期刊名称：Cultural Logic : an Electronic Journal of Marxist Theory and Practice
电子版ISSN：1097-3087
出版年度：2009
出版社：Department of English and Foreign Languages
摘要：In 1847, Marx wrote The Poverty of Philosophy, his polemical response to Pierre Joseph Proudhon’s System of Economical Contradictions Or, The Philosophy of Poverty, published a year earlier. Marx and Proudhon were the principal antagonists in the struggle for influence and control of the emerging European workers movement then fueled by the first great crisis of modern capitalism. While Marx propagated communist revolution as a solution to the crisis, Proudhon sought to preserve “good capitalism” by attempting to formulate a new political economy that would reconcile contradictions of capitalist exchange by means of reciprocal agreements and transactions; in a word, mutualism. In The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx took Proudhon to task for creating a massive “dialectical phantasmagoria” in the System of Economical Contradictions. Usually regarded as his first detailed treatment of political economy, Marx’s book also contains an implicit conception of social and historical progress based on the principles of contradiction, paradox, andpractice. Today, as the U.S. experiences an irreversible and possibly terminal capitalist crisis, Marx’s polemic against Proudhon remains instructive as an historical, theoretical, and practical-political guide. Key features of the Marx- Proudhon divide in the 1840s are now being recast in contemporary guises and forms. The Left must distinguish between revolutionary Marxist solutions and variations of the New Proudhonism. While Marxism holds the potential for revolutionary, socialist transformation and renewed social progress, the New Proudhonism seeks to save “good capitalism” – ironically and tragically, carrying with it the plausibility of a more coercive and barbarous system.
