Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

The politics of anti-politics

And then the revolution, the Republic, and socialism, one
supporting the other, came with a bound. I saw them; I felt
them; and I fled before this democratic and social monster. . .

An inexpressible terror froze my soul, obliterating my very
thoughts. I denounced still more the revolutionists whom I
beheld pulling up the foundations of society with incredible
fury. . . No one understood me. . .

Proudhon¹²¹

What baseness would you not commit to root out baseness?

Bertolt Brecht, The Measures Taken

Make Proudhon a Minister of Finance, a President - he will
become a sort of inverted Bonaparte.

Alexander Herzen¹²²

In January 1865, immediately after the death of Proudhon, Johann
Baptist von Schweitzer wrote to Marx asking him for ‘a detailed
judgment of Proudhon’. Marx was quick to compose in reply what
he claimed was not the detailed judgment requested: ‘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 am hastily jotting down a brief sketch’, an unflattering sketch
of some nine pages which Marx sent to Schweitzer apparently by
return of post. There was more than one immediate reason for Marx’s
evident haste, as we shall see; but not the least important of these
reasons was that Schweitzer had written in his capacity as editor of
the Sozial-Demokrat, the organ of the Lassallean political party in




Prissoa - the General German Workers’ Association or Allgemeiner
Deutscher Arbeiterverein (ADA). Marx in his reply took care to allow
for the publication of his letter, a letter which shows every sign of
careful composition, for reasons that will shortly become apparent.
‘You can complete it, add to it or cut it,’ said Marx, ‘in short, do
anything you like with it’; he added to its ultimate paragraph the
closing words, ‘And now you must take upon yourself the responsibility
of having imposed upon me the role of this man’s judge so soon after
his death.’ Marx’s letter was indeed judgmental, and any ‘good will’ it
displays stops well short of anything that is recognizable as respect for
the memory of Proudhon - about whose passing Marx seems not to
have been overcome by grief. In the event, Schweitzer published
Marx’s letter in its entirety, as Marx no doubt anticipated he would,
and added in an editorial note that ‘we considered it best to give the
article unaltered’. The letter, now article, gained some unsurprising
notoriety in the International as well as in France and Germany, as
Marx presumably intended that it should; it was republished as an
appendix to the First German edition of The Poverty of Philosophy in
1884 (the year after Marx’s death), Engels’s introduction to which is
at pains to emphasize that the ‘obituary’ ‘was the only article Marx
wrote for [Schweitzer’s] paper’.¹²³

The ‘obituary’ itself is on the face of it a summary and recapitulation
of Marx’s earlier arguments against Proudhon, unleavened by any kind
words except those describing What is Property? Even these are under-
cut by Marx’s insistence that the style of Proudhon’s only good book
is its ‘chief merit’. It is as though Proudhon’s death were insufficient to
satisfy Marx, who proceeds in short order to rub salt into the wounds
he himself had caused with the ‘cane’ (ferule) of his earlier criticism.
Marx includes in his ‘obituary’ notice the following morsel from The
Poverty of Philosophy:

M. Proudhon flatters himself on having given a criticism of both
political economy and communism: he is beneath them both.
Beneath the economists, since, as a philosopher who had 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 bourgeoisie
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 judgement sounds’, Marx adds in 1865,
‘I must still endorse every word of it today.’ (The words dropped in




the ellipsis are: ‘He wants to be the synthesis: he is a composite error.’
Let he take comfort who can.)¹²⁴ Indeed, Marx adds to his already
formidable battery of criticisms two more, which, while they are
familiar enough to those who have perused his earlier attacks, might
here be singled out for some special attention, since in the context
of the 1865 letter they have a significance that goes beyond Proudhon;
they concern Proudhon’s idea of science, and his class background as
a ‘petty bourgeois’.

To begin with, Proudhon’s ‘dialectics’ are once more paraded as
being ‘unscientific’:

he and the other Utopians are hunting for a so-called ‘science’ by
which a formula for the ‘solution of the social question’ might
be excogitated a priori, instead of deriving their science from a
critical knowledge of the historical movement ... He even tries
to use the utopian interpretation of Ricardo’s theory of value
as the basis of a new science.

