[London,] 14 August 1851, 28 Dean Street, Soho Dear Engels,
In a day or two I shall be sending you the Proudhon itself, but send it back as soon as you've read it. For I intend — for the money — to publish 2-3 sheets about the book. So let me have your views in greater detail than your hasty letter-writing generally allows. The Proudhon business — and the whole is first and foremost a polemic against communism, however much he may filch from it and however much it may appear to him in the light of the Cabet-Blanc transfiguration — boils down, in my opinion, to the following line of reasoning: "The real enemy to be combatted is capital. The pure economic affirmation of capital is interest. So-called profit is nothing but a particular form of wage. We abolish interest by transforming it into an annuity, i.e. repayment of capital by annual instalments. Thus the working class — read industrial class — will be assured precedence for ever, while the actual capitalist class will be condemned to an ever-diminishing existence. The various forms of interest are money interest, rent interest and lease interest. In this way bourgeois society is retained, justified, and divested only of its *mauvaise tendance *[evil tendency]." *Liquidation sociale* is simply a means of building anew a ‘healthy’ bourgeois society. Quick or slow, *peu nous imports* [it matters little to us]. I want first to hear your views on the contradictions, uncertainties and obscurities of this liquidation as such.
_______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
