Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/141

 134 THE POVERTY OF PHILOSOPHY

opposed by each other. This opposition of interests flows from the economic conditions of their bourgeois life. From day to day it becomes more clear that the relations of production in which the bourgeoisie exists have not a single, a simple character, but a double character, a character of duplicity; that in the same relations in which wealth is produced, poverty is produced also; that in the same relations in which there is a development of productive forces, there is a productive force of repression ; that these relations produce bourgeois wealth, that is to say the wealth of the bourgeois class, only in continually annihilating the wealth of integral members of that class and in producing an ever-growing proletariat.

The more this antagonistic character comes to light the more the economists, the scientific representatives of bourgeois production, become excited with their own theories, and different schools are formed.

We have the fatalist economists, who in their theory are as indifferent to what they call the inconveniences of bourgeois production, as the bourgeois themselves are, in actual practice, to the sufferings of the proletarians who assist them to acquire riches. In this fatalist school there are classicists and romanticists, The classicists, like Adam Smith and Ricardo, represents a bourgeoisie which, still struggling with the relics of feudal society, labors only to purify economic relations from the feudal blemishes, to augment the productive forces, and to give to industry and to commerce a fresh scope. The proletariat participating in this struggle, absorbed in this feverish labor, has only passing accidental suffer- ings to endure, and itself regards them as such. Economists like Adam Smith and Ricardo, who are the