II.1. The Method

Now we are quite in Germany! We have now to talk metaphysics while speaking of political economy. And, in this again, we only follow the “contradictions” of M. Proudhon. Just now he compelled us to speak English, to become even passably English ourselves. Now the scene changes. M. Proudhon transports us to our dear native land and compels us in spite of ourselves to once more assume our quality of German.

If the Englishman transforms men into hats, the German transforms hats into ideas. The Englishman is Ricardo, a rich banker and distinguished economist; the German is Hegel, a simple professor of philosophy at the Berlin University.

Louis XV., the last absolute monarch and who represented the decadence of French royalty, had attached to his person a physician who was, himself, the first economist of France. This physician, this economist, represented the imminent and certain triumph of the French bourgeoisie. Doctor Quesnay has made of political economy a science; he has summarised it in his famous “Tableau Economique.” Besides the thousand and one commentaries which have appeared on this tableau, we possess one by the doctor himself. It is, “The Analysis of the Economic Tableau,” followed by “Seven Important Observations.”

M. Proudhon is another Doctor Quesnay. The Quesnay of the metaphysics of political economy. But metaphysics—the whole of philosophy, in fact—is summed up, according to Hegel, in the method. It will be necessary, then, for us to endeavor to elucidate the method of M. Proudhon, which is at least as obscure as the “Tableau Economique.” For that purpose we will give seven observations more or less important. If Doctor Proudhon is not content with our observations, well, then, he must play Abbé Baudeau, and give “the explanation of the economico-metaphysical method” himself.

“We will not make a history according to the order of time, but according to the succession of ideas. The economic phases or categories are in their manifestation sometimes contemporaneous, sometimes in inverse order.... Economic theories have also their logical succession and their series in the comprehension. It is this order which we flatter ourselves with having discovered.” (Proudhon vol. I., p. 146.)

Decidedly M. Proudhon has wished to frighten the French by throwing in their faces some quasi-Hegelian phrases. We are then concerned with two men, at first with M. Proudhon and then with Hegel. How does M. Proudhon distinguish himself from other economists? And Hegel, what rôle does he play in the political economy of M. Proudhon?

The economists express the relation of bourgeois production, the division of labor, credit, money, &c., as categories fixed, immutable, eternal. M. Proudhon, who has before him these already formed categories, would explain to us the act of formation, the generation of these categories, principles, laws, ideas, thoughts.

The economists explain to us how production is carried on in the relation given, but what they do not explain is how these relations are produced, that is to say the historical movement which has created them. M. Proudhon, having taken these relations as abstract principles, categories, and thoughts, has only to put order into these thoughts, which may be found ranged alphabetically at the end of any treatise on political economy. The material of the economists is the active and busy life of men; the materials of M. Proudhon are the dogmas of the economists. But from the moment that we cease to follow the historical movement of the relations of production, of which the categories are nothing but the theoretical expression, from the moment that we see in these categories only spontaneous thoughts and ideas, independent of the real relations, we are forced to assign the movement of pure reason as the origin of these thoughts and ideas. How does pure reason, eternal, impersonal, give birth to these thoughts? How does it proceed in order to produce them?

If we had the intrepidity of M. Proudhon in this Hegelianism we should say: Reason is distinguished in itself from itself. What does this expression mean? Impersonal reason having outside of itself neither ground upon which to stand, nor object to which it can be opposed, nor subject with which it can be composed, finds itself forced to make a somersault in posing, opposing and composing itself—position, opposition, composition. To speak Greek, we have the thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis. As to those who are not acquainted with Hegelian language, we would say to them in the sacramental formula, affirmation, negation, and negation of the negation. That is what it means to speak in this way. It is certainly not Hebrew, so as not to displease M. Proudhon; but it is the language of this reason so pure, separated from the individual. Instead of the ordinary individual, with his ordinary manner of speaking and thinking, we have nothing but this ordinary manner pure and simple, minus the individual.

