APPENDIX 197
place the insoluble contradiction of Kant as a means of development.
For:a criticism of these two large volumes I must refer you to my reply. I have there, among other things, shown how slightly Proudhon has penetrated the mystery of scientific dialectic, and how far, on the other hand, he shares the illusions of “speculative” philosophy. Instead of regarding the economic categories as the theoretical expressions of the historical relations of production, corresponding to a given degree of the development of material production, his imagination transforms them into “eternal ideas,” existing before any reality, and in this manner he arrives, in a round-about way, at the point from which he started, the point of view of bour- geois economy.*
Then I show how defective and rudimentary is his knowledge of political economy, of which nevertheless, he undertakes the criticism, and how, with the utopians, he sets himself to seek for a pretended “science” which may furnish him with a ready-made formula for “the solution of the social question,” instead of drawing his science from critical knowledge of the historical move- ment, the movement which must itself produce the material conditions of social emancipation. What I, above all, denounce, is that M. Proudhon has only im- perfect ideas,confused and false with regard to the basis of all political economy—exchange-value—a circum-
- In saying that existing conditions—the conditions of
bourgeois production—are natural, the economists give it to be understood that these are the relations in which wealth is created and the productive forces are developed conformably to the laws of nature. Thus these relations are themselves natural laws, independent of the influence of time. They are eternal laws which must always govern society. Thus there has been history, but there is no longer any.
