock-Hegelian dialectic was to be
produced in the manner of an intellectual deus ex machina in order to
‘resolve’ this failure of the understanding, but who admits to Schweitzer
that he did not have a copy of What is Property? at hand when he was




writing this, was, if anything (and for once), too kind to Proudhon in
so characterizing his use of Kantian antinomies. Marx, indeed, presum-
ably did not have a copy of his own The Holy Family to hand when he
wrote to Schweitzer, for he had used this book to recast Proudhonian
antinomies within a dynamic, dialectical setting and drew from them
revolutionary conclusions with which Proudhon would have disagreed
fervently, but which foreshadow Marx’s later arguments in The Poverty
of Philosophy.

Proletariat and wealth are antinomies; as such they form a single
whole. They are both forms of the word ‘private property’
[Privateigenthum]. The question is, however, what place each
occupies in the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them
two sides of a single whole [which is all Proudhon had done,
at least according to Marx] . . . The proletariat ... is com-
pelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite,
the conditions for its existence, what makes it the proletariat,
i.e. private property. That is the negative side of the contradiction,
its restlessness within its very self. . . When the proletariat is
victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side, for it is
victorious only by abolishing itself, and its opposite (private
property, the ‘positive side’) ... it cannot free itself without
abolishing the conditions of its own life (as proletariat).⁸⁶

Proudhon, who according to Marx in this passage and passages like it
in The Holy Family had failed to infer the right kind of conclusion
from the antinomy of proletariat and wealth, was fond of comparing
his antinomies to those of Kant, but this comparison does not with-
stand examination. Proudhon regarded ‘antinomy’ in What is Pro-
perty? and elsewhere much as he was to regard ‘contradiction’ in The
System of Economic Contradictions' as an opposition inherent in some
af the forces constituting society, which will tear it apart unless we
understand them. There is nothing Kantian about this position. The
antinomies in The Critique of Pure Reason have as their medium not
being (let alone ‘society’) but reason; they served to indicate that the
understanding was operating outside its own proper sphere. Proudhon
ry contrast regarded the opposition signified by ‘antinomies’ as ubiqui-
:ous, and was to regard ‘contradiction’ in the same way in 1846;
sconomic and social, as well as logical ‘oppositions’ (or, mutatis mutan-
iis, ‘contradictions’), Proudhon considered identical or identifiable -
vhich is about as far from Kant as one can get. Proudhon also believed
le re'gime proprietaire’ could be comprehended as a ‘structured totality’
as we would say today), one that is intelligible without reference to
ts history, although it is not intelligible according to Proudhon without
eference to the contradictions that pervade it. To regard contradictions


as non-historical in this way is about as far from Hegel as one can get,
as Marx was not slow to point out.*

Even so, Marx in The German Ideology guardedly praised Proudhon’s
dialectics:

The most important thing about Proudhon’s book, The Creation
of Order in Humanity, is his serial dialectic, the attempt to
establish a method of thought by which the thought process
takes the place of self-sufficient [selbstandigen] thought.

Proudhon is searching from the French standpoint for a
dialectic system such as Hegel has actually established. The
relationship with Hegel is present here in reality, not through
a fantastic analogy. Hence it would be easy here to give a
critique of the Proudhonian dialectic, if one had finished
with the critique of the Hegelian.⁸⁷

In the event, however, Marx was to supply us with a critique of the
Proudhonian dialectic without ever completing a critique of the Hegel-
ian (although some of the elements of this latter are included not only
in the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts but also in the second