Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

part of The Poverty of Philosophy itself). Although Marx’s appraisal
of Proudhon’s dialectic was in general extremely negative, he admitted
in his letter to Schweitzer (1865) that ‘Proudhon had a natural incli-
nation for dialectics’, making sure however that he added the rider
that ‘as he never really grasped scientific dialectics he never got further
than sophistry’. This is the view of Proudhon’s dialectics, together with
the view that Proudhon ‘hides his dialectical feebleness under a great
show of rhetoric’ that Marx develops at great length in The Poverty of
Philosophy and the 1846 letter to Annenkov alike. The latter is an
important source; in it Marx poses the question, ‘Why does he [Proud-
hon] resort to feeble Hegelianism to give himself the appearance of a
bold thinker?’, and proceeds to answer it himself. ‘M. Proudhon’, we read,
‘mixes up ideas and things’ and fails to understand that ‘economic
forms in which men produce, consume and exchange, are transitory
and historical’.⁸⁸

*This is not a point that can be developed here, but Proudhon’s stress on a kind
of contradiction or opposition, which owes much less to either Hegel or Kant
than he claimed, actually has a positivistic ring to it, since ‘contradiction’ often
operates as the linking mechanism among the laws of nature, being and logic.

The Creation of Order in Humanity (1 843) professes a law of three stages
strikingly similar to Comte’s, although he links it in his later book on justice
{De la justice dans la revolution et dans I'Eglise) with equality in a way that
would have scandalized Comte and recalls - of all people -Leroux. More often,
we encounter the notion that truth consists in eternal laws embedded in nature
which the correct method of social enquiry will uncover and bear out by inaug-
urating corresponding social institutions. While this notion is positivistic in the
sense that Fourier is positivistic, it also seems to add up to a certain kind of
‘natural law’ assumption.




M. Proudhon, incapable [as he is] of following the real movement
of history, produces a phantasmagoria which presumptuously
claims to be dialectical. He does not feel it necessary to speak
of the seventeenth, the eighteenth and the nineteenth century
for his history proceeds in the misty realm of imagination and
rises far above space and time. In short, it is not history but old
Hegelian junk, it is not profane history - a history of man - but
sacred history - a history of ideas. From his point of view man
is only the instrument of which the idea or the eternal reason
makes use in order to unfold itself. The evolutions of which
M. Proudhon speaks are understood to be evolutions such as
are accomplished within the mystic womb of the absolute idea.

If you tear the veil from this mystical language, what it comes
to is that M. Proudhon is offering you the order in which
economic categories arrange themselves inside his own head
... it is the order of a very disorderly mind.⁸⁹

The ‘evolutions’ to which Marx refers are three-fold: the division of
labour, machinery and competition which according to Proudhon’s
System work, progressively though at cross-purposes, in the trans-
historical interest of equality and justice; these demiurges, which
themselves are not always sharply distinguished from each other or
from a third, the Revolution, Proudhon at times believed he personified.
What this means, according to Marx, is that

M. Proudhon is therefore obliged to take refuge in a Fiction in
order to explain development. He imagines that division of
labour, credit, machinery, etc., were all invented in order to
serve his fixed idea. His explanation is sublimely naive. These
things were invented in the interests of equality but unfortunately
they turned against equality. This constitutes his whole argument.

In other words, he makes a gratuitous assumption and then, as the
actual development contradicts his fiction at every step, he con-
cludes that there is a contradiction. He conceals from you the fact
that the contradiction exists solely between his fixed ideas and
the real movement.

... He has not perceived that economic categories are only
abstract expressions of [human] relations and only remain true
while these relations exist. He therefore falls into the error of the
bourgeois economists, who regard these economic categories as
eternal and not as historical laws which are only laws for a
particular historical development. . . Instead, therefore, of
regarding the political-economic categories as abstract expressions
of the real, transitory, historic social relations, M. Proudhon,
thanks to a mystic inversion, sees in the real relations only




embodiments of these abstractions. These abstractions themselves
are formulas which have been slumbering in the heart of God the
Father since the beginning of the world.

But here our good M. Proudhon falls into severe intellectual
convulsions.. .⁹⁰

Marx proceeds, here as in The Poverty of Philosophy, to accuse Proud-
hon of confusing progress and providentialism. To synthesize the
individualism animating bourgeois society with the desire for social
justice underlying the communist reaction to it seemed quite unprob-
lematic to Proudhon, who blithely assumed, and expatiated at great
length throughout the System on the assumption, that the good,
progressive features of social institutions could be separated without
undue difficulty from their bad, regressive characteristics which could
be sloughed off and cast aside. As Marx quite rightly indicated, simply
to regard everything as being somehow Janus-faced, as presenting a
double aspect, du cote du bien et du cote du mal, is insufficient to
make a system dialectical in even the Hegelian sense; to then add a
dash of providentialism, however watered-down (‘nevertheless, despite
continual oscillations, the good seems to prevail over the evil and,
taking it altogether, there is marked progress toward the better, as
far as we can see’),⁹¹ is not going to make up the difference. Proudhon,
who hated historical determinism, as a result turned his back on any-
thing Marx (and in truth many others too) would recognize as historical
analysis; the attainment of equality and justice was urged instead by
means of a sometimes disarming, ultimately unconvincing faith that
every apparent setback was purely temporary, and that the long-term
trend favoured ‘progress’ at every turn. (Of Proudhon’s works, only
The Political Capacity of the Working Classes - which was published
posthumously in 1865 - is not optimistic in this peculiarly artless
sense.) In Marx’s words,

