The Poverty of Philosophy

The Poverty of Philosophy (French: Misère de la philosophie) is a book by Karl Marx published in Paris and Brussels in 1847, where he lived in exile from 1843 until 1849. It was originally written in French as an answer to the economic and philosophical arguments of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon set forth in his 1846 book The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865) was a French anarchist theoretician who wrote extensively on the relationship between the individual and the state. Proudhon believed in an orderly society but argued that the state represented an illegitimate concentration of official violence which effectively undercut any effort to build a just society. Proudhon rejected all political action as a form of class collaboration but argued instead that the working class could achieve its salvation through economic action alone; abstention from politics was advocated with a view to the ultimate eradication of the existing state and its political apparatus.

Proudhon believed that the stateless future was not preordained by iron laws of history, but was rather to be the conscious creation of a population which had been morally awakened. This necessary morality, based upon honesty, decency, self-respect, and individual responsibility, was believed to be an inherent part of the working class—something to be developed and emphasized.

By way of contrast, industrialists, businessmen, and their servitors were held to be incapable of developing this morality due to the nature of their day-to-day economic and political activity. The act of labor itself was believed to be socially ennobling while the act of economic exploitation backed by political force was held to be inherently corrupting. Therefore, Proudhon emphatically declared for a strict separatism between the working class and all others.

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