Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
1847
Translator: Iain McKay
Marx (quoting from John Francis Bray’s Labour’s Wrongs and Labour’s Remedy): “As an end, the political equality is there a failure, as a means, also, it is there a failure.”
Proudhon: Yes
Marx: “But the moment we cease to pursue the historical movement of production relations, of which the categories are but the theoretical expression, the moment we want to see in these categories no more than ideas, spontaneous thoughts, independent of real relations, we are forced to attribute the origin of these thoughts to the movement of pure reason. “
Proudhon: It is quite necessary, since, in society, everything is, no matter what one says, contemporary; just as, in nature, all the atoms are eternal.
Marx: “It is of this absolute method that Hegel speaks in these terms:”
Proudhon: Very well: is that so stupid?
Marx: “He thinks he is constructing the world by the movement of thought, whereas he is merely reconstructing systematically and classifying by the absolute method of thoughts which are in the minds of all.”
Proudhon: I do not pretend to do anything else!; and I believe that it is something. Your observation observes nothing.
Marx: “M. Proudhon the economist understands very well that men make cloth, linen, or silk materials in definite relations of production. But what he has not understood is that these definite social relations are just as much produced by men as linen, flax, etc. Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces.”
Proudhon: Lie: that is precisely what I say. Society produces the laws and materials from its experience.
Marx: “Thus the ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express.”
Proudhon: Yes, eternal like humanity, no more no less and all contemporary. Your second observation goes nowhere.
Marx: “The only drawback to this method is that when he comes to examine a single one of these phases, M. Proudhon cannot explain it without having recourse to all the other relations of society; which relations, however, he has not yet made his dialectic movement engender.”
Proudhon: I say precisely all this. So tell me, how will you set about speaking in turn about the objects of Pol[itical] Econ[omy]?
Marx: “In constructing the edifice of an ideological system by means of the categories of political economy, the limbs of the social system are dislocated.“
Proudhon: Who tells you about all this? Your third observation is nothing but slander.
Marx: “For him, M. Proudhon, every economic category has two sides – one good, the other bad. He looks upon these categories as the petty bourgeois looks upon the great men of history: Napoleon was a great man; he did a lot of good; he also did a lot of harm.”
Proudhon: I myself criticised of this way of reasoning. For some, Napoleon is a demigod, for others a scourge. Are these or those closer to the truth than this petit bourgeois?
Marx: “The problem to be solved: to keep the good side, while eliminating the bad.”
Proudhon: Shameless slander.
Marx: “Slavery is an economic category like any other… What would M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He would formulate the problem thus: preserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.”
Proudhon: This is just a deceitful, but reasonable, point. Slavery, the extreme [version] of the proletariat, that is to say of relative inferiority, has its reason for being, which will always make it exist, not as slavery but as an apprenticeship or something similar. It is forever like the customs-house.
Marx: “Hegel has no problems to formulate. He has only dialectics. M. Proudhon has nothing of Hegel’s dialectics but the language. For him the dialectic movement is the dogmatic distinction between good and bad.”
Proudhon: Nonsense.
Marx: “The very setting of the problem of eliminating the bad side cuts short the dialectic movement.”
Proudhon: Who has ever spoken to you of elimination?
Marx: “By taking the economic categories thus successively, one by one, and making one the antidote to the other, M. Proudhon manages to make with this mixture of contradictions and antidotes to contradictions, two volumes of contradictions, which he rightly entitles: The System of Economic Contradictions.”
Proudhon: Your fourth observation is nothing but a lie, a [illegible word] slander.
Marx: “When M. Proudhon spoke of the serial relation in understanding, of the logical sequence of categories, he declared positively that he did not want to give history according to the order in time, that is, in M. Proudhon’s view, the historical sequence in which the categories have manifested themselves.”
Proudhon: There is none.
Marx: “and now we have M. Proudhon reduced to saying that the order in which he gives the economic categories is no longer the order in which they engender one another.”
Proudhon: False. To appreciate the true value of logic is not to deny logic.
Marx: “In logical sequence, it was the century that belonged to the principle, and not the principle which belonged to the century.”
Proudhon: Who speaks to you of that? When I categorically say the opposite?
Marx: “But the moment you present men as the actors and authors of their own history, you arrive – by detour – at the real starting point, because you have abandoned those eternal principles of which you spoke at the outset.”
Proudhon: So I have the misfortune to still think like you! Have I ever claimed that principles are anything other than the intellectual representation, not the generating cause, of facts? Your fifth observation is a slanderous imputation. The real meaning of Marx’s work is that he regrets that throughout I thought like him, and that I said it before him. It is up to the reader to believe that it was Marx who, after having read me, regrets thinking like me! What a man!