it seems obvious to [Proudhon] that there is within the bosom
of God a synthesis ... in which [for example] the evils of
monopoly are balanced by competition and vice versa. As a
result of the struggle between the two ideas only their good
side will come into view . . . apply it, and everything will be
for the best; the synthetic formula which lies hidden in the
darkness of the impersonal reason of man must be revealed.

M. Proudhon does not hesitate for a moment to come forward
as the revealer.⁹²

Marx proceeds at this point to write a passage of fundamental import-
ance to an understanding not only of what he thought was wrong with
Proudhon’s notion of the dialectic but also with his grasp of economic


categories. For Proudhon, says Marx,

abstractions, categories are the primordial cause. According to him
they, and not men, make history. The abstraction, the category
taken as such, i.e. apart from men and their material activities, is
of course immortal, unchangeable, unmoved; it is only one form
of the being of pure reason, which is only another way of saying
that the abstraction as such is abstract. An admirable tautology!

. .. M. Proudhon does not directly state that bourgeois life is for
him an eternal verity; he states it indirectly by deifying the
categories which express bourgeois relations in the form of
bourgeois thought. He takes the products of bourgeois society
for spontaneously arisen eternal beings, endowed with a life of
their own. . . So he does not rise above the bourgeois horizon. . .
Indeed he does what all good bourgeois do. They all tell you that
in principle, that is, considered as abstract ideas, competition,
monopoly etc. are the only basis of life, but that in practice they
leave much to be desired. They all want competition without the
lethal effects of competition. They all want the impossible, viz.,
the conditions of bourgeois existence without the necessary
consequences of these conditions. . . Mr. Proudhon is therefore
necessarily doctrinaire. To him the historical movement which
is turning the world upside down reduces itself to the problem
of discovering the correct equilibrium, the synthesis, of two
bourgeois thoughts [in this instance, of monopoly and com-
petition], And so the clever fellow is able by his cunning to
discover . . . the unity of two isolated thoughts - which are only
isolated because M. Proudhon has isolated them. . . [In] place
of [the] vast, prolonged and complicated movement [revolutionary
communism] M. Proudhon supplies the whimsical motion of his
own head. So it is the men of learning that make history, the men
who know how to purloin God’s secret thoughts. The common
people have only to apply their evaluations. You will now under-
stand why M. Proudhon is the declared enemy of every political
movement. The solution of present problems does not lie for him
in public action but in the dialectical rotations of his own mind.⁹³

There are several reasons for quoting this passage at such length. In it,
Marx ties together the two strands of his subsequent critique, The
Poverty of Philosophy, in which he valiantly tries, but largely fails, to
treat them under separate headings, ‘A Scientific Discovery’ (which
could be an ironical reference not only to Proudhon’s insight that
workers cannot buy back the product of their labour, but also to
Marx’s own, earlier praise of Proudhon for having made a scientific
discovery) and ‘The Metaphysics of Political Economy’. That the




separation cannot, finally, be a neat one reinforces Marx’s point that
sloppy dialectics and an uncritical adoption of the ‘horizon’ if not the
actual tenets of political economy go together and reinforce each
other, with dire results. Proudhon, after all, cannot be said to be a
‘doctrinaire’ follower of the political economists in any obvious sense,
since he was severely critical of their concepts and definitions, and
indeed of the capitalist society to which these were to apply. He
contents himself, however, with substituting other definitions and
concepts of his own, which he considers more satisfactory. If his
definitions and concepts are less appropriate to capitalism than those
they were intended to supplant, so much the better: their profession
would serve to underscore Proudhon’s hostility to capitalism. What
gets thrown out at this point, however, as Marx was to reiterate, is
any explanatory force the concepts of the political economists may
once have carried. To argue on the basis of revamped but less appro-
priate concepts, as Proudhon does, is not to reinforce but to vitiate a
critical perspective for this very reason.