Is there occasion to be surprised that everything, in the final abstraction, because it is abstraction and not analysis, presents itself in the state of logical category? Is there need to be astonished that in casting down little by little all which constitutes the individuality of a house, that in making abstraction of the materials of which it is composed, of the form which distinguishes it, you would come to have nothing but a body—that in making abstraction of the limits of this body you would very soon have nothing but an empty space—that, finally, in making abstraction of the dimensions of this space you would finish by having nothing more than quantity pure and simple, the logical category? In consequence of thus abstracting all the so-called accidents, animate or inanimate, men or things, we are right in saying that in the final abstraction we have as substance the logical categories. Thus the metaphysicians who imagine that in making these abstractions they make an analysis, and who in proportion as they detach more and more from certain objects imagine that they approach the point of penetrating them, these metaphysicians have in their turn the right to say that the things of this earth are embroideries of which the logical categories form the canvas. That is what distinguishes the philosopher from the Christian. The Christian has but one incarnation of the Logos, in spite of logic; the philosopher has never finished with incarnations. That all which exists, that all which lives on land and in water, may, by force of abstraction, be reduced to a logical category; that in this fashion the whole of the real world may be drowned in the world of abstractions, in the world of logical categories, who can wonder?

All that exists, all that lives on land and in water, exists, lives, only by some movement. Thus the movement of history produces the social relations, the industrial movement gives us the products of industry, &c.

As by the force of abstraction we have transformed everything into a logical category, so we have only to make abstraction of all distinctive character of the different movements in order to arrive at movement in the abstract, movement purely formal, at the purely logical formula of movement. If in the logical categories is found the substance of all things, it might be supposed that in the logical formula of movement would be found the absolute method which not only explains everything, but which further implies the movement of things.

It is of this absolute method that Hegel speaks in these terms: “Method is absolute force, unique, supreme, infinite, which no object can resist; it is the tendency of reason to find itself, to recognise itself, in everything.” (“Logic,” vol. III.) Everything being reduced to a logical category, and every movement, every act of production, to method, it naturally follows that all masses of products and of production, of objects and of movement, are reduced to an applied metaphysic. What Hegel has done for religion, right, &c., M. Proudhon seeks to do for political economy.

What, then, is this absolute method? The abstraction of movement. What is the abstraction of movement? Movement in the abstract, What is movement in the abstract? The purely logical formula of movement or the movement of pure reason. In what does the movement of pure reason consist? To pose, oppose and compose itself, to be formulated as thesis, antithesis and synthesis, or, better still, to affirm itself, to deny itself and to deny its negation.

How does reason act, in order to affirm itself, to place itself in a given category? That is the affair of reason itself and of its apologists.

But once it has placed itself in thesis, this thesis, this thought, opposed to itself, doubles itself into two contradictory thoughts, the positive and the negative, the yes and no. The struggle of these two antagonistic elements, comprised in the antithesis, constitutes the dialectic movement. The yes becoming no, the no becoming yes, the yes becoming at once yes and no, the no becoming at once no and yes, the contraries balance themselves, neutralise themselves, paralyse themselves. The fusion of these two contradictory thoughts constitutes a new thought which is the synthesis of the two. This new thought unfolds itself again in two contradictory thoughts which are confounded in their turn in a new synthesis. From this travail is born a group of thoughts. This group of thoughts follows the same dialectic movement as a simple category, and has for antithesis a contradictory group. From these two groups is born a new group of thoughts which is the synthesis of them.

As from the dialectic movement of simple categories is born the group, so from the dialectic movement of the groups is born the series, and from the dialectic movement of the series is born the whole system.

Apply this method to the categories of political economy, and you will have the logic and the metaphysics of political economy, or, in other words, you will have the economic categories, known to all the world, translated into an almost unknown language, which will give them the appearance of having been freshly hatched in a head of pure reason, so much do these categories seem to engender the one the other, to enchain and entangle the one in the other by the sole labor of the dialectic movement. Let not the reader be alarmed by these metaphysics with all their scaffolding of categories, of groups, of series and of systems. M. Proudhon, in spite of the great trouble he has taken to scale the height of the system of contradictions, has never been able to raise himself above the two first steps of simple thesis and antithesis, and yet he has bestridden them twice only, and out of the twice he has once tumbled backwards.