In The System of Economic Contradictions, Marx goes on, ‘the twaddle
about “science,” and sham display of it, which are always so unedifying,
are continually screaming in one’s ears’. Proudhon is ‘a parvenu of
science’,^12s a point which once again is directed ostensibly against
Proudhon but also - and not at all ‘between the lines’ of what was,
after all, a Lassallean publication - at others. This is not the place to
expound at any length upon Marx’s differences from Proudhon (or
Lassalle) on the subject of science, except to note in passing that Marx’s
concept of science embodied what was at least a claim not to reduce
‘science’ to a formulaic or abstractly ‘systems-binding’ enterprise. The
problematic paragraph in The Poverty of Philosophy that comes im-
mediately before the ones Marx quotes in his 1865 letter does some-
thing to tell us why:

Just as the economists are the scientific representatives of
the bourgeois class, so the Socialists and the Communists are
the theoreticians of the proletarian class. So long as the
proletariat is not yet sufficiently developed to constitute
itself as a class, and consequently so long as the struggle of
the proletariat with the bourgeoisie has not yet assumed a
political character, and the productive forces are not yet
sufficiently developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie to
enable us to catch a glimpse of the material conditions
necessary for the emancipation of the proletariat and for the
formation of a new society, these theoreticians are merely
Utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes,
improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science.




But in the measure that history moves forward, and with it the
struggle of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no
longer need to seek science in their minds; they have only to
take note of what is happening before their eyes and to become
its mouthpiece. So long as they look for science and merely
make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the
struggle, they see in poverty nothing but poverty, without
seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive side, which will
overthrow the old society. From this moment, science, which
is a product of the historical movement, has associated itself
consciously with it, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has
become revolutionary.¹²⁶

Yet, as Marx’s description of Proudhon as ‘the parvenu of science'
might serve to remind us, what lies behind (and to some extent, ac-
cording to Marx, explains) Proudhon’s charlatanry in science, as in
much else, is the confusion of the social class to which he belonged:
the petty bourgeoisie. We shall have occasion to deal firmly with this
accusation in due course; what concerns us more immediately is the
political reference Marx gives to his accusations, since it is this that
enables us to put all the pieces together in the rather important puzzle
with which Marx’s ‘obituary’ of Proudhon presents us. Let us look at
what Marx says in 1865:

The petty bourgeois is composed of On The One Hand and On
The Other Hand. This is so in his economic interests and
therefore in his politics. . . He is a living contradiction. If, like
Proudhon, he is in addition, a gifted man, he will soon learn
to play with his own contradictions and develop them according
to circumstances into striking, ostentatious, now scandalous,
or now brilliant paradoxes. Charlatanism in economics and
accommodation in politics are inseparable from such a point
of view. There only remains 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 attention of the day.

Thus the simple moral sense, which always kept a Rousseau,
for instance, far from even the semblance of compromise with
the powers that be, is necessarily extinguished.¹²⁷

We need to pay close attention to Marx’s words here, since, appearing
as they did in a Lassallean publication, they embody - not very far
below the surface - a sub-text. On the face of it Marx is quite simply
reminding his readers of Proudhon’s ignoble coquetry with Louis (and
Jerome) Bonaparte.


His work on the coup d’etat, in which he flirts with Louis
Bonaparte and in fact strives to make him palatable to French
workers, and his last work, written against Poland, in which for
the greater glory of the Tsar he expresses the cynicism of a
cretin, must be characterized as not merely bad but base
productions; of a baseness which corresponds, however, to
the petty-bourgeois point of view.¹²⁸

The point here is not merely that this enables Marx to adopt a patron-
izing stance (though of course it does: ‘even 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’);¹²⁹ the point is, throughout these
accusations Marx is implying that Proudhon, because of his petty
bourgeois leanings, had a tendency to wish to resort to authoritarian
solutions. Marx here is doing more than replying in kind to Proudhon’s
anti-communism. We need only look at the date of his obituary to
recognize that several of Marx’s comments about Proudhon have a
more than passing reference to Lassalle.¹³⁰ Indeed many of these
comments - that he was a ‘living contradiction’ in morals, that he was
governed by vanity, ‘and the only question for him, as for all vain
people, is the success of the moment, the sensation of the day’-might
seem puzzling unless we remember that it was Lassalle (to whom these
characterizations apply much more nearly) that Marx also had in his
sights.