This leads to a point of some importance. If we ask, as we must,
what Marx means by the ‘bourgeois horizon’ (or had meant, mutatis
mutandis, in The Holy Family by ‘the standpoint of political economy’)
we find that he does not simply mean ‘following political economy’
in the sense of uncritically adopting its definitions and tenets; he also,
and in fact more fundamentally, means using a certain (broader) kind
of definition in a certain way. He is objecting to a mode of conceptual-
ization that prominently includes but is not satisfied by the procedures
of the political economists themselves. The characteristic feature of
Proudhon’s definitions and concepts is not that they are directly
tainted by those of the political economists but that they are purely
conceptual standards up to which the reality dealt with by the political
economists fails to measure. This can mean only that Proudhon’s
standards, to which present social reality signifies a lamentable failure
to conform, occupy a rarefied level, a level from which judgments
can be made. To say, for example, that competition as it has developed
is a betrayal of the original idea of competition which, if uncovered,
will make us ashamed in its light of what we have come to in its name,
is to refer back to a kind of social form that is obsolete, idealized or
both. Because they are overtaken by events, by the actual process
of social development which cuts their ground from under them,
these concepts come to have little actual reference or relevance to a
society whose worst features they are meant to rectify. This is what
Marx means in The Manifesto of the Communist Party when he says,
archly, that the communists had no need to abolish the form of property
that Proudhon held so dear, as the development of modern industry
was abolishing it daily.⁹⁴

It is important that we recognize that Proudhon here is being accused




not only of having backward looking standards, but of having standards
of a certain kind at all: that he is being accused, in other words, of
hypostatizing concepts, which is, at root, what the political economics
themselves do. ‘Economic categories are only the theoretical expressions,
the abstractions of the social relations of production’, according to
Marx, whereas Proudhon, ‘holding things upside down like a true
philosopher, sees in actual relations nothing but the incarnation of
these principles’, so that ‘what Hegel had done for religion, law etc.,
M. Proudhon seeks to do for political economy’,⁹⁵ an attempt which
is, in fact, redundant as well as mystificatory. Proudhon’s procedure
is to abstract ‘the substance of everything’ into mere logical categories
and then, having hypostatized these abstractions into principles, to
represent real social and historical developments as expressions or
embodiments of them.

If we abstract thus from every subject all the alleged accidents,
animate or inanimate, men or things, we are right in saying
that in the final abstraction, the only substance left is the
logical categories. Thus the metaphysicians who, in making
these abstractions, think they are making analyses, and who,
the more they detach themselves from things, imagine
themselves to be getting all the nearer to the point of
penetrating to their core - these metaphysicians in turn are
right in saying that things here below are embroideries of
which the logical categories constitute the canvas. This is
what distinguishes the philosopher from the Christian. The
Christian, in spite of logic, has only one incarnation of the
Logos', the philosopher has never finished with incarnations.⁹⁶

What this means is that Proudhon sees any social problem in the light
of conceptual problems; the referent of any concept, say ‘competition’,
becomes another concept, say ‘monopoly’, instead of the actual forms
assumed in society by either competition or monopoly. Problems, such
as how competition and monopoly are related, come to reside not in
society but in the concepts used to characterize society; dealing with
these is a purely reflexive, definitional exercise. Proudhon devotes
himself to solving conceptual problems: ‘The economist’s material is
[properly] the active, energetic life of man; M. Proudhon’s material is the
dogmas of the economist’⁹⁷ - dogmas that are rendered more dogmatic
by being treated as self-sufficient entities in a ‘pure ether of reason’.⁹⁸
For Proudhon, ‘the circulation of the blood must be a consequence
of Harvey’s theory’;⁹⁹ ‘instead of saying like everyone else: when the
weather is fine, a lot of people are to be seen going for a walk, M.
Proudhon makes his people go for a walk in order to be able to ensure
them fine weather’.¹⁰⁰




The problem is one of illegitimate abstraction and hypostasis: ‘With
all these changeless and motionless eternities, there is no history left,
there is at most history in the idea, i.e. history reflected in the dialectic
movement of pure reason.’¹⁰¹ Proudhon’s penchant for dialectics
compounds this tendency, for these too must be purely conceptual.
One of the reasons Marx dismisses them as expressing an adulterated
(/relate) Hegelianism is that their dichotomies or ‘contradictions’
were purely conceptual in a way that Hegel’s never had been. ‘M.
Proudhon has nothing of Hegel’s dialectics but the language’ (‘n’a de
la dialectique de Hegel que son langage’);¹⁰² he succeeds in reducing
them ‘to the meanest proportions’.¹⁰³ If this is so, society, which is,
according to Proudhon, ridden with ‘contradictions’, nevertheless
remains fundamentally the inert recipient of insights about ‘contradic-
tion’ and ‘synthesis’ which spring from the mind of the theorist like
Minerva from the brow of Jove; to Marx, on the other hand, contradic-
tions, to be contradictions, are the product not just of the theorist’s
mental agility but also of society itself.

There remains Proudhon’s manner of resolving his contradictions
so that ‘equilibrium’ ensues; there remains, that is, his untoward moral-
ism and feckless providentialism. Marx was justified in indicating, with
no small impatience, that according to Proudhon

every economic category has two sides, one good, one bad. . .