Up to the present we have only explained the dialectic of Hegel. We will see later how M. Proudhon has succeeded in reducing it to the most paltry proportions. Thus for Hegel, all which has passed and which still passes is exactly that which passes in his own reasoning. Thus the philosophy of history is only the history of philosophy, of his own philosophy. There is no longer “history according to the order of time”; there is only “the succession of ideas in the understanding.” He thinks to construct the world by the movement of thought, while all that he does is to reconstruct systematically, and range under the absolute method, the thoughts which are in the heads of everybody.

The economic categories are only the theoretical expressions, the abstractions, of the social relations of production. M. Proudhon, as a true philosopher, taking the things inside out, sees in the real relations only the incarnations of these principles, of these categories, which sleep—M. Proudhon the philosopher tells us again—in the bosom of “the impersonal reason of humanity.” M. Proudhon the economist has clearly understood that men make cloth, linen, silk-stuffs, in certain determined relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these determined social relations are as much produced by men as are the cloth, the linen, &c. The social relations are intimately attached to the productive forces. In acquiring new productive forces men change their mode of production, and in changing their mode of production, their manner of gaining a living, they change all their social relations. The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist.

The same men who establish social relations conformably with their material productivity, produce also the principles, the ideas, the categories, conformably with their social relations.

Thus these ideas, these categories, are not more eternal than the relations which they express. They are historical and transitory products.

There is a continual movement of growth in the productive forces, of destruction in the social relations, of formation in ideas; there is nothing immutable but the abstraction of the movement—mors immortalis.

The relations of production of every society form a whole. M. Proudhon regards the economic relations as so many phases, engendering the one the other, resulting the one from the other, as the antithesis from the thesis, and realising in their logical succession the impersonal reason of humanity.

The sole inconvenience of this method is that in approaching the examination of a single one of these phases M. Proudhon cannot explain it without having recourse to all the other relations of society, relations, however, which he has not yet caused to be engendered by his dialectic movement. When afterwards, by means of pure reason, M. Proudhon passes to the birth of the other phases, he acts as if these were new-born infants, he forgets that they are the same age as the first.

Thus, in order to arrive at the constitution of value, which is for him the basis of all the economic evolutions, he cannot get away from the division of labor, competition, &c. Nevertheless, in the series, in the understanding of M. Proudhon, in the logical succession, these relations do not yet exist.

In constructing with the categories of political economy the edifice of an ideological system, the members of the social system are dislocated. The different members of society are changed as belonging to separate societies which arrive one after the other. How, indeed, can the single logical formula of movement, of succession, of time, explain the composition of society, in which all the relations co-exist simultaneously and support each other?

Let us see now the modifications to which M. Proudhon subjects the dialectic of Hegel in applying it to political economy.

For him, M. Proudhon, every economic category has two sides, the one good, the other bad. He regards the categories as the lower middle-class regard the great men of history: Napoleon was a great man; he did very much good, he also did much evil.

The good side and the bad side, the advantage and the inconvenience, taken together, form for M. Proudhon the contradiction in each economic category.

The problem to solve: To conserve the good side while eliminating the bad.

Slavery is an economic category as well as any other. That then has, that also, its two sides. Let us leave the bad side and speak of the beautiful side of slavery; being understood that it is only a question of direct slavery, of the slavery of the blacks in the East, in Brazil, in the Southern States of North America.

Direct slavery is the pivot of bourgeois industry as well as machinery, credit, &c. Without slavery you have no cotton, without cotton you cannot have modern industry. It is slavery which has given their value to the colonies, it is the colonies which have created the commerce of the world, it is the commerce of the world which is the essential condition of the great industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the highest importance.

Without slavery, North America, the most progressive country, would have been transformed into a patriarchal country. Efface North America from the map of the world and you would have the anarchy, the complete decadence, of modern commerce and civilisation. Cause slavery to disappear, and you will have effaced America from the map of nations.

Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed in the institutions of the nations. Modern nations have known how to disguise slavery in their own lands alone, they have imposed it without disguise on the New World.

What will M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He puts the problem: Conserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.

Hegel has no problems to put. He has only dialectic. M. Proudhon has of the dialectic of Hegel nothing but the language. His dialectic movement for him is the dogmatic distinction of good and evil.

Let us for an instant take M. Proudhon himself as a category. Let us examine his good and his bad side, his advantages and his inconveniences.

If he has the advantage over Hegel of putting problems which he reserves it to himself to solve for the greater good of humanity, he has the inconvenience of being stricken with sterility when it is a question of engendering by dialectical travail a new category. In order merely to put the problem of eliminating the evil side, one cuts short the dialectic movement. It is not the category which poses and opposes itself by its contradictory nature, it is M. Proudhon who disturbs himself, argues with himself, strives and struggles between the two sides of the category.

Taken thus in a impasse, from which it is difficult to escape by legitimate means, M. Proudhon performs a veritable somersault which carries him at a single bound into a new category. It is then that the series in the understanding unveils itself to his astonished eyes.

He takes the first category to hand and arbitrarily attributes to it the quality of becoming a remedy to the inconveniences of the category which he wishes to purify. Thus imposts, if we are to believe M. Proudhon, remedy the inconveniences of monopoly; the balance of commerce, the inconveniences of imposts; landlordism, the inconveniences of credit.

In thus taking successively the economic categories one by one and making one the antidote of the other, M. Proudhon makes of this mixture of contradictions and of antidotes to the contradictions, two volumes of contradictions which he calls by their proper title: “The System of Economic Contradictions.”

“In absolute reason all these ideas.... are equally simple and general..... In fact, we attain to the science only by a kind of scaffolding of our ideas. But truth in itself is independent of its dialectical figures, and free from the combinations of our mind.” (Proudhon, vol. II., p. 97.)

There at a blow, by a kind of quick change of which we now know the secret, the metaphysic of political economy becomes an illusion! Never has M. Proudhon spoken more truly. Certainly from the moment that the development of the dialectical movement is reduced to the simple process of opposing the good to the bad, of posing problems tending to eliminate the bad, and of giving one category as antidote to the other, the categories have no more spontaneity; the idea “functions no more,” it has no longer any life in it. It no longer poses or decomposes itself in categories. The succession of categories has become a kind of scaffolding. The dialectic is no longer the movement of absolute reason. There is no longer any dialectic; at the most there is only pure ethics.

When M. Proudhon spoke of the series in the understanding, of the logical succession of categories, he declared positively that he would not give history according to the order of time, that is to say, according to M. Proudhon, the historical succession in which the categories are manifested. All therefore passed for him in the pure ether of reason. All must be caused to flow from this ether by means of dialectic. Now that it is a question of putting this dialectic in practice, reason makes default. The dialectic of M. Proudhon makes a false leap to the dialectic of Hegel, and here is M. Proudhon compelled to say that the order in which he gives the economic categories is no longer the order in which they engender each other. The economic evolutions are no longer the evolutions of reason itself.

What then is it that M. Proudhon gives us? Real history, that is to say, according to the understanding of M. Proudhon, the succession in which the categories are manifested in the order of time? No. History as it passes in the idea itself? Still less that. Thus neither the profane history of categories nor their sacred history. What history does he give us, in fine? The history of his own contradictions. We will see how they march and how they draw M. Proudhon after them. Before approaching this examination, which gives place to the sixth important observation, we have still an important observation to make.

We will admit with M. Proudhon that real history, history according to the order of time, is the historical succession in which the ideas, the categories, the principles are manifested.

