The Poverty of Philosophy

Front matter

Translated by H. Quelch.

Chicago Charles H. Kerr & Company 1913

80

Introduction

Introduction.

No apology, I imagine, is necessary for the appearance of this translation of Marx's "Misère de la Philosophie." On the contrary it is strange that it should not have been published in England before, and that the translation of his monumental work, the "Capital," tardy as that was, should have yet been made before that of a work which was originally published some twenty years before "Capital" first appeared.

It may be that the translators and editors of the latter work were of opinion that in view of the comprehensiveness of "Capital," a publication of an English edition of the "Misère de la Philosophie" would be a work of supererogation. Or it may be that they thought a book so distinctly French—as the "Capital" may be said to be distinctly English—and which was, further, exclusively a criticism of a work of Proudhon's little known in England—would have slight interest for English readers. On the other hand, the groundwork of the theories so fully elaborated in "Capital," apart from its exhaustive analysis of the capitalist system of production and distribution, will be found in "Misère." In addition, there are several subjects—notably that of rent dealt with in this volume which are barely touched upon in the single book of "Capital" which has been translated into English.

Marx's criticism of Proudhon's theory that "the time which is necessary to create a commodity indicates exactly its degree of utility," so that "the things of which the production costs the least time are the things which are the most immediately useful," has been matched by H.M. Hyndman's crushing refutation of the theory of Final Utility. The subject of rent, too, has been fully dealt with by the latter in the same book, "The Economics of Socialism," published, as the author says, in the hope of furnishing "the rapidly-increasing number of students of sociology with a concise and readable statement of the main theories of the scientific school of political economy founded by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels." Neither of these facts, however, necessarily detracts from the value of this older work of Marx's. On the question of rent, after reviewing the Ricardian theory and the many objections which present themselves to that theory, Hyndman says: "It seems, therefore, that a wider definition of the rent of land under capitalism is needed than that given by Ricardo, and the following is suggested:—Rent of land is that portion of the total net revenue which is paid to the landlord for the use of plots of land after the average profit on the capital embarked in developing such land has been deducted." On the question of confiscating rent he says it "would not affect the position of the working portion of the community unless the money so obtained were devoted to giving them more amusement, to providing them with better surroundings and the like In fact, the attack upon competitive rents is merely a capitalist attack. That class sees a considerable income going off to a set of people who take no part in the direct exploitation of labor; and its representatives are naturally anxious to stop this leakage, as they consider it, and to reduce their own taxation for public purposes by appropriating rent to the service of the State. That is all very well for them."

On this point Marx says: "We can understand such economists as Mill, Cherbulliez, Hilditch and others, demanding that rent should be handed over to the State to be used for the remission of taxation. That is only the frank expression of the hate which the industrial capitalist feels for the landed proprietor, who appears to him as a useless incumbrance, a superfluity in the otherwise harmonious whole of bourgeois production."

"Rent," says Marx, "results from the social relations in which exploitation is carried on. It cannot result from the nature, more or less fixed, more or less durable, of land. Rent proceeds from society and not from the soil."

The criticism of Proudhon's appreciation of gold and silver as the first manifestation of this theory of "constituted value" should be interesting reading to those admirers of the French Anarchist who yet profess their profound detestation of money and its function. So, too, should his declaration against strikes and combinations of workmen. In this we see once more how extremes meet. This declaration of Proudhon's would not be out of place in the organ of the Liberty and Property Defence League.

In this matter of trade union combination, Marx was scarcely accurate in his perception of its development. He clearly did not foresee that the great English trade unions would become fossilised, as it were; and that instead of being a revolutionary force they would become a reactionary mass, opposing the progress of the mere proletarian outside their ranks, as they have done. With the spread of Socialist ideas among them, however, their exclusive character is being modified, and they may even yet take that place in the revolutionary working-class movement which Marx anticipated they would occupy. Given this change of attitude, the development must inevitably be along the lines he predicted. We are seeing "in face of constantly united capital, the maintenance of the association [becoming] more important and necessary for them than the maintenance of wages," and, further, that the combinations of capital are forcing the trade unions to that point where "association takes a political character."

