Marx wrote this book in French, in a hurry, and in anger. In 1846 Pierre-Joseph Proudhon — the most famous socialist in France, the man who had declared that property was theft — published a fat two-volume work called Système des contradictions économiques, ou Philosophie de la misère (System of Economic Contradictions, or the Philosophy of Poverty). Marx read it, decided it was a disaster dressed up as a discovery, and answered it the next winter with a book whose title simply turned Proudhon's upside down: Misère de la philosophie — The Poverty of Philosophy. It came out in Brussels and Paris in July 1847. It was never reprinted in Marx's lifetime as a French book, and for decades it was among the least read things he wrote. It is also, as Engels kept insisting, the place where the mature Marx first shows his face in public — a year before the Communist Manifesto, and twenty years before Capital. This edition is worth having because the young polemic contains, in miniature and at speed, both the method Marx would spend his life perfecting and a warning that the state which later canonised him spectacularly failed to hear.
The present text is the Moscow one: Progress Publishers' edition, made from the French of 1847 with the corrections Marx pencilled into a copy in 1876 and the further corrections Engels made when he edited the first German edition of 1885, for which he also wrote the two prefaces printed here. It is a well-found volume. Around the two chapters it gathers Marx's own foreword, four appendices — his famous letter to Annenkov of December 1846, which sketches the whole argument in advance; his 1865 letter to Schweitzer taking the measure of Proudhon after the man's death; a short excerpt from A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy; and the 1848 Brussels speech On the Question of Free Trade — and it closes with the numbered notes of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism and a name index. Reference marks appear here as [Note 1] and so on; the asterisked footnotes are the author's, Marx's own and the handful Engels added for the Germans. No translator is named on the title page, and none is invented here: the English is the Institute's, and it is the standard one.
What the book does supremely is method, and the method is stated in a single sentence that has never been bettered. Against Proudhon — who treated the categories of economics as eternal ideas descending in a Hegelian order, "constituted value" giving birth to money giving birth to competition — Marx puts the categories back on the ground they grew from. "The hand-mill gives you society with the feudal lord; the steam-mill, society with the industrial capitalist," he writes, and then draws the general conclusion: "The same men who establish their social relations in conformity with their material productivity, produce also principles, ideas and categories, in conformity with their social relations. Thus these ideas, these categories, are as little eternal as the relations they express. They are historical and transitory products." That is the materialist conception of history, three years before Marx would use the word, delivered as a hammer-blow in the middle of a book review. Everything that later hardened into "dialectical materialism" is here still molten, still doing work — the claim that the way people make their living shapes the way they think and rule, offered not as a law of nature but as a reason to study each economy in its own historical motion rather than to deduce it from a philosopher's table of contents.
The other thing the book does supremely is refuse a temptation. Proudhon's whole scheme was that the good side of each economic category could be kept and the bad side legislated away — that value "constituted" by labour-time could be turned, by clever institutional design and a species of labour-money, into a just and painless economy without touching the relations of production underneath. Marx's demolition of this — running through the English "labour-money" utopians, Gray and Bray, whom Proudhon had unknowingly rediscovered — is the first appearance of a conviction he never abandoned: that you cannot decree a new economy into being on top of the old relations, that value is not an accounting choice but the expression of a definite form of society, and that to abolish its evils you must transform the form and not the bookkeeping. It ends, in the great fifth section on strikes and combinations, with something warmer than method. Here Marx defends the workers' right to combine against the economists who deplored it and the Proudhon who thought it futile. "The first attempts of workers to associate among themselves," he writes, "always take place in the form of combinations"; competition divides them, the defence of wages unites them, and in that struggle a scattered "mass" that "is thus already a class as against capital, but not yet for itself" at last "constitutes itself as a class for itself." The book that opens with a joke at Proudhon's expense closes on the self-organisation of the working class as the agent of its own emancipation.