The good side and the bad side, the advantages and the drawbacks,
taken together form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in every
economic category. The problem to be solved: to keep the good
side while eliminating the bad¹⁰⁴

and that, for Proudhon, ‘the dialectical movement is the dogmatic
distinction between good and bad’.¹⁰⁵ Or, again in Marx’s words,

the good side of an economic relation is that which affirms
equality; the bad side, that which negates it and affirms
inequality. Every new category is a hypothesis of the social
genius to eliminate the inequality engendered by the previous
hypothesis. In short, equality is the primordial intention, the
mystical tendency, the providential aim that the social genius
has constantly before its eyes as it whirls in the circles of
economic contradictions. Thus Providence is the locomotive
which makes the whole of M. Proudhon’s economic baggage
move better than his pure and volatile reason.¹⁰⁶

Thus Proudhon’s undoubted radicalism is, in the event, vitiated, not
only by his tendency to transform historical conditions and relation-
ships into a ‘dialectic’ of abstract categories and pre-existing eternal




ideas, but also by an arrant providentialism. Proudhon saw contradic-
tion everywhere; his book is a welter of contradiction. He even ascribed
a kind of propulsive power to negativity (such negativite mo trice being,
after all, a component part of dialectical thinking, albeit one for which
Marx gives no credit to Proudhon). Yet his thought can be said to be
truly progressive in only a very limited way - in much the same sense,
as David Owen Evans has pointed out, that Romantic theories of history
are progressive. That ‘the true in all things, the real, is that which
changes . . . while the false, the fictitious, is anything that presents
itself as fixed and unalterable’,¹⁰⁷ a characteristic Proudhonian senti-
ment, is a point of view akin not to Hegel but to Victor Hugo’s ‘Preface
de Cromwell'. The Hegelian dialectic does not admit of the moral
absolute of ‘justice’ (or ‘equality’ or ‘equilibrium’) which Proudhon
shamelessly placed hors de combat as a goal towards which everything,
despite itself, was tending. As Louis Dupre, paraphrasing Marx, damn-
ingly put it, ‘economic systems come and go not according to the laws
of their intrinsic evolution but according to the development of a
super-economic and superhuman Idea until they reach the state where
Proudhon wants them to be’.¹⁰⁸

2. 
   Political economy
   

Political economy is not my strong point and it will be most
unfortunate if I have not given it up by the time I am forty.

Proudhon, Correspondance¹⁰⁹

From Paris [Paul] Lafargue, who was often in the company of
the Blanquists, wrote to Marx that Blanqui himself had a copy
of LaMisere de la Philosophic, which he often lent to friends.. .

‘He has found the best word I know for Proudhon, he calls
him a hygrometer.’

Maximilien Rubel and Margaret Manale, Aforc Without Myth¹¹⁰

Many of the questions Proudhon had posed to himself in the System,
which he intended as a volume about economics, were the very questions
that more orthodox political economists had also addressed - questions
about the source and nature of value, the distribution of the social
product, the price mechanism, and the character of exchange. Proud-
hon’s valiant but unconvincing attempts to grapple with such problems
were at least the proximate cause of Marx’s first real venture into the
territory he defined as that of his life’s work, the ‘critique of political
economy’, a criticism, that is to say, of the capitalist system alongside




a criticism of the concepts most commonly used to explain and justify
it. Marx occupied himself with questions that to many a more modern
economist would seem either political questions (what is the most just
and equitable distribution of social wealth?) or ‘metaphysical’ ones (what
is the nature of value?). Marx and Proudhon were attempting to answer
the same kinds of question, however different their answers may have
been. Proudhon, attempting in the System to deal with the problems
raised by the political economists, endeavoured to situate himself,
provisionally and on his own terms, on their terrain. Marx s basic
argument against him is that by venturing so innocently and unpre-
paredly onto this terrain Proudhon in effect seals off his own exits
and forecloses the possibility of a genuinely radical critique because
of the assumptions, several of them moralistic assumptions, he brings
in his baggage.

Marx generally criticized political economists for their tendency to
believe that the categories with which they operated were timelessly
and universally true, and for their failure to see through or beyond
the immediate facts they used as data. ‘The error committed by ortho-
dox economists’, as he once put it, ‘is in not being aware of the socially-
conditioned character of general economic categories and relationships
and hence in taking the given social arrangements as natural, harmonious
and eternal.’¹¹¹ There is no immediately obvious sense in which this
stricture can be applied to Proudhon, who did not take given social
arrangements as natural, harmonious and eternal’ at all; Marx’s point
is that Proudhon’s refusal to do so, far from indicating his immunity
to their influence, to the contrary points up how insidious it can be.

