324.

[133] See _Report of Commission of Investigation_, Senate Ex. Doc. No.
7, Fifty-third Congress, third session.

[134] Particulars are taken from a pamphlet by five members of the New
York Bar and issued by the Social Reform Club, New York, in 1900.

[135] See the article by Judge Seabury, _The Abuses of Injunctions, in
The Arena_, June, 1903.

[136] See the New York daily papers, January 31, 1906.

CHAPTER VII

KARL MARX AND THE ECONOMICS OF SOCIALISM

I

The first approach to a comprehensive treatment by Marx of the
materialistic conception of history appeared in 1847, several months
before the publication of the _Communist Manifesto_, in "La Misere de la
Philosophie,"[137] the famous polemic with which Marx assailed J. P.
Proudhon's _La Philosophie de la Misere_. Marx had worked out his theory
at least two years before, so Engels tells us, and in his writings of
that period there are several evidences of the fact. In "La Misere de la
Philosophie," the theory is fundamental to the work, and not merely the
subject of incidental allusion. This little book, all too little known
in England and America, is therefore important from this historical
point of view. In it, Marx for the first time shows his complete
confidence in the theory. It needed confidence little short of sublime
to challenge Proudhon in the audacious manner of this scintillating
critique. The torrential eloquence, the scornful satire, and fierce
invective of the attack, have rather tended to obscure for readers of a
later generation the real merit of the book, the importance of the
fundamental idea that history must be interpreted in the light of
economic development, that economic evolution determines social life.
The book is important for two other reasons. First, it was the author's
first serious essay in economic science--in the preface he boldly and
frankly calls himself an economist--and, second, in it appears a full
and generous recognition of that brilliant coterie of English Socialist
writers of the Ricardian school from whom Marx has been unjustly, and
almost spitefully, charged with "pillaging" his principal ideas.

What led Marx to launch out upon the troubled sea of economic science,
when all his predilections were for the study of pure philosophy, was
the fact that his philosophical studies had led him to a point whence
further progress seemed impossible, except by way of economics. The
Introduction to "A Contribution