Each principle has had its century in which to manifest itself: The principle of authority, for instance, had the eleventh century, as the principle of individualism had the eighteenth century. From, consequence to consequence it was the century which appertained to the principle and not the principle to the century. In other words, it was the principle which made history, it was not history which made the principle. When, further, in order to save the principles as well as history, we enquire why such a principle has been manifested in the eleventh or in the eighteenth century rather than in another, we are necessarily compelled to minutely examine into what were the men of the eleventh century, what were those of the eighteenth, what were their respective wants, their productive forces, their mode of production, the raw material of their production, in fine, what were the relations between man and man resulting from all these conditions of existence. To thoroughly examine all these questions, is it not to make real profane history of the men in each century, to represent these men at the same time as the authors and the actors of their own drama? But from the moment that you represent men as the actors and the authors of their own history you have, by a detour, arrived at the actual point of departure since you have abandoned the eternal principles from which you at first set out.

M. Proudhon has not even advanced sufficiently on the cross-road which the ideologist takes in order to gain the highway of history.

Let us take with M. Proudhon this cross-road.

Let us grant that the economic relations, regarded as immutable laws, eternal principles, ideal categories, were anterior to active living men; that, further, these laws, these principles, these categories, had, from the beginning of time, slept “in the impersonal reason of humanity.” We have already seen that with these immutable and immovable eternities, there is no history; at the most it is only history in the idea, that is to say history which is reflected in the dialectical movement of pure reason. M. Proudhon, in saying that in the dialectical movement the ideas are no longer “differentiated,” has annulled both the shadow of movement and the movement of the shadows, by means of which we might at most have still created a simulacrum of history. In the place of that he imputes to history his own impotence, he takes from it all, even to the French language. “It is then not correct to say,” says M. Proudhon the philosopher, “that something happens, something is produced: in civilisation as in the universe everything exists, everything acts from eternity. It is thus with all social economy.” (Vol. II., p. 102.)

Such is the productive force of the contradictions which function and which make M. Proudhon function, that in wishing to explain history he is forced to deny it, that in wishing to explain the successive development of social relations he denies that anything can happen, and in wishing to explain production in all its phases, he denies that anything can be produced.

Thus for M. Proudhon, no more history, no more succession of ideas, and nevertheless his book still exists; and this book is precisely, according to his own expression, “history according to the succession of ideas.” How can we find a formula, as M. Proudhon is the man of formulas, by the aid of which we can leap at a single bound beyond all his contradictions?

For that he has invented a new kind of reason which is neither absolute reason, pure and virginal, nor the common reason of men living and active in the different centuries, but a reason quite apart, the reason of society personified, of the subject humanity, which, under the pen of M. Proudhon, appears sometimes also as “social genius,” “general reason,” and in the last place as “human reason.” This reason dressed up under so many names, is, however, every instant recognised as the individual reason of M. Proudhon, with his good and bad side, his antidotes and his problems.

“Human reason does not create the truth,” hidden in the profundity of absolute, eternal reason. It can only unveil it. But the truths which it has unveiled up to the present are incomplete, insufficient and therefore contradictory. Then, the economic categories, being themselves discovered truths, revealed by human reason, by social genius, are equally incomplete and enclose the germ of contradiction. Before M. Proudhon social genius has seen only the antagonistic elements and not the synthetic formula, both simultaneously hidden in absolute reason. Economic relations causing to be realised on earth only these insufficient truths, these incomplete categories, these contradictory notions, are then contradictory in themselves and present the two sides, of which one is good, the other evil.

To find the complete truth, the notion in all its plenitude, the synthetic formula, which will annihilate the contradiction—that is the problem of social genius. That is why still, in the illusion of M. Proudhon, the same social genius has been driven from one category to the other without having yet come, with all the battery of its categories, to drag from God, from absolute reason, a synthetic formula.

“At first society (social genius) presents a first fact, emits a hypothesis....a true contradiction, of which the antagonistic results unfold themselves in the social economy in the same manner as the consequences would have been deduced in the mind, in such wise that the industrial movement, following in all the deductions of ideas, divides into a double current, the one of useful effects, the other of subversive results. To constitute harmoniously this two-faced principle and solve this contradiction, society develops a second, which will very soon be followed by a third; and such will be the progress of social genius until, having exhausted all its contradictions—I suppose, but that is not proved, that there is a finality to the contradiction in humanity—it returns, at a bound, upon all its anterior positions, and in a single formula solves all its problems.” (Vol. I., p. 135.)