As we have already seen, Marx in The Holy Family had accused
Proudhon of some serious economic faults.¹¹² According to Marx,
Proudhon took the political economists’ invocation of ‘contract’, for
example, more seriously than they themselves had taken it; their
profession of the free and equal standing of the parties to a labour
contract had been in the nature of a gesture, a ceremonial genuflection,
a fiction made necessary by the fact of compulsion; whereas Proudhon,
with his belief in the morally regenerative power of contract, had taken
these professions at their face value, and those professing them at their
word. Proudhon’s steadfastness (or gullibility) in this regard has the
salutary effect of highlighting the difference between the political
economists’ protestations and the inhuman reality that actually ob-
tained under the aegis of wage-labour.

Yet Marx’s conclusion that Proudhon ‘does all that a criticism of
political economy, from the standpoint of political economy, can do’
is not an indication of approval (or ‘enthusiasm’) but a way of damning
with faint praise. This becomes clear if we ask ourselves, as we must at
this point, what ‘the standpoint of political economy’ is-for Proudhon
certainly did not think he was mired in it - and what it means to inhabit,




or remain locked within, this standpoint. To answer this question is
to see that Marx’s attacks on Proudhon in The Poverty of Philosophy
do not signify a change of mind about Proudhon the economist at all;
they are best regarded, rather, as an extension, a fleshing out, of his
earlier criticisms.

Proudhon’s economic argument proceeds on the basis of his obser-
vation that the more of anything useful there is, the lower will be its
price, the less it will fetch on the market. This commonplace obser-
vation Proudhon regards as a fundamental ‘contradiction’; he thinks
it means that use-value (or utility) and exchange-value (or price) are
locked into conflict. Use-value according to Proudhon is constituted
by the producer, exchange-value by the consumer who estimates the
scarcity of the product. Now there are two problems according to
Marx with this formulation. First, on what basis does the consumer
estimate? What gives him a basis for comparability? The only possible
answer must be one that entails the existence, and circulation, of
other products whose several exchange-values the consumer can scarcely
be expected to have computed all on his own; this means that there
must be a system of exchange operating independently of his will,
unless, of course, the economy is very primitive indeed. That Proudhon
misprizes what any real consumer can and cannot reasonably be ex-
pected to do under modern conditions (even if we suppose that con-
sumption is a full-time job) leads to the second difficulty. The consumer
and the producer cannot in fact be what Proudhon would like to make
of them, that is free agents able to make up their minds about the
prices of what they produce and what they consume, and to act freely
upon their decisions, for the good and simple reason that their respective
positions are in large part determined by the existence of a market
economy. The least that this means is that ‘the producer’ is not free
not to produce (something), the consumer is not free not to consume
(something); and this in turn must mean that producer and consumer,
far from inhabiting separate islands within which their separate decisions
hold sway, are in fact linked or joined together by their mutual involve-
ment in the process of exchange, which, again, operates as an exchange
mechanism independent of the will of either. The existence of this
mechanism means that supply and demand, which Proudhon wished to
dismiss as mystifications concealing the existence of value which is
constituted by labour (valeur constitute), in fact criss-cross and operate
in such a way that production and consumption are in a real sense
brought together.

Proudhon’s contractualism in economic terms entails that it is
possible, indeed desirable, to argue from an archetype of simple ex-
change between two producers to the operation of a complex economic
system like capitalism, applying the norms of simple exchange to an
advanced and developing system of circulation, with the legal and




property relations such a system requires. Marx, on the other hand,
believed these norms to be inappropriate to any more developed system
by virtue of their static quality, restricted scale and primitivism. More
modern forms of property and exchange, as Marx was frequently to
reiterate in contexts other than The Poverty of Philosophy, can no
longer be described as anything like the ideologists’ picture of hard
won, personally acquired property forming the groundwork of personal
freedom and independence as well as the outcome and representation
of personal labour. The point is not that it had never existed, but that
it had been superseded; kinds of property answering to this description
had existed during the ‘heroic period’ of early capitalist competition,
and out of them had emerged property in its more developed forms.
In the course of his earlier polemic against Max Stirner in The German
Ideology, Marx had made a passing comment that was to prove germane
to his critique of Proudhon: competition, Marx had written,

certainly began as a ‘competition’ of persons possessing ‘personal
means.’ The liberation of the feudal serfs, the first condition of
competition, and the first accumulation of ‘things’ were purely
personal acts. If, therefore, Sancho [Stirner] wishes to put the
competition of persons in the place of the competition of things
[as he did in his ‘association’ of egoists] it means that he wishes
to return to the beginnings of competition. . ,¹¹³

In The Poverty of Philosophy we find Marx making very similar claims
- that any desire to replace ‘competition of things’ by ‘competition of
persons’ is, in effect, plainly reactionary. In particular, we find Marx, in
The Poverty of Philosophy and the Grundrisse, following the lines of
his earlier criticisms of Proudhon (and Stirner), ridiculing Proudhon’s
attempt to derive general conclusions about the determination of value
in capitalist society from his ‘scientific discovery’ that overproduction
could be deduced from the fact - which Proudhon again termed a
‘contradiction’ - that under capitalism the labourer could not ‘buy
back’ anything he had produced. This contradiction Proudhon believed
was the root of several others. The labourer cannot buy back his
product; consequently ‘labour’ (here we have a particularly but charac-
teristically slippery transition) is systematically deprived of disposition
over its product - a contradiction that in its turn leads into the lack of
‘equilibrium’ that characterizes the ‘proprietory’ economy from bottom
to top. The entire economic system is permanently and progressively
de-equilibrating, although the process can be checked at the level of
its root cause.

