Content and form are changed” as “nothing can pass to the ownership of individuals, except individual means of consumption” (Marx-Engels Reader, 529-30), [73] System of Economical Contradictions,  101, [75] Allen Oakley, Marx’s Critique of Political Economy: intellectual sources and evolution, 1844 to 1860 Vol. [70], The core of Marx’s critique rested on a massive confusion of commodity production (the market) and capitalism. No discussion of Proudhon would be complete without mentioning Marx particularly as Marx’s discussions of Proudhon’s ideas “span almost the entirety of his career”[17] The first public work on Marxism, The Poverty of Philosophy, was directed against Proudhon while jabs at him surface in Capital, Theories of Surplus Value and throughout his correspondence. In his 1846 Philosophy of Poverty, Proudhon locates a contradiction between use-value and exchange-value-a contradiction which he holds as the basis of poverty, inequality, and economic crises. Why substitute for the immediate object of emulation, which is personal welfare, that far away and almost metaphysical motive called general welfare, especially when the latter is nothing without the former and can result only in the former. Competition is emulation with a view to profit. Marx even suggests that his own opinion is the opposite of Proudhon’s when, in fact, he is simply repeating the Frenchman’s thoughts. The above may have been written by the great annd fearless revisionist Marxist Ota Sik himself. Give us a try. No discussion of Proudhon would be complete without mentioning Marx particularly as Marx’s discussions of Proudhon’s ideas “span almost the entirety of his career” The first public work on Marxism, The Poverty of Philosophy, was directed against Proudhon while jabs at him surface in Capital, Theories of Surplus Value and throughout his correspondence. ), Direct action and voting (plus rare article by Kropotkin), COVID-19 and “Anti-Government ideologues”. Thus revisionism and petty bourgeois Utopianism blur this vital distinction. Be that as it may, and regardless of the misrepresentations that Marx inflicted on Proudhon, it is also fair to say that he developed many of the themes he appropriated from Proudhon (“One of Marx’s most important teachers and the one who laid the foundations for his subsequent development.”[20]). Marx then goes on to argue that either you have “just proportions of past centuries, with the means of production of our epoch, in which case you are at once a reactionary and a utopian” or “you have progress without anarchy: In which case, in order to conserve productive forces, you must abandon individual exchanges.” (73) This comes from the extreme technological determinism Marx expounds: The social relations are intimately attached to the productive forces. “M. Get a notification whenever we post a new article to, where you can also like and comment on our articles, Get a notification whenever we post a new article to, Introduction: General Idea of the Revolution in the 21st Century, On Centralism and Federalism (and turncoats), Donald Trump is not an anarchist (no shit! [69] Proudhon’s notion of an economy based on the “just price”, one which reflects costs, has become more possible over time rather than less as Marx had asserted. That he never did so is one of the great lost opportunities of socialism as it would have clarified some of the issues raised by Marx and allowed Proudhon to extend his critique of state socialism to Marxism. “Marx’s sociology focuses on class-conflict as a predictor and meta-narrative of history.”. Okay, I’ll bite. Proudhon was well aware that exploitation occurred there as workers had “parted with their liberty” and “have sold their arms” to a boss who appropriated their product and “collective force.”[63] To suggest that Proudhon was blind to what happened in production under capitalism is false. So we find Marx arbitrarily arranging quotations from Proudhon’s book, often out of context and even tampered with, to confirm his own views. A return to Marx’s critique of Proudhon offers a salutary antidote to such conventional wisdom and, perhaps, a path forward for all of us searching for real alternatives to capital. Proudhon has not got beyond the ideal of the petty bourgeois. Finally, given how many people think Marx was extremely witty in reversing the sub-title of Proudhon’s book, it should be pointed out that even in this he was plagiarising Proudhon: Modern philosophers, after collecting and classifying their annals, have been led by the nature of their labours to deal also with history: then it was that they saw, not without surprise, that the history of philosophy was the same thing at bottom as the philosophy of history. He takes the Frenchman’s sarcastic comments at face value, his metaphors and abstractions literally. "Zhukov" comes from zhuk, meaning beetle. In our markets, during the first stage, prices were kept within certain bounds by the government. For Proudhon this would be a situation of equality: equal contributions to society receiving equal rewards from society. To set the record straight is not a call for Marx to be rejected in favour of Proudhon, it is a call for an honest appraisal of both. Its great merit is to practically show, that the present pauperising, and despotic system of the subordination of labour to capital can be superseded by the republican and beneficent system of the association of free and equal producers.”