It is scarcely necessary to point out that in this work, written in 1847, some words have a meaning quite other than that which they bear to-day. Thus, for instance, the words "Socialists" and "Socialism," where they occur, refer to the utopians—who formulated theories of a social system independent of the industrial evolution—and to these theories themselves.

In most cases the numerous quotations have been verified and reproduced in the original. In some instances, however, they are summaries rather than quotations, and appear as translated.

A translation in necessarily an imperfect presentation of the thoughts, ideas, and conclusions of the author. In this work I have endeavored to adhere as closely as possible to the form and letter, as well as the spirit of the original, and to this the indulgent reader is asked to ascribe such faults of language as would otherwise merit his censure.

H. Quelch.

Preface

Preface.

The present work was written in the winter of 1846–7, at a time when Marx had just elucidated the principles of his new historical and economic theory. The "Système des Contradictions Economique ou Philosophie de la Misère," of Proudhon, which had just appeared, gave him the opportunity of developing his principles in opposing them to the ideas of the man who from then was to take a preponderating place among the French Socialists of his epoch. From the moment when both of them at Paris had lengthily discussed economic questions together, often for whole nights at a stretch, their tendency had been to drift further and further apart: Proudhon's book showed that there was already an impassable gulf between them; to keep silence was no longer possible. Marx demonstrates in this reply the irreparable rupture which had taken place.

The summary of Marx's judgment of Proudhon is expressed in the article reproduced as an appendix to this work, which first appeared in the Sozialdemokrat of Berlin, Nos. 16, 17 and 18. It was the only article Marx ever wrote for that journal. The efforts of Herr von Schweitzer to drag the paper into governmental and feudal waters constrained us to publicly withdraw from it after a few weeks.

The present work has for Germany a special importance which Marx did not foresee. How could he have known that in attacking Proudhon he at the same time struck a blow at the idol of the Strebars (arrivistes) of to-day, Rodbertus, whose name even he did not know?

This is not the place to deal at length with the relations existing between Marx and Rodbertus; I may soon have the opportunity to do it. Suffice it here to say that when Rodbertus accuses Marx of having "pillaged" him, and of having in his "Capital" profited much by his work, "Zur Erkenntniss," &c., without making any acknowledgment, he allows himself to be guilty of a calumny which is only to be explained by the natural ill-humor of a misunderstood genius, and his remarkable ignorance of everything occurring outside of Prussia, and notably of Socialist and economic literature. These accusations never, any more than the work we have cited, came under the notice of Marx; of Rodbertus's work he knew nothing, except the three "Sozialen Briefe" ("Social Letters"), and even these certainly not before 1858 or 1859.

There is much more foundation for Rodbertus's claim to have in these letters discovered "the constituted value of Proudhon" long before Proudhon. But he is wrong in flattering himself with the belief that he was the first to discover it. In any case, the present work criticises him with Proudhon, and this forces me to dilate somewhat upon his fundamental brochure, "Zur Erkenntniss unserer Staatswirthschaftlichen Zustände" [On the Explanation of our Economical Position], 1842, at least in so far as this work of his, besides the communism of Weitling, which it also contains, however unconsciously anticipates Proudhon.

In so far as modern Socialism, of no matter what tendency otherwise it may be, proceeds from bourgeois political economy, it almost exclusively attaches itself to the theory of value of Ricardo. The two propositions which Ricardo in 1817 put at the head of his "Principles"; First, that the value of each commodity is only and solely determined by the quantity of labor exacted by its production; and, second, that the product of the totality of social labor is shared between the three classes of landlords (rent), capitalists (profit), and laborers (wages)—these two propositions had already in England afforded material for Socialist conclusions. They had been deduced with so much clearness and profundity that this literature, which has now almost disappeared and which Marx had in great part discovered, could not be surpassed until the appearance of "Capital." We shall return to this another time. When Rodbertus, in 1842, on his side drew certain Socialist conclusions from the principles above stated, that was then certainly an important step for a German to take, but it was only a discovery for Germany. Marx shows how little there is of novelty in a similar application of the theory of Ricardo by Proudhon, who suffered from an equal imagination.