But according to Marx the spinning of such webs is literally without
foundation, since Proudhon’s original formulation tells us nothing
about the determination of value in the first place. His model for the




determination of value is the kind of simple, face-to-face bargain
between equal contracting partners, which exists only in Proudhon’s
fertile imagination. Proudhon believed that since only labour creates
value, interest and profit were in the nature of a supplementary charge,
the price of any finished product being in this way surcharged over its
‘real’ value, that is, its valeur constitute. Marx argued that this formu-
lation bore no resemblance to anything that actually could be observed
to take place and that, pace Proudhon, face-to-face bargains provide no
actual or workable model for the determination of value in society as
a whole.

Producers in capitalist society cannot in Marx’s view directly and
equally exchange the products of their labour as individuals for the very
good reason that their labour itself is effectively socialized by the
process of production. What this means is that capital cannot be said
to confront ‘the individual’ qua individual at all.

Already the fact that it is labour that confronts capital as
subject i.e. the worker only in his character as labour and not
he himself, should open the eyes. This alone, disregarding
capital, already contains a relation, a relation of the worker
to his own activity which is by no means the ‘natural’ one,
but which itself already contains a specific economic
character.¹¹⁴

Capitalist society in Marx’s view - and here his critique of Proudhon
comes together with that of Stirner - cannot be said to comprise indi-
viduals qua individuals (either in the morally elevated way Proudhon
saw them or in the morally bereft way Stirner had envisaged them) at
all. It is composed of conditions and relationships of such a kind, and
in such a way, that the true congruence of individual and society has
yet to come about. What counts is not the individual as such, but his
roles; because Proudhon overlooked the real conditions of exchange,
he failed to recognize that the individuals he valued, and their work
(which he also valued, without examining what had happened to it),
were in fact inert, atomized and bounded. People are not free agents,
as they were in the lore of the political economy that Proudhon takes
over so uncritically, but persons distinguishable only by the roles they
occupy, roles determined by the existence and operation of the market
economy. These persons are, according to Marx, linked, but only by
their mutual involvement in the exchange mechanism, a social process
operating without regard to them as individuals, independently of
their wills.

Marx accordingly believes that Proudhon ‘carries abstraction to the
furthest limits when he fuses all producers into one single producer, all
consumers into one single consumer, and sets up a struggle between


these two chimerical personages’.¹¹⁵ Proudhon’s foray into the realm
of political economy results in

the substitution for use value and exchange value, for supply and
demand, of abstract and contradictory notions like scarcity and
abundance, utility and estimation, one producer and one
consumer, both of them knights of free will.¹¹⁶

Nor is this all. Marx went on to point out that Proudhon, speaking as
he did of the labourer’s ‘right’ to the product of his labour (and indeed
making it a linch-pin of his entire system), was blithely engaged in
applying moral categories and solutions to economic problems and
relationships. This mode of procedure Marx, for all the undoubted
force of his own moral indignation, considered quite unacceptable.
Proudhon wished to eliminate social antagonism in a non-violent,
non-revolutionary manner by replacing wage-slavery with a system
based directly on the labour that went into the commodity, on its
valeur constitute. The problem here resides in how this value is to
be determined, estimated and measured. The measure or yardstick
would have to be quantitative, thus, making possible comparison
between one good and another; and labour is most readily measured,
as all the political economists were aware, along the axis of time.
From this, Proudhon derives his ‘formula for the future’, that goods
shall be exchanged according to the labour-time embodied in them.
Unfortunately, however, Ricardo, whom Proudhon had read (and
criticized), had arrived at the same position by taking a different
route. That goods exchange in proportion to the labour-time embodied
in them (or according to what Proudhon termed their valeur con-
stitute) was to Ricardo, moreover, not a prescription for a more golden
future, but a straightforward description of what was actually taking
place in the present - on the assumption, of course, of the validity of
the labour theory of value.

Marx, for his part, readily accepted Ricardo’s belief that products
under capitalist conditions already exchange at prices proportionate
to their values. The outcome of the process of exchange, thus defined,
is not, to be sure, Proudhon’s projected society of equals but instead
the perpetuation of inequality; and there is a good reason why this is
so. What Proudhon overlooks, according to Marx, is something very
basic indeed; that the labour theory of value applies to labour itself,
that in a capitalist system of commodity production labour itself is
produced and reproduced as a commodity. It is valued and paid for
like other commodities, as one commodity among others; it is measured
along the same scale as they are; and this comparability, indeed, is a
defining and distinguishing feature of wage-labour in capitalist society.
Marx in putting it forward was, at one level, re-stating, in more strictly




economic language, an important implication of his earlier discussion
of the division of labour in The German Ideology, a discussion we have
already encountered; but there is at another level a pointedness to his
invocation of wage-labour as a commodity against Proudhon.