The parallels between Proudhon and Lassalle should not be exag-
gerated, but should be pursued. Lassalle had died some three months
before the death of Proudhon, in 1864 (the year of the founding of the
International). Like Proudhon, he had attracted the kind of mass
personal following that showed some signs of becoming a posthumous
personality cult, and that Marx and others considered dangerous to
the working-class movement in general and to the nascent International
in particular. Lassalle,like Proudhon, had been mesmerized by economic
science and had succeeded to a considerable extent in fixing upon his
followers a belief in the possibility and desirability of harnessing the
new science of economics (which, he believed, could be made to yield
‘proletarian’ conclusions) directly to the service of the working-class
movement. Most pointedly of all, Lassalle, like Proudhon, because
of his charlatanry in science, was, according to Marx, an accommodator
in politics; because neither had superseded the categories of political
economy (which they accepted uncritically as a set of formulaic prop-
ositions owing nothing to the context of the society to which they
had proved themselves appropriate), Lassalle, like Proudhon, believed
these categories could be put to direct use by the workers’ movement,
even at the cost of an alliance with autocratic, reactionary forces




against democratic and liberal forces. As far as Marx was concerned,
this meant that Lassalle and Proudhon, lacking as they did a sense of
economic realities, lacked by the same token a sense of the most basic
political realities.

Marx in January 1865, the date of his obituary of Proudhon, had
just received, from Wilhelm Liebknecht, confirmation of his suspicions
that Lassalle was ‘the Richelieu of the proletariat’. Liebknecht had just
exposed Lassalle’s schemes to sell out the ADA to the Prussian govern-
ment. As a Realpolitiker, as Marx was to describe Lassalle to Kugel-
mann the following month, Lassalle had believed he could compromise
the integrity of the movement he led, as well as his own, by dealing
with Bismarck.¹³¹ We need not to go into the tawdry details of Lassalle’s
absurd treachery - there is no reason to believe that Bismarck took this
self-styled Realpolitiker seriously - to see that his shade lurks uneasily
in Marx’s ‘obituary’ of Proudhon, and that this memorial notice has a
wider range than might seem apparent on an innocent first reading.

It is important that we recognize that Marx’s accusation - a dual
accusation, in effect - involved an issue of principle. Proudhon and
Lassalle had not suffered momentary lapses; in neither case was the
alliance with the forces of the right favoured as a purely hypothetical
contingency; both Proudhon and Lassalle had actually initiated contact
with the autocratic forces that held power in their respective countries.
Proudhon, admittedly, after much soul searching,¹³² had chosen to
suspend his principle of political abstentionism (not, it is true, for the
first time) and to ally not with liberal, democratic and socialist forces
but instead to coquet with Louis and Jerome Bonaparte. Not only did
he actively seek support for his credit schemes and people’s bank from
these tainted hands, he also wrote a book putting forward a (limited)
defence of Bonaparte’s coup d’etat.¹³³ In neither case did he receive
anything in return for his pains. Lassalle, in return for what he fondly
imagined would be state support of a limited kind for the co-operative
movement, and in return for mumblings about universal suffrage, had
been prepared to approach Bismarck. The details of the initiatives of
Proudhon and Lassalle remain obscure and debated; we have no way
of knowing how far either of them would have gone down the primrose
path of collaboration, because in the event neither of them was granted
the opportunity to find out. But we do know why Marx thought their
actions unprincipled and unconscionable, why he thought they should
never have set foot on so slippery a slope in the first place.

First of all, however, Proudhon’s motivations need to be examined.
He believed, as we have seen, that to act as a class, to become a class,
workers had to secede from bourgeois democracy, its trappings and its
temptations, in the name and under the banner of proletarian autonomy,
le separatisme ouvrier. He believed that politics was a form of indul-
gence and a source of contamination, and his own faintly bizarre




experiences in the National Assembly did nothing to alter his views.
(In 1848, as a member of the National Assembly - the ‘Parliamentary
Sinai’, as he called it in his subsequent Confessions - Proudhon, who
was expected to be on the socialist left with Ledru-Rollin and Louis
Blanc, not least by those who elected him, astonished his associates
by voting wi,th the right against the constitution of the Second Repub-
lic, on the grounds that he did not believe in constitutions!)¹³⁴ Proud-
hon continued to believe that ‘to indulge in politics is to wash one’s
hands in dung’. Political action is to be adjured in principle by the
workers’ movement; the measures to be taken are to be economic and
social and quite unsullied by politics. Action might in this way be
circumscribed in its scope and scale, but no matter: it will at least
remain uncontaminated, its purity preserved. Yet neither this position,
nor indeed the standard (and by no means exclusively Marxist) objec-
tion to it - that ‘clean hands’ might mean ‘no hands’ - explains why
Proudhon chose to suspend his insistence on politically clean hands
not in aid of French socialists and democrats (all of whom Proudhon
continued after 1848 to attack for various reasons) but by playing
court to Louis Napoleon. Yet if it is the case - as it was according to
Marx - that Proudhon’s unrequited courtship of Louis Napoleon pre-
figures nothing so much as Lassalle’s approaches to Bismarck, some
explanation is necessary.