Just as before the antithesis was changed into the antidote, so now the thesis becomes the hypothesis. This change of terms on the part of M. Proudhon can no longer astonish us. Human reason which is nothing less than pure, having only incomplete views, meets at each step fresh problems to solve. Each new thesis which it discovers in absolute reason, and which is the negation of the first thesis, becomes for it a synthesis, which it naïvely accepts as the solution of the problem in question. It is thus that this reason strives with ever new contradictions, until finding itself as the end of contradictions it perceives that all its theses and syntheses are only contradictory hypotheses. In its perplexity “human reason, the social genius, returns at a bound upon all its anterior positions, and in a single formula solves all its problems.” This unique formula, we may say in passing, constitutes the real discovery of M. Proudhon. It is constituted value.

Hypotheses are only made in view of some end. The end proposed to itself in the first place by the social genius which speaks by the mouth of M. Proudhon, was the elimination of that which was evil in each economic category, in order to have only the good. For him good, the supreme good, the true practical end, is equality. And why does the social genius propose equality rather than inequality, fraternity, catholicism, or any other principle? Because “humanity has realised successively so many particular hypotheses only in view of a superior hypothesis,” which is precisely equality. In other words: because equality is the ideal of M. Proudhon. He imagines that the division of labor, credit, the workshop, that all the economic relations have been invented only for the benefit of equality, and nevertheless they have always finished by turning against her. From the fact that the history and the fiction of M. Proudhon contradict each other at every step, he concludes that there is a contradiction. If there is a contradiction it exists only between his fixed idea and the real movement.

Henceforth the good side of an economic relation is that which affirms equality, the bad side is that which denies it and affirms inequality. Every new category is a hypothesis of the social genius to eliminate the inequality engendered by the preceding hypothesis. To sum up, equality is the primitive intention, the mystic tendency, the providential end, that the social genius has constantly before its eyes in turning round and round in the circle of economic contradictions. Providence is also the locomotive which conveys all the economic baggage of M. Proudhon better than his pure and heedless reason. He has devoted to Providence a whole chapter which follows that on imposts.

Providence, the providential end, that is the fine word with which we are presented to-day to explain the progress of history. In actual fact this word explains nothing. It is at most a declamatory form, one manner among others of paraphrasing the facts. It is a fact that the landed proprietors of Scotland obtained a new value by the development of English industry. This industry opened up new markets for wool. In order to produce wool on a large scale it was necessary to turn arable lands into pasture. To effect this transformation it was necessary to concentrate various properties. To concentrate these properties it was necessary to abolish small holdings, drive thousands of tenants from their native land, and put in their place a few herdsmen in charge of millions of sheep. Thus by successive transformations, landlordism in Scotland has resulted in the men being driven away by sheep. Say now that the providential end of landlordism in Scotland was to cause men to be driven away by sheep, and you have constructed providential history.

Certainly, the tendency to equality appertains to our century for the men and the means of anterior centuries with wants, means of production, &c., entirely different, worked providentially for the realisation of equality, is to begin by substituting the means and the men of one century for the men and the means of anterior centuries and to misunderstand the historical movement by which successive generations transformed the results acquired from the generations which preceded them. Economists know very well that the same thing which was for one the completed work is for the other only the raw material of further production.

Suppose, as M. Proudhon does, that the social genius has produced, or rather improvised, the feudal barons, with the providential end in view of transforming the peasants into responsible and equal workmen, and you will have made a substitution of ends and of persons quite worthy of this Providence, which in Scotland established landlordism in order to give itself the malign pleasure of substituting sheep for men.

But since M. Proudhon takes so tender an interest in Providence we will refer him to “The History of Political Economy” of M. de Villeneuve-Bargemont, who also runs after a providential end. This end is no longer equality but catholicism.