"Whoever is, no matter how little, acquainted, with the movement of political economy in England, cannot but know that nearly all the Socialists of that country have, at different times, proposed the equalitarian (that is to say, Socialist) application of the Ricardian theory." We might cite to M. Proudhon the "Political Economy" of Hopkins, 1822; William Thompson, "An Inquiry into the Principles of the Distribution of Wealth most Conducive to Human Happiness," 1827; T.R. Edmonds, "Practical Moral and Political Economy," 1828, &c., &c., and we might add pages of "&c." We will content ourselves with hearing an English Communist, Bray, in his remarkable work, "Labor's Wrongs and Labor's Remedy," Leeds, 1839, and these quotations from Bray alone settle, for the most part, the claim to priority set up by Rodbertus.

At this time Marx had not entered the reading-room of the British Museum. Beyond the libraries, besides my books and my extracts, which he read during a journey of six weeks which we made together in England in the summer of 1845, he had perused only the books which one could procure at Manchester. The literature of which we have spoken was then not as inaccessible as it may be at the present time. If, in spite of that, it was unknown to Rodbertus, that is entirely due to the fact that he was an exclusive Prussian. He is the veritable founder of specifically Prussian Socialism, and he is at last recognized as such.

However, even in his beloved Prussia, Rodbertus could not remain in absolute ignorance of the work of others. In 1859 there appeared at Berlin the first book of the "Critique de l'Economie Politique," by Marx. There we find, among the objections raised by the economists against Ricardo, as second objection, p. 40: "If the value in exchange of a product is equal to the labor time which it contains, the value in exchange of a day of labor is equal to its product. Or, indeed, wages must be equal to the product of labor. But it is the contrary which is true." In a note: "This objection raised against Ricardo from the side of the economists, has been raised again later by the Socialists. The theoretical exactitude of the formula being admitted, the practice is accused of being in contradiction to the theory, and bourgeois society was invited to draw practically the conclusions implied by the theory. Some English Socialists have, at least in this sense, turned the formula of the exchange-value of Ricardo against political economy." We are referred in this note to the "Misère de la Philosophie" of Marx, which was then in all the libraries.

It was, then, sufficiently easy for Rodbertus to convince himself of the real novelty of his discoveries of 1842. Instead of that he has not ceased to proclaim them, and to believe them to be so incomparable that he has never once been able to suppose that Marx all alone could have drawn from Ricardo the same conclusions as Rodbertus himself had done. That was impossible. Marx had "pillaged" him—him to whom the same Marx had offered every facility for convincing himself that long before either of them these conclusions, at least in the gross form that they still possess with Rodbertus, had already been expressed in England.

The most simple Socialist application of the theory of Ricardo is that which we have given above. In many cases it has led to perceptions on the origin and the nature of surplus-value which have gone far beyond Ricardo. The same may be said with regard to Rodbertus. Not only does he in this order of ideas never present anything which has not already been at least as well said before, but his expositions also possess all the defects of those of his predecessors. He accepts the economic categories of labor, capital, value, in the crude form in which they had been transmitted to him by the economists, under their assumed form, without seeking their content. He thus not only closes to himself all means of developing himself more completely—contrary to Marx who, for the first time, has made something of these propositions so often reproduced during the past sixty-four years—but he takes the road which leads straight to utopia, as we will show.