The application of the labour theory of value to labour itself means
that it is not the value he produces but the value he costs that is the
worker’s ‘due’, all to which he can be said to have a ‘right’, under
capitalist conditions, because under these conditions value is arrived
at socially, and not, pace Proudhon, at the level of the individual
worker. Value is expressed, in other words, not according to the num-
ber of hours expended by the individual producer but in terms of
socially necessary labour-time (that is, of how long it would take an
average producer to produce a commodity of a certain type, under
normal - that is, average under capitalism - conditions). To express
value in individual terms, after all, would make calculability unwieldy.
If the labourer’s value is thus defined, if his value is simply the cost
of his labour with respect to socially necessary labour-time, as capitalists
compute (and must compute) it, then the worker actually receives his
value. The capitalist has the worker exceed his value, or produce more
than he costs; the employer, to put the same point another way,
proceeds to use the labourer to produce surplus-value, the excess
being over the level of subsistence at which (give or take a few notches)
the worker is remunerated.

Proudhon’s fundamental error was to have confused two quite
dissimilar things: the value of labour and the quantity of labour em-
bodied in the finished product. The value of labour, as this is necessarily
computed under capitalist conditions, is quite simply the price that
labour commands in the market, its wage-level. This price, being deter-
mined (like all prices) by competition, will tend, ceteris paribus, to-
wards the minimum permissible. Just as the price of all commodities
is determined by the cost of their production, the labourer gets in
wages what it costs to ‘produce’ him, what it costs to maintain him
as a labourer capable of reproducing others of his kind.

To put the cost of manufacture of hats and the cost of
maintenance of men on the same plane is to turn men into
hats. But do not make an outcry of the cynicism of it. The
cynicism is in the facts and not in the words which express
the facts.¹¹⁷

This position vindicates not Proudhon but Ricardo.

Ricardo shows us the real movement of bourgeois production,
which constitutes value. M. Proudhon, leaving this real movement
out of account, ‘fumes and frets’ in order to invent new processes




and to achieve the reorganization of the world on a would-be
new formula, which formula is no more than the theoretical
expression of the real movement which exists and which is so
well described by Ricardo. Ricardo takes his starting point from
present-day society to demonstrate to us how it constitutes
value -M. Proudhon takes constituted value as his starting point
to construct a new social world with the aid of this value. For
him, M. Proudhon, constituted value must move around and
become once more the constituting factor of a world already
completely constituted according to this mode of evaluation. . .
Ricardo’s theory of values is the scientific interpretation of
actual economic life ; M. Proudhon’s theory of values is the
utopian interpretation of Ricardo’s theory.¹¹⁸

If the worker actually receives his value, his cost in terms of socially
necessary labour-time, under the capitalist wage-contract, if in other
words everything does exchange at its value, as this value must necess-
arily be computed under the prevailing system, then the system is not
unjust according to its own lights. The corollary of this belief is that
the rules that can be shown to be appropriate to capitalism are in and
by this very congruence inappropriate to any other social form. Proud-
hon, by contrast, believed that it was both possible and desirable to
take hold of concepts that are appropriate to capitalist society, turn
them round, and derive (or extract) socialist conclusions from them,
even though more rigorous classical political economists like Ricardo
had entertained such concepts as the labour theory of value without
deriving from them a single radical prescription.

Marx’s conviction that the concepts of political economy, as they
had evolved alongside capitalist society, were appropriate to capitalist
society and capitalist society alone amounts to a recognition that
political economy, for all its undoubted insights into an historically
specific reality, is by the same token in no way a politically neutral
discipline - a mode of enquiry, that is, that could be used or made to
yield socialist conclusions from liberal-bourgeois premises. Marx’s
lifelong ‘critique of political economy’ (in which The Poverty of
Philosophy occupies a prominent position) should be seen as being
devoted to the propagation of the very opposite belief - that capital-
ism and political economy stand, or fall, together. This belief separates
Marx’s thought not only from that of Proudhon (and the ‘Ricardian
socialists’ like John Bray whom Marx criticizes in similar terms in
The Poverty of Philosophy) but also from Rodbertus and Lassalle;
for all these theorists (Lassalle being very much more than a theorist,
as we shall see) believed in their various ways that it was both possible
and desirable to utilize or harness the new science of economics directly
in the service of the labour movement. Seen in this way Marx’s argument


against Proudhon is very much a political argument, with political
stakes; and, as such, it is strikingly similar to his later arguments in
The Critique of the Gotha Programme against the German Workers’
Party, which even in its inception bore the impress of Lassalle, for
having taken certain present-day social and economic forms as absolute,
for having abstracted them from their own process of historical develop-
ment, and for having derived from these perversely misconceived
abstractions various trans-historical prescriptions for action.

