t144 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYcriticism was that Proudhon did not grasp the historical development of
humanity and thus had recourse to eternal concepts such as Reason and
Justice. Marx wrote:
What is society, whatever its form may be? The product of men's
reciprocal action. Are men free to choose this or that form of society
for themselves? By no means. Assume a particular state of development
in the productive forces of man and you will get a particular form of
commerce and consumption. Assume particular stages of development
in production, commerce and consumption and you will have a corre-
sponding social constitution, a corresponding organisation of the family,
of orders or of classes, in a word, a corresponding civil society. Assume
a particular civil society and you will get particular political conditions
which are only the official expression of civil society. M. Proudhon will
never understand this because he thinks he is doing something great
by appealing from the state to society - that is to say, from the official
synopsis of society to official society.
It is superfluous to add that men are not free to choose their
productive forces - which are the bases of all their history - for
every productive force is an acquired force, the product of former
activity. A coherence arises in human history, a history of humanity
takes shape which is all the more a history of humanity as the productive
forces of man and therefore his social relations have been more
developed. Hence it necessarily follows that the social history of men
is never anything but the history of their individual development,
whether they are conscious of it or not. Their material relations are
the basis of all their relations. These material relations are only the
necessary forms in which their material and individual activity is
realised."Marx did, however, grant that Proudhon, by trying to mediate between
bourgeois economics and socialist ideas, had 'the merit of being the
scientific interpreter of the French petty bourgeoisie - a genuine merit
because the petty bourgeoisie will form an integral part of all the impend-
ing social revolutions'.^78
These criticisms were elaborated on in his two-part book The Poverty
of Philosophy. The first part dealt with the theory of value and the second
began with an attack on Proudhon's method and ended with an important
section on the working-class movement.
At the very outset Marx criticised Proudhon's lack of a precise starting
point for his analysis. Proudhon's 'dialetic' merely consisted 'in the substi-
tution for use-value and exchange-value and for supply and demand, of
abstract and contradictory notions such as scarcity and abundance, utility
and estimation, one producer and one consumer, both of them knights of
free will'.^79 And Proudhon's purpose in this was to 'arrange for himself a