Proudhon’s repeated denigrations of the political realm bear all the
hallmarks not just of intense distaste but of obsession; and obsessive-
ness about political power can in and of itself have untoward results.
‘[The] danger of any fundamentally anarchist position’, it has been
pointed out, is that ‘when one is disgusted by any and all government,
whatever its forms, one finishes by losing sight of certain elementary
political realities’.¹³⁵ What this statement means is that the anarchist
fails to see that there are sides and positions in politics, or that he fails
to make distinctions or to discriminate among these positions because
as an anarchist he feels no need to choose among them. The statement
is thus of little use if it is applied to Proudhon who, after all, did
discriminate and was in no way reluctant to specify his grounds for
doing so; his opponents on the left knew this as well as Proudhon
himself did. It is thus possible for us to be more precise.

It may be true that Proudhon’s inability to regard political power
in any but institutional, oppressive and contaminatory terms, his
tendency to see the fonctionnaire, whatever his colours, as the main
enemy, his disgust with bourgeois liberalism and the ‘lottery’ of parlia-
mentarism - that all these brought Proudhon perilously close to favour-
ing alliance with autocracy. Yet normally these characteristics - which
were, we should remember, constant features of his thought - did not
push him over the brink. What did so was the Revolution of 1848.
Proudhon’s particular scorn and wrath were henceforward directed




against those he singled out as the betrayers of the Revolution - the
revolutionary politicians of the Left, who had sold it out. Proudhon
fastened upon revolutionary politicians for two main reasons. The
first is that they were revolutionaries-prepared, that is, to countenance
the violence from which Proudhon recoiled. (The events of 1848
caused him shudders of horror for years afterwards; the thought that he
may have contributed to the violence by his own admission provoked
in him the intensest feelings of guilt.) The second reason is that revol-
utionary politicians by the nature of their craft - the double meaning
is intended - were deceptive, their ideals insidious. Proudhon, like most
French radicals of his generation, had an acute sense of the Revolution
(that of 1789 as well as 1848) betrayed; he differed from his contem-
poraries only in thinking that revolutionary violence, and the dishonesty
of those professing it, were the agencies of its betrayal. Indeed, they
would continue to betray revolutionary ideals unless their sclerotic
progress could be halted by the influence of people like Proudhon
himself, the living embodiment of the ideals of the Revolution. Revol-
utionary violence on this view of it pretends to emancipate the power-
less; by virtue of the illusions its practitioners generate, it garners and
marshals support among the deluded masses, goaded as they are by
impatience and despair. These, for want of anywhere else to turn, put
their lives on the line. Revolutionary movements that espouse violence
are responsible for their fate. If the movements fail it is they who pay,
with their lives, victims to the sacrificial process that claimed it could
emancipate them; if they succeed, then like all political movements
they turn around in their new-found mantle of the regime and enslave
those on whom their success has depended.

Proudhon had a tremendous - indeed to all appearances limitless -
capacity for moral outrage. But it is moral outrage of the kind that is
most particularly incensed not at the persistence of outright evil (to
which, in a way, it gets inured) but at hypocrisy - in this case at the
gall of the self-styled ‘liberators of humanity’ who would, given half
a chance, enslave mankind. Proudhon’s avalanche of indignation and
outrage found its readiest expression in the paradoxes and ironies that
resound through his writings, but it also emerged, less obviously but no
less forcefully, in his scorn for those masters of deceit, the revolutionary
politicians who, he knew, would delude and sacrifice those innocent
enough to take them seriously. The sincerity of their professions of
concern is belied at every step by the outcome of their actions. That
revolutionary politicians in particular by their very nature are deceptive,
insidious, slippery, volatile and untrustworthy has as its corollary what
amounts in Proudhon’s case to a curious reversal or about-face; for
these claims can slide over almost imperceptibly into the proposition
that the revolutionary Left is by its very nature unprincipled and lacking
in a stable set of values. To admit this is to be ready for the fatal next




step, which is to think that those on the Right, by contrast, may be
utterly unscrupulous but will nevertheless be predictable and consistent
in their unscrupulousness. This means that they cannot deceive us in
quite the same way; we know, we can have no illusions about where
they stand; with them, at least, we know where we stand. These, after
all, are people who are used to the exercise and the ‘realities’ of power;
in their way, they are dependable and much less likely than the un-
principled Left to lead us astray. Better, after all, perhaps, the devil
you know...