Marx: “We shall concede that economic relations, viewed as immutable laws, eternal principles, ideal categories, existed before active and energetic men did”
Proudhon: I have no need of your supposition.
Marx: “So great is the productive force of the contradictions which function and which made M. Proudhon function, that, in trying to explain history, he is forced to deny it”
Proudhon: Appearing and existing are two different things, the first of which is true only for us.
Marx: “in trying to explain the successive appearance of social relations, he denies that anything can appear: in trying to explain production, with all its phases, he questions whether anything can be produced.”
Proudhon: Yes, production is appearance.
Marx: “To this end he has invented a new reason”
Proudhon: You always joke beforehand: start by being right.
Marx: “Just as the antithesis was before turned into an antidote, so now the thesis becomes a hypothesis. This change of terms, coming from M. Proudhon, has no longer anything surprising for us!”
Proudhon: Prattle.
Marx: “Providence, providential aim, this is the great word used today to explain the movement of history. In fact, this word explains nothing. It is at most a rhetorical form, one of the various ways of paraphrasing facts.”
Proudhon: Here I am again guilty of worshipping Providence!
Marx: “Thus, by successive transformations, landed property in Scotland has resulted in the driving out of men by sheep. Now say that the providential aim of the institution of landed property in Scotland was to have men driven out by sheep, and you will have made providential history.”
Proudhon: Libel! [Pasquinade!]
Marx: “To say now that all former centuries, with entirely different needs, means of production, etc., worked providentially for the realization of equality is, firstly, to substitute the means and the men of our century for the men and the means of earlier centuries and to misunderstand the historical movement by which the successive generations transformed the results acquired by the generations that preceded them.”
Proudhon: What is this chicanery? Generations transform! – I say myself that the same principle unites, governs, all events; – I do not know what transformation is. The France of 89 transformed its absolute monarch into a constitutional monarch. So be it. That is your style. I say, for my part, that the State, in 89, regularised the division of political powers that existed before 89. The reader will judge. The sixth observation falls on Hegel and does not relate to anything.
Marx: “But since M. Proudhon takes such a tender interest in Providence, we refer him to the Histoire de l’economie politique of M. de Villeneuve-Bargemont, who likewise goes in pursuit of a providential aim. This aim, however, is not equality, but Catholicism.”
Proudhon: What stupidity after what I wrote! Truly, Marx is jealous.
Marx: “Thus, feudal production, to be judged properly, must be considered as a mode of production founded on antagonism.”
Proudhon: Does Marx have the pretension to present all this as his own, in opposition to something to the contrary that I said?
Marx: “From day to day it thus becomes clearer that the production relations in which the bourgeoisie moves have not a simple, uniform character, but a dual character… there is a development of the productive forces, there is also a force producing repression; that these relations produce bourgeois wealth – i.e., the wealth of the bourgeois class – only by continually annihilating the wealth of the individual members of this class and by producing an ever-growing proletariat.
Proudhon: But all this is me!
Marx: “We have the fatalist economists, who in their theory are as indifferent to what they call the drawbacks of bourgeois production as the bourgeois themselves are in practice to the sufferings of the proletarians who help them to acquire wealth… The proletariat that takes part in this struggle and is absorbed in this feverish labour experiences only passing, accidental sufferings, and itself regards them as such.”
Proudhon: I said all that. Marx does as Vidal did.[1]
Marx: “these theoreticians are merely utopians who, to meet the wants of the oppressed classes, improvise systems and go in search of a regenerating science.”
Proudhon: Plagiarism of my 1st chapter.
Marx: “Let us return to M. Proudhon.”
Proudhon: What! return! But the preceding pages are a copy of me.
Marx: “Certainly, things would be made much too easy if they were reduced to M. Proudhon’s categories.”
Proudhon: What does that prove? That humanity is progressing slowly.
Marx: “Adam Smith goes further than M. Proudhon thinks.”
Proudhon: Fine
Marx: “All this does not prevent M. Proudhon from saying elsewhere that Adam Smith has not the slightest idea of the drawbacks produced by the division of labour. “
Proudhon: Fine. But has Smith clarified the matter? – No.
Marx: “17 years before Adam Smith, who was a pupil of A. Ferguson, the last-named gave a clear exposition of the subject in a chapter which deals specifically with the division of labour [and quotes Ferguson’s An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1783)]”
Proudhon: The problem is not clarified.
Marx: “Besides, why stress this part of M. Proudhon’s work, since a little later we shall see him formally retract all these alleged developments? ‘The first effect of fractional labour,’ continues M. Proudhon… M. Proudhon says, to relieve his conscience, that the universal conscience wills it thus…”
Proudhon: Come, dear Marx, you act in bad faith, and at the same time you know nothing.
