Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/175

 SECTION IV.-PROPERTY AND RENT. In each historical epoch property is differently developed, and in a series of social relations entirely different. Thus, to define bourgeois property is nothing other than to explain all the social relations of bourgeois production.

To pretend to give a definition of property as of an independent relation, a separate category, an abstract and eternal idea, can only be an illusion of metaphysics or of jurisprudence.

M. Proudhon, while professing to speak of property in general, deals only with property in land, the rent of land.

"The origin of rent, as property, is, so to speak, extra-economic; it exists in certain psychological and moral considerations which are only remotely connected with the production of wealth." (Vol. II., p. 266.)

Thus M. Proudhon recognises his inability to comprehend the economic origin of rent and of property. He acknowledges that this incapacity obliges him to have recourse to psychological and moral considerations, which are indeed only remotely connected with the production of wealth, being closely allied to the exigencies of his historical views. M. Proudhon affirms that in the origin of property there is something mystic and mysterious. But to see mystery in the origin of property, that is to say, to transform the relation of production itself to the distribution of the instruments of production into a mystery, is that not, to use the language of M. Proudhon, to renounce all pretension to economic science?

M. Proudhon is "compelled to recall that at the seventh epoch of economic evolution—credit—the fiction