[33] In the 1880s, Engels suggested as a reform the putting of public works and state-owned land into the hands of workers’ co-operatives rather than capitalists. Merely as a commodity labour is worth nothing and produces nothing. In terms of politics, Marx also repeated Proudhon. Indeed, in volume 2 of “System of Economic Contradiction” he explicitly says that money does not need to be abolished! “M Proudhon begins by defending the eternal necessity of competition against those who wish to replace it with emulation. “Competition is not industrial emulation, It is commercial emulation” ” The immediate object of industrial emulation is the product and not the profit”. Marx’s comments were related to his dismissal of Proudhon’s “constituted value” which he asserted was incompatible with an advanced economy. Proudhon, rightly, thought social transformation more pressing than bothering with an obscure German communist. Dunayevskaya’s books are not digitized; they are available for purchase through our Literature page, along with some of her pamphlets and other Marxist-Humanist writings. Thus there is no individual exchange without the antagonism of classes.” (84), This is not the only area in which the Marx of 1847 is in direct contradiction to his more mature future self. Instead of being, as M. Proudhon would have it, the ‘revolutionary theory’ of the emancipation of the proletariat.” (55) Come 1875, Marx-the-older proclaims in his Critique of the Gotha Programme the use of labour-notes in the period of transition to communism.[72]. It is society, it is the social relations based on the antagonism of classes... Efface these relations and you have extinguished the whole of society, and your Prometheus is nothing more than a phantom.” (109) It is almost redundant to note that Proudhon analysed the class nature of capitalist society in System of Economic Contradictions. “According to this, bourgeois society ought long ago to have gone to the dogs through sheer idleness; for those of its members who work, acquire nothing, and those who acquire anything do not work. (187, 74) Such valid points should not blind us to the distortions that work contains, distortions which ultimately undermine Marx’s case. Marx’s critical dialogue with the work of the French anarchist thinker Pierre Joseph Proudhon spanned several decades-from his youth haunting the cafes of Paris, where he had occasion to meet Proudhon and discuss German philosophy, through the writing of the Grundrisse, Capital, and theCritique of the Gotha Program. This notion also recurs as a fundamental part of political economy of modern revisionism. (37-8) Marx then quotes three economists expounding on this contradiction. For most Marxists (and even some anarchists) all they know of Proudhon has been gathered from Marx and Engels. Presumably Marx hoped that readers would be distracted by his witticism to notice that he had lambasted Proudhon for something he had not actually said. The consequence of that usurpation is that the worker, whose share of the collective product is constantly confiscated by the entrepreneur, is always on his uppers, while the capitalist is always in profit... and that political economy, that upholds and advocates that regime, is the theory of theft. So, in terms of “Marx’s critique of Proudhon” it would be useful to remember that much of it is not critiquing what Proudhon actually advocated. Think about campaigns for “Fair Trade” (rather than “Free Trade”) and the work of organizations like Global Exchange and Trade Craft. His discussion of machinery, for example, shows that he was well aware that capitalists introduce it to increase their profits at the expense of the workers. Except, of course, Marx never shows us where Proudhon advocated this… this is unsurprising for he did not. After all, there are potentially “black markets.” So there are economic relations that determine whether or not, IN FACT, the labor vouchers circulate. Like with Proudhon’s work, there is a failure to look closely at the mode of production itself. In Capital, Marx shows that the value of a commodity is determined by the amount of “socially necessary labor-time” required for its reproduction-any labor-time beyond that which is socially necessary is simply wasted (i.e., labor-time during which no value is created). He indicated that with “machinery and the workshop, divine right – that is, the principle of authority – makes its entrance into political economy. This website’s Archives page contains numerous writings by Raya Dunayevskaya from 1941-1987 and some additional Marxist-Humanist writings. Marx-the-older, however, argued that the “purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work” and so “becomes in actuality what previously he only was potentially,” a worker who produces “a specific article.”[74] Thus Proudhon “anticipated an idea that Marx was to develop as one of the key elements in the concept of labour power, viz. Strictly speaking, as Marx shows elsewhere, when supply equals demand, prices in the market equal prices of production, not values. This work became possible only owing to the work of Proudhon himself.[21]. “Proudhon says that the contradiction between supply and demand can be overcome if commodities are made to exchange directly in proportion to the amount of labor required for their production. Marx To Pierre-Joseph Proudhon In Paris. “Socially necessary labour-time is the labour-time required to produce any use-value under the conditions of production normal for a given society and with the average degree of skill and intensity of labour prevalent in that society” (Capital, p. 129, Penguin edition). Clearly someone unaware of the fallacy of composition…, “Proudhon’s interest in the equilibration of supply and demand led him to advocate the abolition of money.”. • The Resistance: A Permanent State of Revolt Against Trumpism The windmill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist. [70] See section I.1.2 of An Anarchist FAQ. The method of organizing two large-scale campaigns could be used to solve our basic water conservancy problems. (Mattick, 333). Good. So I think Seth has it right when he asks, “Can we legislate the abolition of commodity production? The Guide to the Collection is available here, and microfilm of the papers is on sale from Wayne State. In the course of his discussion of these issues in the Poverty of Philosophy, Marx draws an important distinction between the role of a “legislator” and that of an “economist.” As a legislator, Marx tells us, Proudhon is free to decree the abolition of the law of supply and demand.

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