The Classics, Beginnings,
Part 2
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 notes 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 course on The Classics, moving
through the works of Marx and Engels and revealing the spine or theme of the
entire body of work - the Marxist “canon”.
We have
already looked at this question and concluded that The German
Ideology, including the Theses on Feuerbach, written
between 1845 and 1847 but not published in full until 1932, long after Lenin’s
death in 1924, ought in addition to be recognised as one of the “first works of
mature Marxism”, if not the very first.
So we can see 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, which is then
carefully examined and dissected. These works are polemical. “The German
Ideology” was a polemic against Bruno Bauer and Max Stirner, the latter being 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, who wrote a
book called “Gospel of Poor Sinners”, published in 1847.
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. Marx’s
polemic 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 within 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 Marxis 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, downloadable via the link given
below, is a compilation of Part 3 of Chapter 2, together with the last pages of
the book, which 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 the “twin brothers”
- the reformist bourgeois economists and the utopian socialists - both arguing
against combination; yet he notes that the more advanced the countries become,
the greater is the degree of combination. 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 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon made
in 1865 by the Realist painter and revolutionary Gustave Courbet who in 1871 was
placed in charge of all art museums by the Paris Commune and who was
subsequently punished and exiled to Switzerland, where he died.
Please download
and read this text:
The Poverty of
Philosophy, Karl Marx, 1847, excerpts (4083 words)
Further
reading:
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