It is an early book, and honesty requires saying where it is early. The economics is pre-Capital: Marx here still argues largely on Ricardo's ground, with labour-time as the measure of value, and the decisive distinction that founds the whole later system — between labour and labour-power, the distinction that reveals where profit comes from — is not yet in his hands. Engels's prefaces, printed here, half-admit as much even as they defend the book, and they spend a surprising amount of energy on a priority-quarrel with the German economist Rodbertus that mattered enormously in 1885 and not at all now. The polemic, too, is a young man's: dazzling, unfair in places, so intent on scoring against Proudhon that it sometimes flattens what the older man was groping toward. None of this is a reason to discount the book. It is a reason to read it as what it is — the workshop sketch, not the finished canvas — and Engels was right that the finished canvas is unmistakably drawn in it.
Which raises the question this edition, for all its apparatus, never puts to itself: was the state that printed The Poverty of Philosophy in its millions consistent with the book? On two points it was the book's living refutation. The first is the labour-money utopia Marx destroyed. The Soviet economy became, in its own bureaucratic key, precisely the thing Marx mocked Proudhon for dreaming: an order in which a central office — Gosplan, the state planning agency — would fix values and quantities by administrative decree and settle accounts in what amounted to labour-tokens, socialism reduced to a gigantic exercise in bookkeeping imposed from above on relations of production it had not transformed but merely nationalised. Marx's charge against Proudhon — that a schema drawn up in the head and clamped onto real social relations is idealism wearing the costume of economics — turns on the planners' cabinet as sharply as it ever turned on the Frenchman. The doctrine took the hand-mill sentence as a licence for productive-forces worship, as though building the steam-mills would by itself deliver socialism; Marx's actual point was the opposite, that relations, not machines alone, make a society what it is, and the relations the Soviet state built were relations of command.
The second and sharper inconsistency is the fifth section. The Poverty of Philosophy ends by celebrating the workers' combination, the strike, the coalition formed independently of and against the employer — the moment the class constitutes itself "for itself." The state that canonised this text outlawed the strike, dissolved the independent unions into what were frankly called transmission belts of the Party, and jailed those who tried to combine on their own account. It embalmed the theorist of working-class self-emancipation while abolishing the thing itself. The apparatus of this very edition is scrupulous about which French edition a passage comes from and which novel George Sand took a line from, and entirely silent about the one chapter its own publisher's practice most flatly contradicted. That silence is not an oversight. It is the reflexivity test — can a doctrine's own weapons be turned on the society that holds it? — being failed by omission.
None of this is a charge against Marx, and the anti-bureaucratic reading is not a modern imposition on the text; it is the text. The tradition that defended the October revolution while refusing to worship its degeneration used exactly this method against exactly this state. Trotsky's The Revolution Betrayed reads the USSR the way The Poverty of Philosophy reads any economy — as a historical and transitory form, contradictory, to be explained by its real relations and not by its official self-description — and concludes that a bureaucracy commanding a nationalised economy is not the classless society but a usurpation sitting on top of the workers' conquests. That the same regime which taught the hand-mill sentence in every school also anathematised Trotsky is the whole story in one line: it needed the method as scripture and could not survive the method as inquiry. The degeneration itself had causes a Marxist can name without flinching — isolation after the revolutions in the West failed, the ruin and hunger of the civil war, the near-destruction of the very working class that had made 1917 — but the outcome was a stratum that ruled in Marx's name against everything the fifth section of this book stands for.
So what is The Poverty of Philosophy worth now? Its value is the value of a method that keeps the mind free of eternities. Its enduring gift is the flat refusal to let any economic arrangement present itself as natural, permanent, or beyond politics — the categories are "as little eternal as the relations they express," and that sentence is as lethal to the market's claim that there is no alternative as it once was to Proudhon's providential harmonies, and as it is to any bureaucracy's claim to be socialism completed. Read the book with its fifth section left in, and it turns out to contain its own standard of judgement. Marx closes it by insisting that so long as classes exist, "the last word of social science will always be" the line he borrows from George Sand — combat or death, bloody struggle or extinction, the question inexorably put. The state that printed those words in the languages of the world had, by the time it printed them, made very sure that no one in its own factories could put the question at all. The book supplies both the method and the measure; the measure falls, as it happens, on the publisher.