Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/127



The relations of production of every society form a whole. M. Proudhon regards the economic relations as so many phases, engendering the one the other, resulting the one from the other, as the antithesis from the thesis, and realising in their logical succession the impersonal reason of humanity.

The sole inconvenience of this method is that in approaching the examination of a single one of these phases M. Proudhon cannot explain it without having recourse to all the other relations of society, relations, however, which he has not yet caused to be engendered by his dialectic movement. When afterwards, by means of pure reason, M. Proudhon passes to the birth of the other phases, he acts as if these were new-born infants, he forgets that they are the same age as the first.

Thus, in order to arrive at the constitution of value, which is for him the basis of all the economic evolutions, he cannot get away from the division of labor, competition, &c. Nevertheless, in the series, in the understanding of M. Proudhon, in the logical succession, these relations do not yet exist.

In constructing with the categories of political economy the edifice of an ideological system, the members of the social system are dislocated. The different members of society are changed as belonging to separate societies which arrive one after the other. How, indeed, can the single logical formula of movement, of succession, of time, explain the composition of society, in which all the relations co-exist simultaneously and support each other?