The above application of the theory of Ricardo, which shows to the workers that the totality of social production, which is their product, belongs to them because they are the only real producers, leads direct to Communism. But it is also, as Marx shows, false in form, economically speaking, because it is simply an application of morality to economy. According to the laws of bourgeois economy, the greater part of the product does not belong to the workers who have created it. If, then, we say, "That is unjust, it ought not to be"; that has nothing whatever to do with economy, we are only stating that this economic fact is in contradiction to our moral sentiment. That is why Marx has never based upon this his Communist conclusions, but rather upon the necessary overthrow, which is developing itself under our eyes every day, of the capitalist system of production. He contents himself with saying that surplus-value consists of unpaid labor; it is a fact, pure and simple. But that which may be false in form from the economic point of view may yet be exact from the point of view of universal history. If the moral sentiment of the mass regards an economic fact—as, formerly, slavery and serfdom—as unjust, that proves that this fact itself is a survival; that other economic facts are established thanks to which the first has become insupportable, intolerable. Behind the formal economic inexactitude may, therefore, be hidden a very real economic content. It would, however, be out of place here to dwell at length on the importance and the history of surplus-value.

We can draw other conclusions from Ricardo's theory of value, and that has been done. The value of commodities is determined by the labor exacted by their production. But it is found that in this wicked world commodities are bought sometimes above, sometimes below, their value, and besides, there is the relation to the variations of competition. As the rate of profit has a tendency to maintain itself at the same level for all capitalists, the price of commodities tends also to sink to the value of labor, through the intermediary of supply and demand. But the rate of profit is calculated upon the total capital employed in an industrial enterprise; on the other hand, in two different branches of industry the annual production may incorporate equal masses of labor, that is to say, present equal values, while, if the wages are at an equal level in these two branches, the capital advanced can be, and often is, doubled or trebled in one or the other branch. Ricardo's law of value, as Ricardo himself has already discovered, is in contradiction to the law of the equality of the rate of profit. If the products of the two branches are sold at their value, the aggregates of profits cannot be equal; but if the rates of profit are equal, the products of the two branches are not sold at their value everywhere and always. We have then, here, a contradiction, an antagonism between two economic laws. The practical solu- tion operates, according to Ricardo (chap. i., sections 4 and 5) regularly in favor of the rate of profit at the expense of the value.

But Ricardo's definition of value, in spite of its evil characteristics, has a phase which renders it dear to our good bourgeoisie. That is the side on which it appeals with irresistible force to their sense of justice. Justice and equality of rights, those are the twin pillars upon which the bourgeoisie of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would raise their social edifice above the ruins of injustice, of feudal inequalities and privileges. The determination of the value of commodities by labor and the free exchange which arises according to this measure of value between the possessors of equal rights, such are, as Marx has already shown, the real foundation upon which all the political, juridical and philosophical ideology of the modern bourgeoisie is erected. When one knows that labor is the measure of commodities, the good sentiments of the worthy bourgeoisie must feel deeply wounded by the wickedness of the world, which, indeed, nominally recognises this principle of justice, but which every moment without compunction actually appears to set it on one side. Above all, the "little man," whose honest labor—even when it is only that of his workmen or of his apprentices—loses every day more and more of its value through the competition of the great industry and of machinery; above all, the small producer must ardently desire a society in which the exchange of products according to their labor-value would be a complete and invariable reality. In other terms, he must ardently desire a society in which a single law of production of commodities reigns fully and exclusively, but in which the conditions which alone render this law effective, that is to say, the other laws of the production of commodities, or better, of capitalist production, were entirely suppressed.

This utopia has struck its roots deep and wide in the thought of the modern middle class—real or ideal. This is demonstrated by the fact that already in 1831 it had been systematically developed by John Gray; that at this period it had been practically tried, theoretically expounded, in England, proclaimed as the most recent truth in 1842 by Rodbertus in Germany, in 1846 by Proudhon in France, and again published by Rodbertus as the solution of the social question, and, so to speak, his social testament in 1871; and in 1884 it receives the adhesion of the sequel evolved under the name of Rodbertus to exploit Prussian State Socialism.

