By Frederick Engels and Karl Marx

This little book, printed in octavo, consists of a foreword (pp. III-IV) (dated Paris, September 1844), a table of contents (pp. V-VIII) and text proper (pp. 1-335), divided into nine chapters (Kapitel). Chapters I, II and III were written by Engels, Chapters V, VIII and IX by Marx, Chapters IV, VI and VII by both, in which case, however, each has signed the particular chapter section or subsection, supplied with its own heading, that was written by him. All these headings are satirical up to and including the “Critical Transformation of a Butcher into a Dog” (the heading of Section 1 of Chapter VIII). Engels is responsible for pages 1-17 Chapters I, II, III and sections 1 and 2 of Chapter IV, pages 138-142 (Section 2a of Chapter VI) and pages 240-245 (Section 2b of Chapter VII):

i.e., 26 pages out of 335.

The first chapters are entirely criticism of the style (t h e w h o l e ( ! ) first chapter, pp. 1-5) of the Literary Gazette [[Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung of Bruno Bauer—in their foreword Marx and Engels say that their criticism is directed against its first eight numbers]], criticism of its distortion of history (Chapter II, pp. 5-12, especially of English history), criticism of its themes (Chapter III, pp. 13-14, ridiculing the Gründlichkeit of the account of some dispute of Herr Nauwerk with the Berlin Faculty of Philosophy), criticism of views on love (Chapter IV, 3 by Marx), criticism of the account of Proudhon in the Literary Gazette ((IV,4) Proudhon, p. 22 u. ff. bis 74. At the beginning there is a mass of corrections of the translation: they have confused formule et signification, they have translated la justice as Gerechtigkeit instead of Rechtpraxis, etc.). This criticism of the translation (Marx entitles it—Characterisierende Übersetzung No. I, II u.s.w.) is followed by Kritische Randglosse No. I u.s.w., where Marx defends Proudhon against the critics of the Literary Gazette, counterposing his clearly socialist ideas to speculation.

Marx’s tone in relation to Proudhon is very laudatory (although there are minor reservations, for example reference to Engels’ Umrisse zu einer Kritik der Nationalökonomie in the Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher).

Marx here advances from Hegelian philosophy to socialism: the transition is clearly observable—it is evident what Marx has already mastered and how he goes over to the new sphere of ideas.

(36) “Accepting the relations of private property as human and rational, political economy comes into continual contradiction with its basic premise, private property, a contradiction analogous to that of the theologian, who constantly gives a human interpretation to religious conceptions and by that very fact comes into constant conflict with his basic premise, the superhuman character of religion. Thus, in political economy wages appear at the beginning as the proportionate share of the product due to labour. Wages and profit on capital stand in the most friendly and apparently the most human relationship, reciprocally promoting one another. Subsequently it turns out that they stand in the most hostile relationship, in inverse proportion to each other. Value is determined at the beginning in an apparently rational way by the cost of production of an object and its social usefulness. Later it turns out that value is determined quite fortuitously, not bearing any relation to cost of production or social usefulness. The magnitude of wages is determined at the beginning by free agreement between the free worker and the free capitalist. Later it turns out that the worker is compelled to agree to the determination of wages by the capitalist, just as the capitalist is compelled to fix it as low as possible. Freedom of the contracting Parthei” [this is the way the word is spelled in the book] “has been supplanted by compulsion. The same thing holds good of trade and all other economic relations. The economists themselves occasionally sense these contradictions, and the disclosure of these contradictions constitutes the main content of the conflicts between them. When, however, the economists in one way or another become conscious of these contradictions, they themselves attack private property in any one of its private forms as the falsifier of what is in itself (i.e., in their imagination) rational wages, in itself rational value, in itself rational trade. Adam Smith, for instance, occassionally polemises against the capitalists, Destutt de Tracy against the bankers, Simonde de Sismondi against the factory system, Ricardo against landed property, and nearly all modern economists against the non-industrial capitalists, in whom private property appears as a mere consumer.

“Thus, as an exception—and all the more so when they attack some special abuse—the economists sometimes stress the semblance of the humane in economic relations, while, more often than not, they take these relations precisely in their marked difference from the humane, in their strictly economic sense. They stagger about within that contradiction without going beyond its limits.

