The Poverty of Philosophy

The Poverty of Philosophy is an 1847 polemical work by Karl Marx (1818-1883), written in French in answer to The Philosophy of Poverty by the French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Marx wrote the book in Brussels during his exile years and used the exchange with Proudhon to set out for the first time in published form the materialist conception of history, the labour theory of value as he then understood it, and the critique of utopian socialism that would later be developed at length in Capital. The book attacks Proudhon’s Hegelian dialectic of economic categories as superficial and ahistorical, and argues for a class-based analysis of capitalist production. The Poverty of Philosophy is one of the earliest mature statements of Marx’s economic thought and a primary source for the formation of historical materialism. Free PDF download available on BDeBooks.