The criticism of this utopia has been made so completely by Marx, as well against Proudhon as against Gray (Cf. appendix 2 of this work), that I need only devote myself here to some remarks on the special form that Rodbertus has adapted to formulate and express it.

As we have said: Rodbertus accepts the traditional economic concepts under the exact form in which they have been transmitted to him by the economists. He does not make the slightest attempt to verify them. Value is for him "the quantitative valuation of one thing relatively to others, this valuation being taken for measure." This none too rigorous definition gives us at the most an idea of what value appears almost to be, but does not say absolutely what it is. But as it is all that Rodbertus is able to tell us about value, it is comprehensible that he seeks for a measure of value outside of value. After having at random, and without method, twisted use-value and exchange-value about under a hundred aspects with that power of abstraction so infinitely admired by M. Adolphe Wagner, he arrives at this result—that there is no real measure of value, and that it is necessary to be content with a supererogatory measure. Labor may be such measure, but only in the case of an exchange between products of equal quantities of labor; if the case is otherwise in other instances, it is not so unless one has taken means to assure it. Value and labor thus remain without the least real relation to each other, although all the first chapter has been devoted to an endeavor to explain to us how and why the cost of commodities is determined by labor and by nothing but labor.

Labor is yet again taken in the form in which one meets it with the economists. And not even that. Because although there may be something said as to the difference in intensity of labor, it is very generally represented as something which "costs," that is to say which is a measure of value, whether it be expended or not under the normal conditions of society. Whether the producers employ ten days in the manufacture of products which could be manufactured in one day, or if they employ only one; whether they use the best or the worst implements; whether they apply their labor time to the manufacture of articles socially necessary or in the quantity socially required; whether they make articles for which there is no demand at all or articles for which there is more or less demand—of all that there is no question; labor is labor, the product of equal labor must be exchanged with the product of equal labor. Rodbertus, who in all other cases is always ready, whether it be relevant or not, to place himself at the national point of view and to consider the relations of isolated producers from the height of the observatory of general society, timidly avoids all that here. Simply because from the first line of his book he goes straight to the utopia of the labor-note, and that all analysis of labor as the producer of value only strews his route with difficulties. His instinct was here considerably stronger than his power of abstraction—that cannot be discovered in Rodbertus, it may be said in passing, only by means of the most concrete poverty of ideas.

The journey to utopia is quickly made. "The dispositions" which fix the exchange of commodities according to the value of labor as following an absolute law present no difficulty. All the other utopians of this tendency, from Gray to Proudhon, are at great pains to elaborate social measures. In order to realize this object they at least endeavor to resolve the economic question by economic means, due to the action of the owner of commodities who exchanges them. For Rodbertus it is much more simple. As a good Prussian he calls in the State. A decree of the public power establishes the reform.

Value is thus then happily "constituted," but not the priority of this constitution which is claimed by Rodbertus. On the contrary, Gray as well as Bray—among many others—have often expressed the same idea; they piously desire measures by which the products will exchange, in spite of all obstacles, always and only at their value in labor. After the State has thus constituted value—at least of a part of the products, as Rodbertus is modest—it issues its labor-notes; in effect, as advances to the industrial capitalists with which the workers are paid; the workers then buy the products with the labor-notes they have received and thus permit the return of the paper money to its original source. It is necessary to learn from Rodbertus himself how admirably that develops.

