State
and Revolution, Part 5a
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and his
daughters, by Gustave Courbet, 1865
The Poverty of
Philosophy
In Chapter
2 of his 1917 between-revolutions work “The State and Revolution”,
V I Lenin wrote that “The first works of mature Marxism — The Poverty of Philosophy
and the Communist Manifesto
— appeared just on the eve of the revolution of 1848.” Among other things, “The State and
Revolution” was Lenin’s own well-designed course on The Classics, moving
through the works of Marx and Engels and revealing the spine or theme of the
entire body of work.
We have elsewhere
looked at this question and concluded that The German
Ideology, including the Theses on Feuerbach,
all written between 1845 and 1847 but not published in full until 1932, long
after Lenin’s death in 1924, ought to be recognised as one of the “first works
of mature Marxism”.
With all
these, we have a reasonably clear-cut beginning to the “canon” of Marxism, in
terms of time and of specific works. But what is the nature of this beginning,
as revealed in these works?
One part of
the answer to this question is polemic, which is a kind of argument that
proceeds from criticism of an opponent’s ideas expressed in text, carefully
examined and dissected. These works of Marx’s and Engels’ are polemical.
The German Ideology was a polemic against Bruno
Bauer and against Max
Stirner, an anarchist who had previously published a book called “The
Ego and Its Own”. Another anarchist opponent of Marx and Engels in the early
1840s was Wilhelm Weitling. The Poverty of
Philosophy, started in January 1847 and published the same year, was a polemic
against a third anarchist, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who
had written a book called “The Philosophy of
Poverty”.
In case we
should get too particular about the term “anarchism”, it can help to recall
what Lenin wrote in Chapter 3 of The State and Revolution, namely that “anarcho-syndicalism… is merely the twin
brother of opportunism.” The imprecision of anarchism is one of its faults.
Its distinction from bourgeois and petty-bourgeois liberalism is not clear,
because it is actually non-existent. Marx’s polemic in “The Poverty of
Philosophy” is directed against these faults, and others.
It is as
well to use this opportunity to remind ourselves that there was no innocent
Garden of Eden for Marxism before it was assailed by anarchists, “ultra-lefts”,
revisionists, reformists and all sorts of deviationists, escamoteurs and demagogues. In fact, there was not even as much as
one minute of peace for Marxism before it had to contend with all of these
kinds of opponents. On the contrary, Marxism was actually conceived in this
very same argument. The argument with the anarchists was itself the creative
act. There was no Marxism prior to its polemical fights with anarchism, and it
is fated to contend with these same foes in their many variations until the day
that class struggle finally ends and the communist parties disband themselves.
The
selected text from The Poverty of Philosophy, attached, and downloadable via
the link given below, is a compilation of Part 3 of Chapter 2, together with
the last pages of the book, which last pages comprise what is arguably the
first concise full statement of Marxism.
It is not
necessary for our present purposes to follow every twist and turn of Marx’s
argument in Part 3 of The Poverty of Philosophy. Most of it is in any case
lucid and clear, although it is sometimes not easy to tell which is Marx’s own
voice, and which is Marx speaking satirically in Proudhon’s voice.
Some
highlights include the following passage, where Marx anticipates both Capital
Volume 3 and also the current banking crisis and US home-loan bubble:
“Competition is not industrial emulation, it is
commercial emulation. In our time industrial emulation exists only in view of
commerce. There are even phases in the economic life of modern nations when
everybody is seized with a sort of craze for making profit without producing.
This speculation craze, which recurs periodically, lays bare the true character
of competition, which seeks to escape the need for industrial emulation.”
In the final part, Marx begins by advocating “combination”,
which is the creation of mass democratic organisations, especially trade
unions. He finds what Lenin calls the “twin brothers” - the reformist bourgeois
economists and the utopian socialists - both arguing against combination
(unions); yet he notes that the more advanced the countries become, the greater
is the degree of combination. This kind of association then takes on a
political character, says Marx.
In the final page Marx writes:
“An oppressed class is the vital condition
for every society founded on the antagonism of classes. The emancipation of the
oppressed class thus implies necessarily the creation of a new society… The
condition for the emancipation of the working class is the abolition of every
class… …there will be no more political power
properly so-called, since political power is precisely the official expression
of antagonism in civil society... …the antagonism between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie is a
struggle of class against class, a struggle which carried to its highest
expression is a total revolution.”
This is
classic Marxism.
The image
above is a reproduction of a painting of Proudhon made in 1865 by the
great Realist painter Gustave Courbet who in 1871 was
placed in charge of all art museums by the Paris Commune, and who was as a
result subsequently exiled to Switzerland, where he died.
- The above is to introduce the original reading-text: The Poverty
of Philosophy, Karl Marx, 1847, excerpts.
