d be in reality what
they are in fancy. In other words, the ideas which have been formed of
them should be abandoned and their veritable inhumanity should be
acknowledged. He was therefore consistent in plainly representing
private property in its most universal aspect to be the falsifier of
economic relationships, and not this or that kind of private property,
to a partial degree, as did most of the other political economists. He
achieved everything that could be achieved by the criticism of
political economy from the standpoint of political economy.

All political economy hitherto has taken as its starting-point the
wealth which the movement of private property ostensibly creates for
the nations, in order to reach its conclusions in support of private
property.

Proudhon starts out from the reverse side, which is sophistically
covered up in political economy, that is, from the poverty created by
the movement of private property, in order to reach his conclusions,
which are unfavourable to private poverty. The first criticism of
private property was naturally prompted by the phenomenon which
embodies its essence in the most striking and clamorous form, a form
which directly violates human feeling--by the phenomenon of poverty.

The critics of Proudhon cannot deny that Proudhon also perceives an
inner connection between the facts of poverty and of property, as he
proposes to abolish property on account of this connection, in order
to abolish poverty. Proudhon has done even more. He has demonstrated
in detail how the movement of capital creates poverty. The critics of
Proudhon, on the other hand, will not enter into such trivialities.
They perceive only that poverty and private property are opposites:
which is fairly obvious.

Proletariat and wealth are antitheses. As such they constitute a
whole; both are manifestations of the world of private property. The
question to be considered is the specific position which both occupy
in the antithesis. To describe them as two sides of a whole is not a
sufficient explanation. Private property as private property, as
wealth, is compelled to preserve its own existence, and along with it
that of its antithesis, the proletariat. Private property satisfied in
itself is the positive side of the antithesis. The proletariat, on the
other hand, is obliged, as proletariat, to abolish itself, and along
with it private property, its conditioned antithesis, which makes it
the proletariat