Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/17

 an impassable gulf between them; to keep silence was no longer possible. Marx demonstrates in this reply the irreparable rupture which had taken place.

The summary of Marx's judgment of Proudhon is expressed in the article reproduced as an appendix to this work, which first appeared in the Sozialdemokrat of Berlin, Nos. 16, 17 and 18. It was the only article Marx ever wrote for that journal. The efforts of Herr von Schweitzer to drag the paper into governmental and feudal waters constrained us to publicly withdraw from it after a few weeks.

The present work has for Germany a special importance which Marx did not foresee. How could he have known that in attacking Proudhon he at the same time struck a blow at the idol of the Strebars (arrivistes) of to-day, Rodbertus, whose name even he did not know?

This is not the place to deal at length with the relations existing between Marx and Rodbertus; I may soon have the opportunity to do it. Suffice it here to say that when Rodbertus accuses Marx of having "pillaged" him, and of having in his "Capital" profited much by his work, "Zur Erkenntniss," &c., without making any acknowledgment, he allows himself to be guilty of a calumny which is only to be explained by the natural ill-humor of a misunderstood genius, and his remarkable ignorance of everything occurring outside of Prussia, and notably of Socialist and economic literature. These accusations never, any more than the work we have cited, came under the notice of Marx; of Rodbertus's work he knew nothing, except the three "Sozialen Briefe" ("Social Letters"), and even these certainly not before 1858 or 1859.

There is much more foundation for Rodbertus's claim to have in these letters discovered "the constituted value