Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/130

 He takes the first category to hand and arbitrarily attributes to it the quality of becoming a remedy to the inconveniences of the category which he wishes to purify. Thus imposts, if we are to believe M. Proudhon, remedy the inconveniences of monopoly; the balance of commerce, the inconveniences of imposts; landlordism, the inconveniences of credit.

In thus taking successively the economic categories one by one and making one the antidote of the other, M. Proudhon makes of this mixture of contradictions and of antidotes to the contradictions, two volumes of contradictions which he calls by their proper title: "The System of Economic Contradictions."

"In absolute reason all these ideas.... are equally simple and general..... In fact, we attain to the science only by a kind of scaffolding of our ideas. But truth in itself is independent of its dialectical figures, and free from the combinations of our mind." (Proudhon, vol. II., p. 97.)

There at a blow, by a kind of quick change of which we now know the secret, the metaphysic of political economy becomes an illusion! Never has M. Proudhon spoken more truly. Certainly from the moment that the development of the dialectical movement is reduced to the simple process of opposing the good to the bad, of posing problems tending to eliminate the bad, and of giving one category as antidote to the other, the categories have no more spontaneity; the idea "functions no more," it has no longer any life in it. It no longer poses or decomposes itself in categories. The succession of categories has become a kind of scaffolding. The dia-