The economists have a singular manner of proceeding. There are for them only two kinds of institutions, those of art and those of nature. Feudal institutions are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural institutions. In this they resemble the theologians, who also establish two kinds of religion. Every religion but their own is an invention of men, while their own religion is an emanation from God. In saying that existing conditions—the conditions of bourgeois production—are natural, the economists give it to be understood that these are the relations in which wealth is created and the productive forces are developed conformably to the laws of nature. Thus these relations are themselves natural laws, independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any. There has been history, since there have been feudal institutions, and in these feudal institutions were found conditions of production entirely different to those of bourgeois society, which the economists wish to have accepted as being natural and therefore eternal.

Feudalism also had its proletariat—serfdom, which enclosed all the germs of the bourgeoisie. Feudal production also had two antagonistic elements, which were equally designated by the names of good side and bad side of feudalism, without regard being had to the fact that it is always the evil side which finishes by overcoming the good side. It is the bad side that produces the movement which makes history, by constituting the struggle. If at the epoch of the reign of feudalism the economists, enthusiastic over the virtues of chivalry, the delightful harmony between rights and duties, the patriarchal life of the towns, the prosperous state of domestic industry in the country, of the development of industry organised in corporations, guilds and fellowships, in fine of all which constitutes the beautiful side of feudalism, had proposed to themselves the problem of eliminating all which cast a shadow upon this lovely picture—serfdom, privilege, anarchy—what would have been the result? All the elements which constituted the struggle would have been annihilated, and the development of the bourgeoisie would have been stifled in the germ. They would have set themselves the absurd problem of eliminating history.

When the bourgeoisie had overcome it, it was no longer a question of either the good or the bad side of feudalism. The productive forces which were developed by the bourgeoisie under feudalism had now been acquired by the bourgeoisie itself. All the old economic forms, the civil relations corresponding to them, the political state which was the official expression of the old civil society, were all broken down.

Thus, in order to fairly judge feudal production, it is necessary to consider it as a system of production based on antagonism. It is necessary to show how wealth was produced within this antagonism, how the productive forces were developed at the same time as the antagonism of classes, how one of the classes, the bad side, the inconvenience of society, continued always to grow until the material conditions necessary to its emancipation had arrived at maturity. Is it not sufficient to say that the mode of production, the relations in which the productive forces are developed, are nothing less than eternal laws, but that they correspond to a determined development of men and of their productive forces, and that any change arising in the productive forces of men necessarily effects a change in their conditions of production? As it is above all important not to be deprived of the fruits of civilisation, of acquired productive forces, it is necessary to break the traditional forms in which they have been produced. From the moment this happens the revolutionary class becomes conservative.

The bourgeoisie commences with a proletariat which is itself a remnant of feudal times. In the course of its historical development, the bourgeoisie necessarily develops its antagonistic character, which at its first appearance was found to be more or less disguised, and existed only in a latent state. In proportion as the bourgeoisie develops, it develops in its bosom a new proletariat, a modern proletariat: it develops a struggle between the proletarian class and the bourgeois class, a struggle which, before it is felt, perceived, appreciated, comprehended, avowed and loudly proclaimed by the two sides, only manifests itself previously by partial and momentary conflicts, by subversive acts. On the other hand, if all the members of the modern bourgeoise have an identity of interest, inasmuch as they form a class opposed by another class, they have also conflicting, antagonistic interests, inasmuch as they find themselves opposed by each other. This opposition of interests flows from the economic conditions of their bourgeois life. From day to day it becomes more clear that the relations of production in which the bourgeoisie exists have not a single, a simple character, but a double character, a character of duplicity; that in the same relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the same relations in which there is a development of productive forces, there is a productive force of repression; that these relations produce bourgeois wealth, that is to say the wealth of the bourgeois class, only in continually annihilating the wealth of integral members of that class and in producing an ever-growing proletariat.

The more this antagonistic character comes to light the more the economists, the scientific representatives of bourgeois production, become excited with their own theories, and different schools are formed.

