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Poverty of Philosophy (Great Books in Philosophy)

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Marx's attack on Proudhon's Système des Contradictions Économiques ou Philosophie de la Misere was first published in French in 1847. There is a good deal of rather turgid logomachy about "value" but also several interesting details illustrative of the genesis of the Marxian System. Of these, what may perhaps seem one of the more curious is Marx's stern correction of Proudhon for having in his treatment of value "simply forgotten about demand" (p. 40). Two later letters dealing with Proudhon, and a speech by Marx "On the Question of Free Trade" (1848) are also included. But the most interesting item in the volume is Engels's Preface of 1884 to the First German Edition, which includes a very lucid and forthright defense of the functions of the competitive price mechanism, and a correspondingly vigorous attack on the labor-money scheme of Rodbertus as a kind of "Utopian" socialism which afforded no solution to the problems of the allocation of resources. With his usual generous modesty vis-à-vis his senior partner, Engels suggests (p. 15) that he is simply applying to Rodbertus the criticisms Marx had directed against Proudhon and John Gray (in a passage in the Critique of Political Economy printed here as an appendix). In fact, however, the fundamental point about the essential functions of a competitive price mechanism in allocating resources hardly emerges at all in Marx's polemics, whereas Engels's paragraphs (pp. 17-22) might almost have been written by Mises.

This book is of historical interest. Karl Marx obtained his doctorate in philosophy in 1841, based on a thesis on post-Aristotelian Greek philosophy. He became a newspaper editor in 1842, until the government closed the publication. Marx moved to Paris, and wrote THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY in 1847. (p. 5). Most Americans believe that the American revolution was fought to establish principles of equality. As equals of anyone, we certainly don't think of ourselves as having fought the American revolution against our own government. Marx and Engels created the COMMUNIST MANIFESTO in 1847, a mere 14 years before the American Civil War, when it seemed like Americans on both sides were being blamed for fighting against a Union or the rights of states, and the Americans who were on the same side as General Sherman had the clearest picture of their military policy (war is hell).

THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY was written just before Marx might have been considered the founder of a settled doctrine, but it is full of signs that Marx saw how necessary it was that those who would rule should think like a government, or like a burning bush, and more honest than the law could ever be. Most of the observations in this book are based upon economic considerations. In pure economics, the almighty dollar would be the standard for determining matters of exchange, but this book is in search of a basis for political economics. In opposition to the political economics of Proudhon, which was based on the idea of equality, Marx wrote:

Hypotheses are only made in view of some end. The end proposed to itself in the first place by the social genius which speaks by the mouth of M. Proudhon, was the elimination of that which was evil in each economic category, in order to have only the good. For him good, the supreme good, the true practical end, is equality. And why does the social genius propose equality rather than inequality, fraternity, Catholicism, or any other principle? Because "humanity has realized successively so many particular hypotheses only in view of a superior hypothesis," which is precisely equality. In other words: because equality is the ideal of M. Proudhon. He imagines that the division of labor, credit, the workshop, that all the economic relations have been invented only for the benefit of equality, and nevertheless they have always finished by turning against her. From the fact that the history and the fiction of M. Proudhon contradict each other at every step, he concludes that there is a contradiction. If there is a contradiction it exists only between his fixed idea and the real movement.

Henceforth the good side of an economic relation is that which affirms equality, the bad side is that which denies it and affirms inequality. Every new category is a hypothesis of the social genius to eliminate the inequality engendered by the preceding hypothesis. To sum up, equality is the primitive intention, the mystic tendency, the providential end, that the social genius has before its eyes in turning round and round in the circle of economic contradictions. Providence is also the locomotive which conveys all the economic baggage of M. Proudhon better than his pure and heedless reason. (p. 129)

In the time of Marx, the struggle between the bourgeoisie and proletariat classes was political, but the almighty dollar has managed to produce a politics which is fundamentally only for those of standing, who have "conflicting, antagonistic interests, inasmuch as they find themselves opposed by each other. This opposition of interests flows from the economic conditions of their bourgeois life." (pp. 133-4). According to Marx, any attempt by a humanitarian school of economics was doomed to have a theory which was actually based "upon interminable distinctions between theory and practice, between principles and results, between the idea and the application, between the content and the form, between the essence and the reality, between right and fact, between the good and evil side." (p. 135) Marx proposes an ability to see beyond this, imagining the power of "the revolutionary subversive side which will overturn the old society." (p. 137). Even without communism, the papers are full of the efforts of the doomed to try this stunt, and of the government to stop them. General Sherman was as American as any economist.

Marxs book here shows you how the distribution of wealth yes why some now 060601, have 145,000,000 in net worth at top of company and a worker in company has 43,000 dollars, is a human political construction. Nothing that exists is law of physics unalterable reality. He shows how this distribution is stupid, and how a more equal distribution and democratic economy can do much better than now. He says this in angery word webs. It is a fun book that get sone thinking. You will have intellectual, fun, a rare form of fun these days.