KARL MARX

BRUSSELS
143
Let us together seek, if you wish, the law of society, the manner in
which these laws are realised, the process by which we shall succeed
in discovering them; but, for God's sake, after having demolished all
the a priori dogmatisms, do not let us in our turn dream of indoctrinating
the people ... I applaud with all my heart your thought of inviting
all shades of opinion; let us carry on a good and loyal polemic; let us
give the world the example of an informed and far-sighted tolerance,
but let us not - simply because we are at the head of a movement -
make ourselves the leaders of a new intolerance, let us not pose as the
apostles of a new religion, even if it be the religion of logic, the religion
of reason. Let us gather together and encourage all dissent, let us
outlaw all exclusiveness, all mysticism; let us never regard a question
as exhausted, and when we have used our last argument, let us if
necessary begin again - with eloquence and irony. On these conditions,
I will gladly enter into your association. Otherwise - no! 75
Proudhon continued by saying that he was not in favour of immediate
revolutionary action and preferred 'to burn property by a slow fire, rather
than give it new strength by making a St Bartholomew's Night of the
property owners'. There followed an ironical paragraph: 'This, my dear
philosopher, is where I am at the moment; unless, of course, I am mistaken
and the occasion arises to receive a caning from you, to which I subject
myself with good grace while waiting for my revenge. ...' Proudhon
finished by excusing Griln on the grounds that he had been obliged to
exploit 'modern ideas' in order to earn money for his family; he added,
moreover, that it was at Grtln's suggestion that he was hoping to insert a
mention of Marx's works in his next book - The System of Economic
Contradictions subtitled 'The Philosophy of Poverty'. Marx apparently
made no reply to Proudhon's letter except in the form of his furious
attack on Proudhon's book published a year later under the title of The
Poverty of Philosophy. In his reply Marx accepted Proudhon's facetious
invitation to 'administer the cane' with a vengeance.
Proudhon's book was a large sprawling two-volume work which bore
the motto destruam et aedifkabo - though there was much more of the
former than the latter. With great vigour Proudhon attacked religion,
academic economics and communism but did not provide any very clear
solutions. 76 The book's ideas were very popular among French workers
and in Germany three separate translations were arranged and two published
in 1847, one being by Griin, whose ideas Engels had spent such a
long time combating in Paris. Marx did not obtain Proudhon's book until
Christmas 1846 and immediately wrote his impression of it in a long
letter to Annenkov in which he clearly and succinctly applied to Proudhon's
ideas his own materialist conception of history. The centre of Marx's