Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/82

 little known in France; and, further, because we believe we have there found the key of the past, present and future works of M. Proudhon.

"The only way to arrive at truth is to go at once to first principles. Let us go at once to the source from whence governments themselves have arisen.  By thus going to the origin of the thing we shall find that every form of government, and every social and governmental wrong, owes its rise to the existing social system—to the institution of property as it at present exists—and that, therefore, if we would end our wrongs and our miseries at once and for ever, the present arrangements of society must be totally subverted, and supplanted by those more in accordance with the principles of justice and the rationality of man.

"By thus fighting them upon their own ground, and with their own weapons, we shall avoid that senseless clatter respecting 'visionaries' and 'theorists' with which they are so ready to assail all who dare move one step from that beaten track which 'by authority' has been pronounced to be the only right one. Before the conclusions arrived at by such a course of proceeding can be overthrown the economists must unsay or disprove those established truths and principles on which their own arguments are founded." (J. F. Bray, pp. 17 and 41.)

"it is labor alone which bestows value. Every man has an undoubted right to all that his honest labor can procure him. When he thus appropriates the fruits of his labor he commits no injustice upon any other human being, for he interferes with no other man's right of doing the same with the produce of his labor.  All these ideas of superior and inferior—of master and man—may be traced to the neglect of first principles, and to the consequent rise of inequality of possessions;