Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/129

 decadence, of modern commerce and civilisation. Cause slavery to disappear, and you will have effaced America from the map of nations.

Thus slavery, because it is an economic category, has always existed in the institutions of the nations. Modern nations have known how to disguise slavery in their own lands alone, they have imposed it without disguise on the New World.

What will M. Proudhon do to save slavery? He puts the problem: Conserve the good side of this economic category, eliminate the bad.

Hegel has no problems to put. He has only dialectic. M. Proudhon has of the dialectic of Hegel nothing but the language. His dialectic movement for him is the dogmatic distinction of good and evil.

Let us for an instant take M. Proudhon himself as a category. Let us examine his good and his bad side, his advantages and his inconveniences.

If he has the advantage over Hegel of putting problems which he reserves it to himself to solve for the greater good of humanity, he has the inconvenience of being stricken with sterility when it is a question of engendering by dialectical travail a new category. In order merely to put the problem of eliminating the evil side, one cuts short the dialectic movement. It is not the category which poses and opposes itself by its contradictory nature, it is M. Proudhon who disturbs himself, argues with himself, strives and struggles between the two sides of the category.

Taken thus in a impasse, from which it is difficult to escape by legitimate means, M. Proudhon performs a veritable somersault which carries him at a single bound into a new category. It is then that the series in the understanding unveils itself to his astonished eyes.