The Poverty of Philosophy
철학의 빈곤
The book Karl Marx wrote in French in reply to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty (1846), published in Paris and Brussels in 1847. Charging Proudhon with aping Hegel's dialectic and treating economic categories as the unfolding of eternal ideas, it argued that categories are only the theoretical expressions of historically transient social relations of production. It was the first economic work Marx published himself, and in 1859 he wrote that the decisive points of his view were first indicated scientifically, if only polemically, in this book.
In depth
Why does a reply to Proudhon matter?
In the mid-1840s Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the best-known theorist of French socialism. Marx had once rated highly the author of What Is Property? (1840), with its "property is theft". But when Proudhon published his two-volume System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty in 1846, Marx decided to answer it head-on. The title of the reply, The Poverty of Philosophy, turns Proudhon's subtitle around.
The book matters for more than its attack on Proudhon. With The German Ideology left in a drawer, this was the first book in which Marx published his new view of history and political economy. In the 1859 preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy he wrote: "The decisive points of our view were first indicated scientifically, although only polemically, in my work against Proudhon published in 1847, Misère de la philosophie." In the 1885 preface to the second edition of Anti-Dühring, Engels likewise said that their outlook first came before the world in The Poverty of Philosophy and the Communist Manifesto.
Die entscheidenden Punkte unsrer Ansicht wurden zuerst wissenschaftlich, wenn auch nur polemisch, angedeutet in meiner 1847 herausgegebenen und gegen Proudhon gerichteten Schrift „Misère de la philosophie etc.“
How was it written and how did it spread?
According to the English Wikipedia, Marx read Proudhon's book late in 1846 and on 28 December set out the ideas that would form the core of his reply in a long letter to his Russian correspondent Pavel Annenkov. He began the book in January and finished it in the spring. The German Wikipedia gives 15 June 1847 as the date of Marx's foreword and 24 July as the day the Paris bookseller Albert Franck announced it as published, in an edition of 800 copies printed for Paris and Brussels. He wrote in French to reach French readers and, above all, Proudhon himself.
The foreword sets the tone: "M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France he has the right to be a bad economist, because he passes for a good German philosopher. In Germany he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he passes for one of the ablest French economists. Being both a German and an economist, we have wished to protest against this double error."
M. Proudhon a le malheur d’être singulièrement méconnu en Europe. En France, il a le droit d’être mauvais économiste, parce qu’il passe pour être bon philosophe allemand. En Allemagne, il a le droit d’être mauvais philosophe, parce qu’il passe pour être économiste français des plus forts.
At first the book hardly sold. Only its last section, on strikes and workers' combinations, was reprinted in several workers' papers in the 1870s. A German edition appeared only after Marx's death, in Stuttgart in 1885, translated by Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky with a preface by Engels, who used it to refute at length Johann Karl Rodbertus's charge that Marx had plagiarised him. A second German edition followed in 1892 and the first English one in 1900.
How does the first chapter criticise Proudhon's theory of value?
Chapter One, "A Scientific Discovery", deals with what Proudhon presented as his great discovery, "constituted value". Proudhon held that value "constituted" by labour time resolves the contradiction between use value and exchange value, and that a just society would follow if all products exchanged according to that labour time. Marx brings in David Ricardo: that labour time determines value is what Ricardo had already shown to be the law of present society, and turning it into a formula of future equality had been done before by several English socialists. That labour time becomes the measure of value is itself, he adds, a result of modern industry, in which labour under the machine has become simple and uniform. "Time is everything, man is nothing; he is at most time's carcass."
Le temps est tout, l’homme n’est plus rien ; il est tout au plus la carcasse du temps.
What does the second chapter say? Economic categories are products of history
Chapter Two, "The Metaphysics of Political Economy", is about method. "If the Englishman transforms men into hats, the German transforms hats into ideas," Marx writes, mocking Proudhon for dressing Ricardo's economics in Hegel's idiom. Proudhon lines up economic categories such as division of labour, machinery, competition, monopoly and property as a series of concepts arising one after another in reason, sorts out the "good side" and "bad side" of each, and tries to cure the bad side with the next category. To Marx this is not Hegel's dialectic but mere morality.
Against it Marx sets the book's most famous sentences: "Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production; and in changing their mode of production, the way of earning their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist." Economic categories are therefore "as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products."
Le moulin à bras vous donnera la société avec le suzerain ; le moulin à vapeur, la société avec le capitaliste industriel.
The last section answers Proudhon's dismissal of strikes and workers' combinations and ends in politics. In the course of its development the working class will put in place of the old civil society an association that excludes classes and their antagonism, and there will then be no political power properly so called. Until then the antagonism between proletariat and bourgeoisie is a struggle of class against class, and the book closes with words of George Sand: "Combat or death; bloody struggle or extinction. Thus the question is inexorably put."
Where does the book stand in the genealogy?
The Poverty of Philosophy leads in two directions. One carries the conception of history worked out in The German Ideology into the critique of political economy: productive forces and relations of production and the historical nature of categories lead on to the 1859 preface and to Capital. The other is a split within the socialist movement. The book ended the relationship between Marx and Proudhon for good; as Engels put it in his preface, an unbridgeable gulf already lay between them. The conflict revived in the First International in the fight with the Proudhonists and with Bakunin. After Proudhon's death in 1865 Marx assessed him again in an article in the Social-Demokrat, which later editions appended to the book.