Marx s position was very different, and his successive criticisms of
Proudhon do much to show us the reason why. The emancipation of
the proletariat, to be genuine, must involve inter alia its emancipation
from the categories of bourgeois thought, categories that can mystify
and obscure that which they purport to explain, categories that can
fatally mislead and bamboozle the intrepid critic no less than the
shameless apologist, the expert as well as the novice.

Marx never denied that these categories in and of themselves em-
bodied a certain descriptive force, so long as capitalist society per-
sisted; but he consistently argued against their application, across the
board, to any other social form. It is because he fails to escape their
stranglehold that Proudhon’s ‘solution’ that was to bring about a better
society was no more than one of the worst features of established
society warmed over. That Ricardo’s perception of the equal exchange
of labour-values can fatally mislead is brought out in The Poverty of
Philosophy, not least in a passage which, though it is directly pointed
at John Bray, was intended to include in its purview Proudhon.

Mr. Bray does not realize that this egalitarian relationship, this
corrective ideal which he wants to apply to the world is nothing
but the reflex of the real world, and that in consequence it is
altogether impossible to reconstitute society upon a basis which
is merely its own embellished shadow. In the measure that this
shade takes on corporeal substance, one perceives that this body,
far from being the dreamed-of transfiguration, is the actual body
of society.

According to Marx, ‘[in] a purified individual exchange, freed from
all the elements of antagonism [Bray] finds in it, he sees an “equalitarian”
relation which he would like society to adopt generally’. The trouble is
that, again according to Marx, ‘[there] is no individual exchange with-
out the antagonism of classes’.¹¹⁹ In the course of one of his discussions
of Proudhon in the Grundrisse, Marx points to

the foolishness of those socialists (namely the French, who want
to depict socialism as the realization of the ideals of bourgeois
society articulated by the French revolution) who demonstrate


that exchange and exchange value etc. are originally (in time) or
essentially (in their adequate form) a system of universal freedom
and equality, but that they have been perverted by money, capital,
etc. Or, also, that history has so far failed in every attempt to
implement them in their true manner, but that they have now, like
Proudhon discovered e.g. the real Jacob, and intend now to supply
the genuine history of these relations in place of the fake. The
proper reply to them is: that exchange value, or, more precisely,
the money system is in fact the system of equality and freedom,
and that the disturbances which they encounter in the further
development of the system are disturbances inherent in it, are
merely the realization of equality and freedom, which prove to
be inequality and unfreedom. It is just as pious as it is stupid to
wish that exchange-value would not develop into capital, nor
labour which produces exchange value into wage labour. What
divides these gentlemen from the bourgeois apologists is, on one
side, their sensitivity to the contradictions included in the system;
on the other, the utopian inability to grasp the necessary difference
between the real and the ideal form of bourgeois society, which
is the cause of their desire to undertake the superfluous business
of realizing the ideal expression again, which is in fact only the
inverted projection [Lichtbild] of this reality.¹²⁰

One of the striking features of this passage is its parallelism with some
passages in Marx’s essay, written some sixteen years earlier, ‘On the
Jewish Question’. That Marx in this passage castigates the depiction
by Proudhon and others of ‘socialism as the realization of the ideals of
bourgeois society articulated by the French revolution’, and pinpoints
the ideals in question as ‘equality and freedom’, indicates not just a
parallelism but an overlap. Freedom and equality are situated in the
penumbra of ‘political emancipation’ and ‘political economy’; it is
an important feature of ‘political emancipation’ and ‘political economy’
alike that men be, formally and in principle, free and equal. That this
is freedom to buy and sell and otherwise contract with one another,
freedom at the level of abstract citizenship, and equality of a similarly
abstract kind means, of course, that these characteristics turn into
their opposites, ‘inequality and unfreedom’; but this happens not
because the original promise they once embodied has been eroded and
abandoned but because this promise depends for its fulfilment on the
overcoming of ‘political emancipation’ and ‘political economy’. Its
substantiation, in other words, exists not in an imagined past but in a
future that has to be worked for and brought about, a future in which
political will have given way to human emancipation and political
economy to the abolition of the class antagonism that is its current
matrix. In the meantime, as Marx was to reiterate with a remarkable




frequency, political emancipation and political economy alike can, and
are likely to, mislead the unwary; an ‘inability to grasp the necessary
difference between the real and ideal form of bourgeois society’ was to
afflict Lassalle as well as Proudhon. The fundamental point Marx
makes against Proudhon, that reform of capitalism, involving an im-
plicit acceptance of some of its rules and norms, does not amount to
emancipation but may distract us from the task of emancipation, is
a point that has a certain applicability to Lassalle’s reform from above
as well as Proudhon’s reform from below. The importance of this
point is about to become apparent.