Marx: “Machinery is no more an economic category than the bullock that drags the plough. Machinery is merely a productive force.”
Proudhon: It is a philosopher who says this.
Marx: “For M. Proudhon, who sees things upside down, if he sees them at all, the division of labour, in Adam Smith’s sense, precedes the workshop, which is a condition of its existence.”
Proudhon: Not division in the sense of A. Smith, but the great natural division of trades.
Marx: “Nothing is more absurd than to see in machinery the antithesis of the division of labour, the synthesis restoring unity to divided labour.”
Proudhon: I maintain that.
Marx: “The machine is a unification of the instruments of labour, and by no means a combination of different operations for the worker himself. ‘When, by the division of labour, each particular operation has been simplified to the use of a single instrument, the linking up of all these instruments, set in motion by a single engine, constitutes – a machine.’ (Babbage, Traité sur l’économie des machines, p. 230, Paris, 1833)”
Proudhon: So the machine comes after division.
Marx: “Simple tools; accumulation tools; composite tools; setting in motion of a composite tool by a single hand engine, by man; setting in motion of these instruments by natural forces, machines; system of machines having one motor; system of machines having one automatic motor – this is the progress of machinery.”
Proudhon: So the workshop that groups the parts of work also comes after division.
Marx: “The concentration of the instruments of production and the division of labour are as inseparable one from the other as are, in the political sphere, the concentration of public authority and the division of private interests.”
Proudhon: Without doubt, it is only a logical succession.
Marx: “For M. Proudhon the concentration of the instruments of labour is the negation of the division of labour. “
Proudhon: Yes.
Marx: “In reality, we find again the reverse. As the concentration of instruments develops, the division develops also, and vice versa.”
Proudhon: Yes too, all of this is true at the same time.
Marx: “This is why every big mechanical invention is followed by a greater division of labour, and each increase in the division of labour gives rise in turn to new mechanical inventions.”
Proudhon: Very good, this is explained in my theory perfectly, as the parallel development of wealth and poverty.
Marx: “The automatic workshop opened its career with acts which were anything but philanthropic.”
Proudhon: Absurd, like the opinion that believes the balance of trade is dishonoured by the vexations of the customs-house.
Marx: “Indeed, what a difference between the division of labour as it existed in Adam Smith’s day and as we see it in the automatic workshop!”
Proudhon: Division for me goes back further than A. Smith; it is also taken in a broader sense.
Marx (quoting from Dr. Ure’s The Philosophy of Manufactures): “The principle of the factory system then is, to substitute mechanical science for hand skill, and the partition of a process into its essential constituents, for the division or gradation of labour among artisans… on the automatic plan, skilled labour gets progressively superseded, and will, eventually, be replaced by mere overlookers of machines.”
Proudhon: One is only the consequence of the other and everything that is said about the first is applicable to the second.
Marx (quoting from Dr. Ure’s The Philosophy of Manufactures): “Such translations are utterly at variance with the old practice of the division of labour, which fixed one man to shaping the head of a pin, and another to sharpening its point, with the most irksome and spirit-wasting uniformity, for a whole life...”
Proudhon: Very good: I have carefully noted this opposition – the degradation of the worker is more advanced in what you call the automatic system than in what A. Smith calls division: – as for me, I have termed those two degrees as Division and as machines. I have said the Division of Labour fragments, mutilates, dissipates man; – machines enslave him: it is exactly the same as Dr Ure.
Marx: “But the moment every special development stops, the need for universality, the tendency towards an integral development of the individual begins to be felt.”
Proudhon: Good! And how do you understand this integral development?
Marx: “M. Proudhon, not having understood even this one revolutionary side of the automatic workshop, takes a step backward and proposes to the worker that he make not only the 12th part of a pin, but successively all 12 parts of it.”
Proudhon: Yes, insofar as it would only be a matter of resolving the antinomy of division; but I did not say that was all there was. The worker, always synthesising old and modern skill, must know how to work both with his hands and with machines. For it is absurd [to suggest] that he who has been replaced by the machine can do without the machine. Synthetism, having reached to its highest degree, requires of the worker both a greater ability and a lesser development of ability.
Marx: “If the immediate object of the lover is the woman, the immediate object of industrial emulation is the product and not the profit.”
Proudhon: Synonym here.
Marx: “Competition is not industrial emulation, it is commercial emulation.”
Proudhon: Another synonym.
[1] François Vidal (1812-1872) was a French utopian socialist associated first with the Saint-Simonians and then the Fourierists. He published an article in Presse on the 9th of December 1846 which analysed capitalism in terms of its contradictions. In his notebooks Proudhon accused Vidal of plundering his ideas (Pierre Haubtmann, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: sa vie et sa pensée, 1809-1849 [Paris : Beauchesne, 1982], 711). (Translator)