It is important that we recognize at this juncture how deep-seated
the opposition between Marx and Proudhon is on this point. While
Proudhon always considered political power in institutional terms, as
an evil that is to be (normally) shunned, and always considered demo-
cracy and universal suffrage as une vraie lotterie, Marx did not. As
Shlomo Avineri has recently reminded us,

Marx with all his critique of bourgeois liberalism, always
supports political liberalism against the traditional Right, not
because of any deterministic attitude which sees history as
moving constantly ‘leftward’ but for completely different
reasons. . . For Marx, socialism grows out of the contradictions
inherent in bourgeois society and political liberalism. A socialism
that would grow, like Lassallean socialism, out of an alliance
with the Right after both have overthrown political liberalism,
will necessarily carry with it some of the characteristics of its
authoritarian ally.¹³⁶

Marx, that is to say, supported political liberalism not grudgingly but
reservedly for a straightforward reason that far outweighed any desire
he might have had to polarize society into two hostile, irrevocably
antagonistic camps. To say, with Avineri, that socialism in Marx’s
view grows out of the contradictions that are inherent in its direct,
proximate precursor, or to say in the words of Maximilien Rubel’s
arresting (but exaggerated) paradox that ‘Marx was a revolutionary
communist only in theory, while he was a bourgeois democrat in
practice’¹³⁷ is to say that ‘human emancipation’, to employ once
again the vocabulary of ‘On the Jewish Question’, presupposes ‘political
emancipation’, which informs and should inform it in advance. The
Lassallean-Proudhonian tactic of destroying bourgeois society and
liberal democracy with the aid of an autocratic state (aid which would
not be given freely) would necessarily have socialism carry with it
into the future some of the characteristics of its authoritarian ally
so that society would become a reactionary utopia¹³⁸ instead of what
Marx wanted it to become, and thought it would become.

The dispute between Marx and Proudhon is at one level about ‘reform




versus revolution’, between amelioration of a gradualist kind and
wholesale revolutionary emancipation. Proudhon was exclusively and
quite sincerely interested in discovering ways to ameliorate ‘la con-
dition physique, morale et intellectuelle de la classe la plus nombreuse
et la plus pauvre’ (as he put it in his covering letter to the Besamjon
Academy introducing What is Property?). Marx by contrast was con-
cerned (if we may play upon the German title of his ‘Anti-Proudhon’)
not with Elend but with Verelendung\ and the difference goes much
deeper. Proudhon envisaged low-level social and economic measures
of a peaceable, non-drastic and decentralized kind which, he thought,
could be so organized that the negative (though not the positive) features
of a social system he found morally contradictory could be progress-
ively eliminated and undercut. Marx’s argument has to it an altogether
different directionality. He would say that Proudhon dissolves the
possibility of political (not instead of but as well as economic and
social) action into utopian economics. Marx himself was concerned
to apply economic analysis as the theoretical basis of an envisaged
political action; and as Istvan Mezaros has pointed out,¹³⁹ the very
language Marx uses is significant. While he employed economic cat-
egories in the analysis of the existing social forms of productive activity,
Marx, whenever he discussed the supersession of these forms used
specifically political terms - liberation, emancipation, Gemeinschaft
- all of which have a non-corporative, non-nostalgic, forward-looking
application. More is involved here than the undoubted stasis and
austerity of Proudhon’s utopia, since, as we have seen in our examin-
ation of ‘alien politics’, from Marx’s point of view the anarchy of
Proudhon and the autocracy implicit in Bauer, Lassalle and others
are opposite sides of the same coin. Each in its own way maximizes
alienation, while the point is to abolish it. Marx pressed for neither
the externality of all norms and sanctions, nor for their outright abol-
ition; he stood for the programme we can trace back to ‘On the Jewish
Question’, that of the positive reintegration of all norms and sanctions
into human life as a reassertion of conscious social control by men over
their own activity and creations which, in becoming alien and external,
had escaped men’s control. Men under capitalism are dominated by
needs that are external to them, by alien requirements which coerce
while (and because) they do not express. Proudhon was aware of
certain features of what was, to Marx also, a systematic process, but
in seeing symptoms in terms of other symptoms, he could not but
fail, according to Marx, to diagnose the disease or prescribe the
correct remedy. Proudhon saw freedom and authority as opposites,
utterly inimical one to the other, and this, finally, was the rock
against which all his various attempts to reconcile anarchy and order
foundered.

That the difference between Marx and Proudhon is, inter alia, a




difference between expansiveness and restrictiveness can be seen if we
turn, by way of conclusion, to a brief recapitulation of some of Proud-
hon’s economic assumptions.