"For this second condition we must secure the dis- position which exacts that the value attested should be really in circulation by giving only to him who actually delivers a product, a note on which should be marked exactly the quantity of labor necessary for the manufacture of the product. He who delivers a product of two days' labor would receive a note marked 'two days.' The second condition would be necessarily fulfilled by the strict observance of this regulation in the issue of the notes. According to our hypothesis, the true value of goods coincides with the quantity of labor expended in their manufacture, and this quantity of labor is measured by the division of time expressed. He who delivers a product to which two days' labor have been devoted, if he receives a certificate of two days' labor, has then secured that there should be assigned or certified to him neither more nor less value than he has in fact delivered—and further, as he only who has really put a product in circulation, alone secures such an attestation, it is equally certain that the value inscribed on the note is capable of paying society. Enlarge as much as we will the sphere of the division of labor, if the regulation is properly followed the sum of value disposable must be exactly equal to the sum of value certified, and, as the sum of value certified is exactly the sum assigned, this must necessarily coincide with the value disposable. All the exigencies are satisfied and the liquidation is perfect." (Pages 166, 167.)

If Rodbertus has up to the present had the misfortune of arriving too late with his discoveries, this time, at least, he has obtained a kind of originality; none of his rivals had dared to give to the foolish utopia of the labor-note this form so naïvely infantile, I might even say so truly Pomeranian. Because that for each note an object of corresponding value is delivered, as no object of value is delivered except against a corresponding note, necessarily the sum of notes is covered by the sum of the objects of value. The calculation is perfectly equal, it is exact to a second of labor time, and there is not a superior employee in the Office of the Public Debt who, however appalled by his own duties, could in this calculation make the slightest error. What more could be desired?

In modern capitalist society each industrial capitalist produces on his own account what he likes, how he likes, and as much as he likes. The quantity socially demanded is for him an unknown magnitude, and he does not know the quality of the objects demanded any more than their quantity. That which to-day cannot be supplied quickly enough may to-morrow be in excess of the demand. Ultimately demand is satisfied in some fashion, ill or well, and generally production is definitely regulated by the objects demanded. How is the reconciliation of this contradiction effected? By competition. And how does that arrive at this solution? Simply by depreciating below their labor value the commodities which are by reason of their quality or quantity useless or unnecessary, in the present state of the demand of society, and in making the producers feel, in this explicit fashion, that they have manufactured articles absolutely useless or unnecessary, or that they have manufactured a superfluity of otherwise useful articles. From that two things follow:

First, the continual deviation of the price of commodities in relation to the value of commodities is the necessary condition by which alone the value of commodities can exist. It is only by the fluctuations of competition, and following that, of the price of commodities, that the law of value realizes itself in the production of commodities and that the determination of value by the labor time socially necessary becomes a reality. That the form of representation of value, price, has, in general, a quite other aspect than the value which it manifests, is a lot which it shares with the greater part of social relations. The king often bears but slight resemblance to the monarchy which he represents. In a society of producers of exchangeable commodities, to wish to determine value by labor time by interdicting competition from establishing this determination of value in the single form by which it can do this—in influencing its price, is to show, at least in this connection, the habitual utopian misunderstanding of economic laws.

In the second place competition, in realizing the law of value of the production of commodities in a society of producers for exchange, establishes by that means and by assured conditions the single order and the single organisation possible for social production. It is only by the depreciation or appreciation of the price of products that the isolated producers of commodities learn to their cost what kind of things society requires, and the quantity it requires of them. But it is precisely this single regulator which the utopianism shared by Rodbertus would suppress. And if we ask what guarantee we have that only the necessary quantity of each commodity would be produced, that we should not be wanting corn and meat while there was an abundance of beet sugar and we were inundated with a too plentiful supply of potato spirit, that we should not be lacking breeches to cover our nakedness while breeches buttons were multiplied by the million—Rodbertus triumphantly shows us his famous account, in which there is set forth an exact certificate for each superfluous pound of sugar, for each cask of spirit not purchased, for each useless breeches button, an account which is "just," which "satisfies all the conditions and in which the liquidation is exact." And anyone who does not believe this has only to address himself to "M. X.," the superior employee of the Office of the Public Debt in Pomerania, who has revised the calculation and has found it just, and who may be regarded as never having been capable of a mistake in his accounts.