We have the fatalist economists, who in their theory are as indifferent to what they call the inconveniences of bourgeois production, as the bourgeois themselves are, in actual practice, to the sufferings of the proletarians who assist them to acquire riches. In this fatalist school there are classicists and romanticists, The classicists, like Adam Smith and Ricardo, represents a bourgeoisie which, still struggling with the relics of feudal society, labors only to purify economic relations from the feudal blemishes, to augment the productive forces, and to give to industry and to commerce a fresh scope. The proletariat participating in this struggle, absorbed in this feverish labor, has only passing accidental sufferings to endure, and itself regards them as such. Economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo, who are the historians of this epoch, have no other mission than to demonstrate how wealth is acquired in the relations of bourgeois production, to formulate these relations in categories, in laws, and to demonstrate how far these laws, these categories, are, for the production of wealth, superior to the laws and categories of feudal society. Poverty in their eyes is only the pain which accompanies all child-birth, in nature as well as in industry.

The romanticists appertain to our epoch, where the bourgeoisie is in direct antagonism to the proletariat; where poverty is engendered in as great abundance as wealth. The economists then pose as satisfied fatalists who, from their lofty position, throw a glance of superb disdain on the active men who manufacture wealth. They copy all the developments given by their predecessors, and the indifference which with those was naiveté becomes for these others mere coquetry.

Afterwards comes the humanitarian school, which takes to heart the evil side of the existing relations of production. This school seeks, as an acquittal for its conscience, to palliate, however little, existing contrasts; it sincerely deplores the distress of the proletariat, the unrestricted competition between the bourgeoisie themselves; it advises the workers to be sober and industrious, and to have but few children; it recommends the bourgeoisie to put thoughtful earnestness into the work of production. The whole theory of this school rests upon interminable distinctions between theory and practice, between principles and results, between the idea and the application, between the content and the form, between the essence and the reality, between right and fact, between the good and the evil side.

The philanthropic school is the humanitarian school perfected. It denies the necessity of antagonism; it would make all men bourgeois; it would realise the theory in so far as it is distinguished from practice and encloses no antagonism. It goes without saying that, in theory, it is easy to make abstraction of the contradictions that are met with each instant in reality. This theory would become then idealised reality. The philanthropists thus wish to conserve the categories which express bourgeois relations, without having the antagonism which is inseparable from these relations. They fancy they are seriously combatting the bourgeois system, and they are more bourgeois than the others.

As the economists are the scientific representatives of the bourgeois class, so the Socialists and Communists are the theorists of the proletarian class. So long as the proletariat is not sufficiently developed to constitute itself as a class, so long as, in consequence, the struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has not acquired a political character, and while the productive forces are not sufficiently developed in the bosom of the bourgeoisie itself to allow a perception of the material conditions necessary to the emancipation of the proletariat and the formation of a new society, so long these theorists are only utopians who, to obviate the distress of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and run after a regenerative science. But as history develops and with it the struggle of the proletariat becomes more clearly defined, they have no longer any need to seek for such a science in their own minds, they have only to give an account of what passes before their eyes and to make of that their medium. So long as they seek science and only make systems, so long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty only poverty, without seeing therein the revolutionary subversive side which will overturn the old society. From that moment science, produced by the historical movement and linking itself thereto in full knowledge of the facts of the case, has ceased to be doctrinaire and has become revolutionary.

Let us return to M. Proudhon.

Each economic relation has a good and bad side: that is the single point upon which M. Proudhon does not contradict himself. The good side, he sees explained by the economists; the bad side, he sees denounced by the Socialists. He borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations; he borrows from the Socialists the illusion of seeing in poverty only poverty. He is in agreement with both in wishing to refer it to the authority of science. Science, for him, is reduced to the insignificant proportion of a scientific formula. It is thus that M. Proudhon flatters himself to have made the criticism of both political economy and of communism: he is below both the one and the other. Below the economists, since as a philosopher, who has under his hand a magic formula, he has believed himself able to do without entering into purely economic details; below the Socialists, since he has neither sufficient courage nor sufficient intelligence to raise himself, were it only speculatively, above the bourgeois horizon.

He wished to be the synthesis, he is a composite error.

He wished to soar as man of science above the bourgeoisie and the proletarians; he is only the petty bourgeois, tossed about constantly between capital and labor, between political economy and communism.