According to Proudhon’s economic theory, nothing has value that
is not the outcome of the individual’s own work, the work of the
producer’s own hands. Accordingly, no participant in the economy
should be able to get out of the process of circulation more, or much
more, than he put into it; this rough and ready equality is to be the
basis and outcome of Proudhon’s contract, which is there to regulate
the exchange of goods of equal value. This can mean only that Proud-
hon, in seeking a measure of value that would be independent of
supply and demand, was looking for a stable, underlying proportional
relation which the prices of commodities would necessarily express.
He also believed that he had found it. His proposal to establish direct
relations among producers based on the immediate exchange of equiv-
alent amounts of labour-time in order to assure workers of the full
value of their work presupposes its discovery. But in what can it consist? It
can only resolve itself into a kind of juste milieu, a golden mean, a
principle of proportionality or equilibrium between needs and resources;
and this equilibrium would have to be something that always needs
restoring. The eminently restorative nature of this ideal means that
what lies behind Proudhon’s economic theory is not only a notion of
the inelasticity of wealth but also a real stasis. Proudhon’s utopia
would be a static and austere place to live. He has no notion of pro-
duction as being in any way expansive; the constitutive power he
ascribes to labour is thus reconstitutive and restorative. Labour can
be ennobling and uplifting if and only if it is kept within very strict
bounds; in particular, labour has nothing to do with the creation and
satisfaction of new needs, which to Marx, after all, was its defining
feature - albeit one that is denied and subverted by capitalism. Yet
Proudhon had no real conception of alienation in the labour process;
while Marx considered that under capitalism ‘labour is only an ex-
pression of human activity within alienation, of expressing one’s life
by alienating it [‘Lebensausserung als Lebensentausserung’] ’,¹⁴⁰ this
conception would have been unwelcome, if not actually inconceivable,
to Proudhon, to whom all labour, in all circumstances (not excluding
those of capitalism), embodied and expressed something ennobling and
regenerative. Marx considered that Proudhon had extended a basically
moral, and indeed rather poetic, vision of labour into his economic
theory, with fatal results:

The surplus-value which causes all Ricardians and anti-Ricardians
so much worry is solved by this fearless thinker simply by mystifying
it.. . The fact that actual work goes beyond necessary labour is
transformed by Proudhon into a mystical quality of labour.¹⁴¹




Yet Proudhon’s conception of labour does more than simply vitiate
his economic analysis, since it was, as we have seen, also the basis for
the centrality of ‘autonomous’ working-class organization in his thought.
Here too there are differences of some substance from Marx, whose
conception of productive labour does not involve the rehabilitation of
the labouring class by means of work in anything like Proudhon’s sense.
The issue is an important one, since Proudhon’s concept of autonomous
working-class (ouvrierist) organization, based squarely on a belief in
the redemptive, morally uplifting character of manual labour, stands
out historically not by virtue of its incoherence but by virtue of its
exraordinarily influential nature. The French anarcho-syndicalists
(and by extension revolutionary syndicalists elsewhere) took it over
lock, stock and barrel, along with its corollary, political abstentionism;
and while this is not the place to enter into the minutiae of the con-
tinuity between Proudhonism and anarcho-syndicalism, a continuity
that cannot really be doubted, two points do need to be made in
passing. First, despite Marx’s efforts to discredit Proudhon (or, possibly,
partly because of them), France, a country that was familiar with
attempts at socialist organization before Marx wrote his first journalistic
article, continued to have a socialist tradition that owed little to Marx-
ism, and indeed grew up quite independently of Marxism, until the
1890s; and even then the credentials of a resurgent Marxism were to be
challenged, not least by an equally and simultaneously resurgent
anarcho-syndicalism. The point here is not only that anarcho-syndicalism
owed much more to Proudhon than to Marx; it goes much deeper
because the features that were to separate anarcho-syndicalists from
Marxists in the 1890s were, mutatis mutandis, the very features that
had separated Proudhon and Marx in the 1840s.¹⁴² These prominently
included autonomous working-class organization, its deliberate separat-
ism on the basis of economic and social counter-institutions from the
prevailing system, and a rigid political abstentionism; these in turn were
based on an idea of the affirmative quality of labour per se, the direct
inspiration for which was Proudhon. The ideal of a French working-
class movement and consciousness, free from academic orthodoxy and
doctrinaire, ‘outside’ regimentation, creating its own weapons of
combat and spontaneously producing its own leaders, suspicious (at
times to the point of paranoia) of party creeds and state socialism - this
was an ideal above all of authenticity, that indicates the fertility of
Proudhon’s thought, which was strong enough to penetrate an anarcho-
syndicalist movement some of whose features (particularly the notion
of the revolutionary general strike and a certain penchant for violence
that underlay its profession) would not have commended themselves
to Proudhon himself.

