126 KARL MARX: A BIOGRAPHYpast centuries with present-day means of production - in which case you
are both reactionary and Utopian; or you want progress without anarchy- in which case, in order to preserve the productive forces, you must
abandon individual exchange.'^89 Anyway, Marx claimed, Proudhon was far
from the first to think of 'reforming society by transforming all men into
actual workers exchanging equal amounts of labour'.^90 To prove his point
he quoted at great length from the English economist Bray, views
which he nevertheless rejected on the grounds that 'individual exchange
corresponds ... to a definite mode of production which itself corresponds
to class antagonism. There is thus no individual exchange without the
antagonism of classes.'^91 Marx then finished the first half of the book with
remarks on the impossibility of deducing the value of money from labour
time, and on the way that Proudhon (in order to oppose the idea that
labour produced a surplus) had to suppose existing social relations to be
non-existent.
In the second part of the book, Marx attacked Proudhon's desire 'to
frighten the French by flinging quasi-Hegelian phrases at them',^92 and his
use of such pseudo-explanatory devices as thesis, antithesis and synthesis.^93
He then accused Proudhon of seeing 'in actual relations nothing but the
incarnation of... principles' and continued in a well-known passage:
Social relations are closely bound up with productive forces. In acquir-
ing new productive forces men change their mode of production; and
in changing their mode of production, in changing the way of earning
their living, they change all their social relations. The hand-mill gives
you society with the feudal lord: the steammill, society with the indus-
trial capitalist.^94According to Marx, in the eyes of classical economists 'there are only two
kinds of institutions, artificial and natural. The institutions of feudalism
are artificial institutions, those of the bourgeoisie are natural insti-
tutions.'^95 But bourgeois doctrines were as relative as any other and were
to be supplanted by proletarian economic doctrines. The theoreticians of
such doctrines were, of course, merely Utopian in the beginning of the
proletarian movement;
but to the extent that history moves forward and with it the struggle
of the proletariat assumes clearer outlines, they no longer need to seek
solutions by drawing on their imagination; they have only to take note
of what is happening before their eyes and to become its mouthpiece.
So long as they look for knowledge by merely constructing systems, so
long as they are at the beginning of the struggle, they see in poverty
nothing but poverty - without seeing in it the revolutionary, subversive
aspect which will overthrow the old society. From this moment, knowl-