The Poverty of Philosophy

Contents

1. Translator’s Introduction (Quelch) 7 min 4

   Harry Quelch introduces the first English translation (1900). The book contains the groundwork of Capital and treats subjects, such as rent, that the English edition of Capital barely touches. He notes that Marx underestimated how conservative the great English trade unions would become, explains that “Socialism” in 1847 meant the utopians, and describes his translation.

2. Engels’s Preface to the German Edition (1884) 37 min 10

   Engels explains that Marx wrote the book in 1846–47 to answer Proudhon, from whom he had become irreconcilably separated. Most of the preface defends Marx against the charge that he plagiarised the Prussian economist Rodbertus: the “Socialist application” of Ricardo’s labour theory of value had long been made by English socialists, and Rodbertus’s labour-note utopia is naïve. Engels explains why markets cannot simply be replaced by labour money without abolishing commodity production, and why moral outrage at exploitation signals that an economic order is becoming obsolete.

3. Author’s Preface 1 min 2

   Marx’s two-paragraph preface: in France Proudhon passes for a German philosopher, in Germany for a French economist; Marx, as both German and economist, protests against this double error.

4. Author’s Introductory Note 1 min

   Proudhon’s book presents itself as a revelation, a Bible full of mysteries; the reader must follow its “Genesis” before rising to its heights.

5. I.1 Opposition of Utility-Value to Exchange-Value 28 min 7

   Proudhon explains exchange by imagining an individual who proposes it to others, though the needs he starts from already presuppose division of labour and exchange. Marx traces the historical phases of exchange up to the age of “universal venality,” when even virtue and conscience are sold. Proudhon’s supposed discovery, the opposition of use-value and exchange-value, was already known to economists such as Sismondi and Lauderdale; it arises because he forgets demand and treats abundance and scarcity, the free producer and the free consumer, as abstract opposing powers. In reality supply and demand, production and consumption, are socially determined.

6. I.2 Constituted or Synthetic Value 1 h 20 min 17

   Proudhon’s “constituted value,” value determined by labour-time, is Ricardo’s theory of value, which Ricardo had presented as the law of existing capitalist society, not a formula for a just future. If labour is a commodity, its value is the cost of the worker’s subsistence: the theory is the formula of the worker’s slavery. Measuring value by labour-time presupposes that labour has become simple and uniform under modern industry (“time is everything, man is nothing”). Proudhon confuses labour embodied with the value of labour. Under capitalism, proportion between supply and demand is achieved only through constant disproportion; cheap goods dominate consumption because of poverty, not utility. Marx shows that English socialists such as Bray anticipated Proudhon’s egalitarian scheme, and that equal exchange of labour-time is impossible without abolishing individual exchange.

7. I.3 Application of the Law of the Proportion of Value 54 min 9

   Gold and silver are not the first examples of “constituted value,” as Proudhon claims; money is a social relation, and its value in circulation depends on quantity, which is why paper can replace it. Kings do not create money’s value by their stamp. On “surplus labour,” Proudhon personifies society as Prometheus and makes elementary errors of arithmetic with railway percentages. The enormous growth of English productivity from 1770 to 1840 did not enrich workers correspondingly because the conditions of that growth were class antagonism and the wage system.

8. II.1 The Method 52 min 19

   Marx turns to Proudhon’s borrowing from Hegel in seven observations. Hegel’s dialectic, reduced to thesis, antithesis and synthesis, turns real history into the movement of pure reason. Economic categories are only theoretical expressions of social relations, which change with the productive forces: “the hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.” Proudhon reduces the dialectic to finding a good and a bad side in each category, which, applied ironically to slavery, shows its absurdity, since slavery in the Americas was the pivot of modern industry. Economists treat bourgeois institutions as natural and eternal: “there has been history, but there is no longer any.” It is the bad side, the struggle, that makes history. Socialists and communists, at first utopians, become the theorists of the proletariat as its struggle develops. Proudhon is a petty bourgeois oscillating between capital and labour.

9. II.2 The Division of Labor and Machinery 38 min 10

   Proudhon treats the division of labour as an eternal category with a good and a bad side. Marx shows that its forms are historical and that machinery is a productive force, not an economic category, while the factory is a social relation. Within the workshop the division of labour is planned by authority; in society it is left to competition. Manufacture arose from the accumulation of capital, the growth of markets and the dispossession of feudal retainers; machinery followed. The automatic factory destroys craft specialisation and so creates the need for all-round development, which Proudhon, longing for the independent artisan, cannot see.

10. II.3 Competition and Monopoly 19 min 6

    Competition is not emulation but commercial rivalry for profit. Proudhon’s claim that abolishing competition contradicts human nature ignores that history is the continual transformation of human nature. Competition is the most destructive force within bourgeois society, and monopoly and competition generate each other continuously. Taxes on consumption developed with the bourgeoisie.

11. II.4 Property and Rent 27 min 7

    Property must be understood historically: each epoch has its own forms. Proudhon, writing on property, deals only with rent and calls its origin extra-economic. Ricardo’s theory of rent applies only where capitalist farmers employ wage labour; rent is feudal landed property subjected to bourgeois production. Proposals to hand rent to the state express industrial capital’s hostility to landowners. Fertility itself is socially conditioned, and agricultural improvement lowers rent. “Rent proceeds from society and not from the soil.”

12. II.5 Strikes and the Combination of Workmen 20 min 14

    Against Proudhon’s claim that wage rises cause general dearness, Marx argues they mainly reduce profits. Strikes have spurred the invention of machinery, such as the self-acting mule. Economists and socialists alike condemn workers’ combinations, yet trade unions grow with modern industry and, in England, are linked with Chartism. Combination unites workers against capital; as capital organises in turn, the association becomes more important than the wage, and the mass of workers, already a class in relation to capital, becomes a class for itself. The emancipation of the working class means the abolition of all classes and of political power in the strict sense. Until then, social and political struggle are inseparable, and the question is put as George Sand put it: combat or death.

13. Appendix I: Proudhon Judged by Karl Marx (1865) 19 min 12

    Marx’s article written days after Proudhon’s death in January 1865. What is Property? was Proudhon’s best and boldest work, though it posed the question abstractly. Marx recalls teaching Proudhon Hegel in 1844, sums up The Poverty of Philosophy, praises Proudhon’s courage in the 1848 National Assembly, and condemns his later work, from free credit and the People’s Bank to his flirtation with Louis Bonaparte, as the expression of a petty-bourgeois standpoint always torn between contradictions.

14. Appendix II: On John Gray’s Labour Money (1859) 6 min 12

    Marx’s critique of John Gray’s scheme for labour money, from the Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859): commodities cannot be directly exchanged as quanta of labour-time while production remains private, so labour money would either fail or require the abolition of commodity production.

15. Appendix III: Free Trade (1848) 37 min 2

    Marx’s speech on free trade to the Democratic Association of Brussels, January 1848, in Quelch’s translation: free trade lowers wages along with food prices and gives capital freedom to exploit, but Marx supports it because it hastens the social revolution.