This point leads into another. To say that the issues between Marx
and Proudhon outlasted their immediate protagonists is to point up the




practical resonance of theoretical differences, in this instance differences
about how labour in capitalist society is to be appraised. The differences
between Marx and Proudhon in this respect run very deep indeed. This
is so not only because Marx was concerned, unlike Proudhon, to
emphasize the deleterious effects of the division of labour in capitalist
society which, as we saw in the last chapter as well as this one, has
distinguishing features which do nothing to lend labour itself any
emancipatory potential. Nor is it simply a matter of Marx’s theory of
alienation in the labour process and its connection with his theory of
value. The differences ultimately reside in how labour itself is con-
ceptualized by either theorist. Proudhon, as we have seen, in ascribing
constitutive power to labour per se, espoused a labour theory of value
of a sort which did not rigidly keep apart ‘value’ in a moral sense and
‘value’ in an economic sense, so that his economics is vitiated by his
moralism. We need to remind ourselves only of Marx’s accusations
that Proudhon ‘abolishes political-economic estrangement within
political-economic estrangement’ and that ‘he does all that a criticism
of political economy, from the standpoint of political economy can do’.

Postscript: on the use of the term ‘petty bourgeois’

The accusation that Proudhon’s various failings (his accommodation in
politics, the drawbacks of his economic theories) can be attributed to
his ‘petty bourgeois’ background, interests or mentality is a Leitmotiv
of Marx’s successive attacks on him; and the question that remains to
be dealt with is not so much what kind of accusation or attribution
this is, but whether it can properly be said to be an attribution at all.
Let us take some illustrative examples. In his letter to Annenkov of
1846, Marx not only describes Proudhon’s ‘petty-bourgeois sentimen-
tality’ as consisting in his ‘declamations about home, conjugal love and
all such banalities’. He goes further.

From head to foot M. Proudhon is the philosopher and
economist of the petty bourgeoisie. In an advanced society
the petty bourgeois is necessarily from his very position a
socialist on the one side and an economist on the other; that
is to say, he is dazed by the magnificence of the big bourgeoisie
and has sympathy for the sufferings of the people. Deep down
in his heart he flatters himself that he is impartial and has
found the right equilibrium, which claims to be something
different from mediocrity. A petty bourgeois of this type
glorifies contradiction because contradiction is the basis of his
existence. He is himself nothing but social contradiction in
action. He must justify in theory what he is in practice, and




M. Proudhon has the merit [das Verdienst] of being the
scientific interpreter of the French petty bourgeoisie - a
genuine merit, because the petty bourgeoisie will form an
integral part of the impending social revolutions.¹⁴³

The timely admission contained in the last sentence is conspicious by
its absence from Marx’s later characterizations of Proudhon as a petty
bourgeois, characterizations which do not ‘merit’ Proudhon with any-
thing. Later, Proudhon’s specific arguments are dismissed in shorthand
form, at least to Marx’s satisfaction, by the simple device of attaching
what to Marx was the unflattering adjective ‘petty bourgeois’ to them.
Thus, for instance, the 1865 ‘obituary’: ‘to regard interest-bearing
capital as the main form of capital, while trying to use a special form of
credit, the alleged abolition of interest, as the basis for a transformation
of society is a thoroughly petty-bourgeois fantasy’.¹⁴⁴ And thus (again
from a welter of possible examples) Theories of Surplus Value'.

In the same way as [Proudhon] wanted commodities to exist but
did not want them to become ‘money,’ so here he wants
commodities, money to exist but they must not develop into
capital. When all phantastic forms has been stripped away, this
means nothing more than that there should be no advance from
small, petty-bourgeois peasant and artisan production to large
scale industry.¹⁴⁵

We must balk, not only at this last point (which happens to suggest
something that is largely untrue) but also at the way it and others like
it are put. It is perfectly possible to criticize Proudhon’s economic ideas
without recourse to the epithet ‘petty bourgeois’; Marx himself, indeed,
sometimes - but not often - did so. That the frequent use of the label
‘petty bourgeois’ in subsequent Marxist writing is frequently unsavoury,
ad hominem and unfair, as well as wearying to the critical reader, is a
point that does not need to be laboured. What does need to be pointed
out is that any such use is in reality misuse which disqualifies the status
of arguments employing the label as arguments, properly so-called,
at all.

