The Method
Lenin describes the three component parts of Marxism as English political economy, French Socialism, and German philosophy. In order to address Proudhon's economic errors, Marx says, he was forced to stand on the ground of English political economy. Now, to deal with the errors of Proudhon's philosophical method, it is necessary for him to return home, and stand on the ground of German philosophy, and, in particular, Hegel.
“If the Englishman transforms men into hats, the German transforms hats into ideas. The Englishman is Ricardo, rich banker and distinguished economist; the German is Hegel, simple professor at the University of Berlin.” (p 96)
Louis XV had appointed Dr. Quesnay as his personal physician and Quesnay was also, perhaps, the first scientific economist, with his analysis set out in the Tableau Economique. Marx examines the work of Quesnay and the Tableau in Theories of Surplus Value. He represented, Marx says, “the imminent and certain triumph of the French bourgeoisie.” (p 96)
The Tableau was accompanied by an analysis comprising seven observations on it by Quesnay. Marx proposes seven observations on Proudhon's philosophical method.
First Observation
Marx quotes Proudhon.
“We are not giving a history according to the order in time, but according to the sequence of ideas. Economic phases or categories are in their manifestation sometimes contemporary, sometimes inverted.... Economic theories have nonetheless their logical sequence and their serial relation in the understanding: it is this order that we flatter ourselves to have discovered." (p 97)
As Marx had previously described, during his time in Paris, he had spent many hours trying to explain the Hegelian dialectic to Proudhon, without success. For Proudhon, as with petty-bourgeois, moral socialists in general, the dialectic is reduced to a Kantian moralism of good and evil. The task, then, becomes to move forward by preserving the good side of any phenomenon, whilst discarding the bad. That requires making a moral decision about what is good and what is bad, a moral decision which is in no way compatible with what may be historically progressive, as against reactionary. This is the point made by Marx in Theories of Surplus Value, Chapter 9, contrasting the position of Sismondi and Ricardo, and it is also taken up in Anti-Duhring. Lenin pursues the same argument against the petty-bourgeois moralism of the Narodniks.
For Hegel, Marx says, there was no question of adopting such a moralism, but of simply following the process of the unfolding of The Idea, wherever it led. Marx points out that, also, progress comes not from the “good” side of phenomena, but the “bad”, because it is the latter, which provides a struggle against it. Serfdom could be seen as the “bad” side of feudalism, but it was from amongst the serfs that the independent commodity producers arose, which led to the differentiation into bourgeois and proletarians, which led society forward to capitalism.
From the standpoint of capitalism, a shortage of labour, causing wages to rise, and profits to be squeezed is “bad”, but it is this “bad” which provokes capital to respond to it by engaging in technological innovation, which takes society forward, by revolutionising the forces of production, which also makes possible the transition to socialism.
Bourgeois economics takes the categories seen in capitalist production, such as exchange-value, division of labour, money and credit, and turns them into fixed categories, applying to all production, throughout history. Proudhon takes these categories, and sees them as the product of the development of ideas, unrelated to actual production, and historical development.
“Economists explain how production takes place in the above-mentioned relations, but what they do not explain is how these relations themselves are produced, that is, the historical movement which gave them birth. M. Proudhon, taking these relations for principles, categories, abstract thoughts, has merely to put into order these thoughts, which are to be found alphabetically arranged at the end of every treatise on political economy. The economists' material is the active, energetic life of man; M. Proudhon's material is the dogmas of the economists. But the moment we cease to pursue the historical movement of production relations, of which the categories are but the theoretical expression, the moment we want to see in these categories no more than ideas, spontaneous thoughts, independent of real relations, we are forced to attribute the origin of these thoughts to the movement of pure reason.” (p 97-8)
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