The Poverty of Philosophy
[3] 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.
[3] By way of contrast, industrialists, businessmen, and those who serve them were held to be incapable of developing this morality due to the nature of their day-to-day economic and political activity.
[3] Karl Marx left Germany following the repression of the newspaper he edited, the Rheinische Zeitung, by the government of Prussia early in 1843.
[5] Despite an appeal being made as a prospective French collaborator, Proudhon declined to participate in the ill-fated Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher (German-French Yearbook) project with which Marx was intimately associated.
[6] Although the personal contact between the two was limited, Marx read Proudhon's writings at this time, discussions of which may be found in his work of the period, including the book written against Bruno Bauer, The Holy Family (1845), and the unpublished Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844.
Proudhon emphasized the social relationships emerging from private property, and the tendency of economic development to produce a propertyless proletariat in ever increasing numbers—ideas which Marx found compelling.
[9] Despite his departure from France, he continued to see Proudhon as a potential political collaborator, asking him in 1846 to participate in a new international correspondence committee patterned after the London-based Workers' Educational Association, designed to propagate socialist ideas among the working class of continental Europe.
[12] A corrected Second French Edition materialized in 1896, initiated by Friedrich Engels and completed after his death by Marx's daughter, Laura Lafargue.
[12] The first English language edition of The Poverty of Philosophy was unveiled in London in 1900 by the pioneer Marxist publisher Twentieth Century Press.
[13] Quelch's version was reprised in the United States for the first time in 1910 by Charles H. Kerr & Co., a socialist publishing house based in Chicago.
[23]: 30 In 1956 economist Joan Robinson proclaimed in a review of a new British edition of The Poverty of Philosophy that from the standpoint of modern economics Marx's polemic with Proudhon was "a dead horse" of only "highly specialised interest.
There is no wit in The Poverty of Philosophy apart from its title; Proudhon's ideas were confused enough to begin with, and Marx's presentation of them makes them totally unseizable, so that there is little sport to be got out of following the argument.
