Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/207

 200 APPENDIX

Helvetius: ‘We desire that the unfortunate should be perfect.”

In fact, the revolution of February happened very un- fortunately for Proudhon, who, a few weeks previously, had proved definitely and irrefutably that the “era of revolutions” was past for ever. Nevertheless his attitude in the National Assembly merits nothing but praise, al- though it proved his lack of intelligence of the situation. After the insurrection of June this attitude was an act of great courage. It had further this happy result, that M. Thiers, in his reply to the propositions of Proudhon, which was afterwards published as a book, revealed the mean, petty pedestal upon which the intellectual pillar of the French bourgeoisie was raised. Compared with Thiers, Proudhon assumed the proportions of an ancient colossus.

The last economic acts and achievements of Proudhon were his discovery of “Free Credit,” and of the “People’s Bank” which should realise it. In my work “Zur Kritik der Politischen C£konomie” (“Criticism of Political Economy”), Berlin, 1859 (pp. 59-64), you will find the proof that these Proudhonian ideas are based upon a complete ignorance of the first elements of bourgeois political economy—the relation between commodity and money—while their practical realisation was nothing but the reproduction of better elaborated projects of a much earlier period. There is no doubt, there is indeed evidence to show, that the development of credit, which has served in England in the beginning of the eighteenth century, and more recently in this, to transfer wealth from one class to another, might also serve, in certain political and economic conditions, to accelerate the emancipation of the working class. But to consider interest-bearing capital as the principal form of capital,