To see this we should take our bearings. There is a sense in which to
characterize Proudhon as a ‘petty bourgeois’, or even to apply ‘petty
bourgeois’ to some of his ideas, may seem appropriate. Such a character-
ization (with which Proudhon himself might have agreed, with some
pride) may not seem altogether wide of the mark, if it were kept within
limits. In early nineteenth-century France, it might generally be agreed,
a relatively large proportion of the population were small property-
owners, small masters, small employers, and - sometimes down through
well-nigh imperceptible shadings - journeymen, craftsmen, apprentices,




landed and landless peasants. All these groups were threatened by the
onset and expansion of a capitalism that represented in their eyes an
intensified exploitation, expropriation and dispossession. The pen-
etration of capitalism was real enough, and rapid and unsettling enough
to pose a threat to members of these groups; the writing, as it were, was
on the wall, and it spelt deprivation of property - property broadly
conceived to include the kind of labour that was still a skill and not yet
a commodity - and it spelt proletarianization. The threat, indeed, was
double-edged, since those who had something to lose as a result of
‘progress’ could scarcely have been expected to turn for support to the
revolutionary Left in so far as it was made up of collectivist socialists
and communists, since these, too, given a free hand, would deprive
them of a property which was the more valued as it was more threatened.
These groups, ‘the shock absorbers of the bourgeoisie’ (to wrest an
appropriate phrase from George Orwell), had proved their volatility
and vitality in defence of their threatened rights during the French
Revolution.¹⁴⁶ Proudhon, for his part, had undoubted connections
with this peculiarly French menu peuple. He came from their ranks,
spoke up for them, spoke to them, had their interests at heart, and
enjoyed much support and admiration among them. There is nothing
surprising about this. Proudhon, indeed, as Marx seemed grudgingly to
be on the point of admitting in 1846, was well placed to perceive, and
speak to, the real, basically non-proletarian (or pre-proletarian) character
of ‘la classe la plus nombreuse et la plus pauvre’ - unlike Saint-Simon
who, as an aristocrat malgre lui, saw them from afar.

Thus Marx, in attributing petty bourgeois characteristics to Proudhon
and his thought, was not wrong. But this is not all that he did. He used
‘petty bourgeois’ as a term of abuse and opprobrium; he maintained
that the confusions and contradictions in Proudhon’s thought in some
way represented or could be reduced to the confusions and contradic-
tions in the placement of the non-progressive petty bourgeois class.
The objections to this procedure, considered as a mode of explanation,
are, at one level, fairly obvious. It is unwarranted, because reductive;
it begs the question of whether, or to what extent or in what way,
intellectual confusion may legitimately be reduced to social contradic-
tion; it has little if any explanatory force because to use it is always
to beg the question not only of what these connections may be, but
how they are to be traced; and, in particular, to use the term ‘petty
bourgeois’ as an adjectival epithet to be applied to a thinker, or a body
of thought, is to misuse what at best can be applied within strict limits
to explain the provenance or bearing of an idea. To use it to refer to
relations among ideas (connections, contradictions, confusions) is
indefensible because all the problems of reductiveness are multiplied
in the attempt itself.

These objections are damning and might be conclusive in themselves.




Yet there is another objection that is even more damning, having to do
with the way we use (and ought to use) words. Raymond Williams¹⁴⁷
has tellingly observed that in Marxist discourse ‘analytic categories...
almost unnoticed become substantive descriptions to which, as analytic
categories, they are attempting to speak’. Marx’s attempt to characterize
Proudhon as a ‘petty bourgeois’ is not an example Williams uses; but it
is nevertheless a case in point. The term ‘petty bourgeois’ is, or can
legitimately be used as, an analytic category. Those persons belonging
to it have certain characteristics - let us say of being threatened in
various ways by ‘progress’, or of subscribing in various ways to what
E.P. Thompson called a pre-capitalist ‘moral economy’.¹⁴⁸ This means
that if we fail to specify what these characteristics are, any use of the
category of which these are characteristics makes no sense. This in turn
means that use of the category, if it is to make sense, depends on the
characteristics that make it up. But if we ‘describe’ Proudhon as a petty
bourgeois, the better, perhaps, to try to discredit him, we are trying to
use the term ‘petty bourgeois’ adjectivally to characterize him or some-
thing about him; and this we simply cannot do, since ‘petty bourgeois’
is not a designation or a characterization in the required sense. It exists
not in order to characterize but in order to be characterized. If we
attempt to explain or account for Proudhon, or anything about Proud-
hon, by saying that he is a petty bourgeois, we are using an analytic
category as a descriptive term; but no analytic category can be used as
a descriptive term without losing all its meaning. Our attempt would
be no more than the verbal trickery involved in substituting connota-
tations for characterizations; and it is we who would be tricked.