“Proudhon put an end to this unconsciousness once for all. He took the humane semblance of the economic relations seriously and sharply opposed it to their inhumane reality. He forced them to be in reality what they imagine themselves to be, or, more accurately, to give up their own idea of themselves and confess their real inhumanity. He therefore quite consistently represented as the falsifier of economic relations not one or another particular type of private property, as other economists have done, but private property as such, in its entirety. He has done all that can be done by criticism of political economy from the stand-point of political economy.” (39)

Herr Edgar’s reproach (Edgar of the Literary Gazette) that Proudhon makes a “god” out of “justice,” Marx brushes aside by saying that Proudhon’s treatise of 1840 does not adopt “the standpoint of German development of 1844” (39), that this is a general failing of the French, and that one must also bear in mind Proudhon’s reference to the implementation of justice by its negation—a reference making it possible to have done with this Absolute in history as well (um auch dieses Absoluten in der Geschichte überhoben zu sein)—at the end of p. 39. “If Proudhon does not arrive at this consistent conclusion, it is owing to his misfortune in being born a Frenchman and not a German.” (39-40)

Then follows Critical Gloss No. II (40-46), setting out in very clear relief Marx’s view—already almost fully developed—concerning the revolutionary role of the proletariat.

...“Hitherto political economy proceeded from the wealth that the movement of private property supposedly creates for the nations to an apology of private property. Proudhon proceeds from the opposite side, which political economy sophistically conceals, from the poverty bred by the movement of private property, to his conclusions negating private property. The first criticism of private property proceeds, of course, from the fact in which its contradictory essence appears in the form that is most perceptible and most glaring and most directly arouses man’s indignation—from the fact of poverty, of misery.” (41)

“Proletariat and wealth are opposites. As such they form a single whole. They are both begotten by the world of private property. The question is what particular place each occupies within the antithesis. It is not sufficient to declare them two sides of a single whole.

“Private property as private property, as wealth, is compelled to maintain itself, and thereby its opposite, the proletariat, in existence. That is the positive side of the contradiction, self-satisfied private property.

“The proletariat, on the other hand, is compelled as proletariat to abolish itself and thereby its opposite, the condition for its existence, that which makes it the proletariat, i.e. private property. That is the negative side of the contradiction, its restlessness within its very self, dissolved and self-dissolving private property.

“The propertied class and the class of the proletariat present the same human self-alienation. But the former class feels happy and confirmed in this self-alientation, it recognises alienation as its own power, and has in it the semblance of human existence. The class of the proletariat feels annihilated in its self-alienation; it sees in it its own powerlessness and the reality of an inhuman existnece. To use an expression of Hegel’s, the class of the proletariat is in abasement indignation at this abasement, an indignation to which it is necessarily driven by the contradiction between its human nature and its conditions of life, which are the outright, decisive and comprehensive negation of that nature.

“Within this antithesis the private property-owner is therefore the conservative side, the proletarian, the destructive side. From the former arises the action of preserving the antithesis, from the latter, that of annihilating it.

“In any case, in its economic movement private property drives towards its own dissolution, but only through a development which does not depend on it, of which it is unconscious and which takes place against its will, through the very nature of things, only inasmuch as it produces the proletariat as proletariat, misery conscious of its spiritual and physical misery, dehumnaisation conscious of its dehumanisation and therefore self-abolishing. The proletariat executes the sentence that private property pronounced on itself by begetting the proletariat, just as it executes the sentence that wage-labour pronounced on itself by begetting wealth for others and misery for itself. When the proletariat is victorious, it by no means becomes the absolute side of society, for it is victorious only by abolishing itself and its opposite. Then the proletariat disappears as well as the opposite which determines it, private property.

“When socialist writers ascribe this historic role to the proletariat, it is not, as Critical Criticism would have one think, because they consider the proletarians as gods. Rather the contrary. Since the abstraction of all humanity, even of the semblance of humanity, is practically complete in the fully-formed proletariat; since the conditions of life of the proletariat sum up all the conditions of life of society today in their most inhuman and acute form; since man has lost himself in the proletariat, yet at the same time has not only gained theoretical consciousness of that loss, but through the no longer removable, no longer disguisable, absolutely imperative need—the practical expression of necessity—is driven directly to revolt against that inhumanity; it follows that the proletariat can and must free itelf. But it cannot free itself without abolishing the conditions of its own life. It cannot abolish the conditions of its own life without abolishing all the inhuman conditions of life of society today which are summed up in its own situation. Not in vain does it go through the stern but steeling school of labour. It is not a question of what this or that proletarian, or even the whole proletariat, at the moment considers as its aim. It is a question of what the proletariat is, and what, in accordance with this being, it will historically be compelled to do. Its aim and historical action is irrevocably and clearly foreshadowed in its own life situation as well as in the whole organisation of bourgeois society today. There is no need here to show that a large part of the English and French proletariat is already conscious of its historic task and is constantly working to develop that consciousness into complete clarity.” (42-45)