The title of The Poverty of Philosophy has an active table of contents for readers to access each chapter easily.

The Poverty of Philosophy is a principal source for understanding Karl Marx's theory of communism published in Paris and Brussels in 1847. It was written to answer the economic and philosophical arguments of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon set forth in his 1846 book The System of Economic Contradictions.

Using his groundwork for the subject of economics being fully elaborated in Capital, Marx rejected idea of Proudhon on consumption tax and strike action. Marx set the tone in his forward of the book against Proudhon as "M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being particularly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest of French economists. Being both a German and an economist at the same time, we desire to protest against this double error".

Marxists highly praised the book as one of the first works of mature Marxism that was most profound and most brilliant monographs by Karl Marx. This is a must-read book to understand the foundational thought of a communist party and the nature of a socialistic country by Karl Marx.