Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  “Power, the instrument of collective might, created in society as a mediator between labour and capital, finds itself inevitably chained to capital and directed against the proletariat. No political reform can solve this contradiction because, according to the confession of the politicians themselves, such a reform would only result in increasing power’s energy and scope, and, without overturning hierarchy and dissolving society, power could not affect the prerogatives of monopoly. The problem before the working classes then is not to conquer but to overcome at the same time power and monopoly, which means creating, out of the people’s guts and labour’s profundity, a greater authority, a more powerful fact, that surrounds and subjugates capital and the state. Every proposed reform that does not satisfy this condition is simply one more scourge, a rod on sentry duty, virgam vigilantem, as a prophet said, which threatens the proletariat.”507

  These lines, written in 1845, are the prophecy of the events that we have seen take place in 1848 and 1849. It is by stubbornly wanting revolution through power and social reform through political reform that the February Revolution was postponed, and the cause of the proletariat and nationalities was lost by all of Europe.508

  Combatants of June, the principle of your defeat is in the February 25th decree! They abused you, those who made, in the name of power, a promise that power could not keep. The defeat of power, that is to say, the reabsorption of power by the people through the separate centralisation of political and social functions; the defeat of capital through the mutual guarantee of circulation and credit: that is what the politics of democracy had to be. Is that so difficult to understand?

  In March, April and May, instead of organising yourselves for work and freedom by benefiting from the political advantages the February victory gave you, you ran to the government and asked from it what you alone could give yourselves and set the revolution back three steps. In June, victims of a despicable lack of faith, you had the misfortune of giving in to indignation and anger: you threw yourselves into the trap set six weeks before. Your error was in demanding that power fulfil a promise it could not keep: your mistake was fighting against the representatives of the nation and the government of the republic. Without a doubt, your enemies did not collect the fruit of their intrigue; without a doubt, your martyrdom made you grow: you are a hundred times stronger today than you were in the first stage of siege, and you can attribute your later successes to the justice of your cause. But it must be acknowledged that, because victory could not give you anything more than what you already possessed, the power of planning production and markets yourselves, your victory was lost beforehand. You were the soldiers of the republic, the soldiers of order and freedom. Never accuse the entirety of the largest portion of the people of treason; do not hold on to any resentment for your deceived brothers who fought you. Only those who seduced you with disastrous utopias should beat their breasts: as for those who, in these days of mourning, only had enough intelligence to exploit your misery, I hope that they never abuse enough of their temporary power to call down too many just reprisals on their heads.

  For me, the memory of the days of June will be forever remorseful in my heart. I state it with sadness: until the 25th, I had predicted nothing, known nothing and guessed nothing. Elected fifteen days before as a representative of the people, I entered the national assembly with the shyness of the child and the ardour of a neophyte. Always in attendance from nine o’clock in the morning at the office and committee meetings, I only left the assembly at night, exhausted with fatigue and disgust. Since I first set foot on this parliamentary Sinai, I ceased to be in contact with the masses: by absorbing myself in my legislative work, I had completely lost view of current affairs. I knew nothing about the national workshop situation, government policy or the intrigues going on within the assembly. One has to experience this isolation called a national assembly to understand how the men who are the most completely ignorant of the state of a country are nearly always those who represent it. I set about reading everything that the distribution office provided to representatives: proposals, reports, brochures and even Le Moniteur and the law bulletin. Most of my colleagues on the left and the extreme left were in the same state of mental perplexity and ignorance of daily reality. We only talked about the national workshops with a kind of dread: because the fear of the people is the evil of all those who belong to authority: for power, the people are the enemy. Every day, we voted on new subsidies for the national workshops while trembling before the incompetence of power and with our own powerlessness.

  What a disastrous apprenticeship! The effect of this representative waste I had to experience was that I had no intelligence of anything. On the 23rd, when Flocon declared from the podium that the movement was being directed by political factions and supported from abroad, I let myself accept that baseless ministerial story, and on the 24th, I again asked if the real reason for the insurrection was the dissolution of the national workshops!!! No, M. Senard, I was not a coward in June, the insult you threw at me before the assembly. Like you and many others, I was an imbecile. I was lacking in my duties as a representative due to a parliamentary stupor. I was there to see, but I did not see. I was there to sound the alarm, but I did not cry out! I was like the dog that does not bark in the presence of the enemy. As an elected representative of working people, a journalist of the proletariat, I was not supposed to leave the masses without direction and advice: 100,000 regimented men deserved my concern. They were worth more than my dejection in your offices. Since then, I have done what I can to repair my irreparable error. I have not always been fortunate. I have often been mistaken: my conscience no longer reproaches me for anything.

  CHAPTER XIV

  4 NOVEMBER: THE CONSTITUTION

  ON 4TH NOVEMBER 1848 the complete Constitution was voted on. There were 769 Representatives present at the session: 739 voted for and 30 against. Of these 30 votes against the motion, 16 were democrat-socialists and 14 legitimists. M. Odilon Barrot, current head of the ministry, abstained.

  On the very day of the vote I found it necessary to have a letter published in Le Moniteur explaining the motives that had determined my position. Here is that letter:“Sir,

  “The national Assembly has just proclaimed the Constitution to prolonged cries of: Long Live the Republic!

  “I took part in my colleagues’ exaltation of the Republic; I put a blue ticket in the urn against the Constitution. I could not have seen my way to abstaining in such solemn circumstances, after four months of discussion; I would find it incomprehensible, after my vote, not to be permitted to explain myself.

  “I did not vote against the Constitution in a vain spirit of opposition or as a form of revolutionary agitation, because the Constitution contained things I wished to eliminate or did not contain others that I wished to put in it. If reasons like that could predominate in a representative’s mind then there would never be any votes on any laws at all.

  “I voted against the Constitution because it is a Constitution. The essence of a constitution—I mean a political constitution, there cannot be any question here of any other sort—is the division of sovereignty, in other words the separation into two powers, legislative and executive. That is the principle and the essence of any political constitution; outside that there is no constitution in the present sense of the word, there is only a sovereign authority, making its laws and implementing them by means of its committees and ministers.509

  “We are not at all accustomed to such an organisation of sovereignty; in my opinion, republican government is just that and nothing else.

  “I therefore find that in a republic a constitution is a perfectly useless thing; I think that the interim system we had for the previous eight months could very well have been rendered definitive with a little more regularity and a little less respect for monarchical traditions; I am convinced that the Constitution, the first act of which will be to create a presidency, with all its prerogatives, ambitions and culpable hopes, will imp
eril rather than guarantee liberty.

  “My fraternal regards.

  “P-J PROUDHON

  “Representative for the Seine.

  “Paris, 4th November 1848”

  For myself as legislator this letter sufficed: the reporter owes his readers more ample explanations. We are so infatuated by power, we were so effectively monarchised, we love to be governed so much, that we cannot conceive of the possibility of living in liberty. We consider ourselves democrats because we have abolished hereditary royalty four times: some who have gone as far as rejecting elective presidency, only to invest all the powers in a Convention directed by a committee of public safety, imagine they have arrived at radicalism’s Pillars of Hercules.510 But we do not see that in holding on so obstinately to this fixed idea of Government we are all, inasmuch as we engage in war to be able to exercise power, only a kind of absolutists!

  What is a political constitution?

  Can a society survive without a political constitution?

  These are the questions that I propose to resolve, perhaps in fewer words than others might need to pose them. The ideas I am going to present are as old as democracy, as simple as universal suffrage; my only merit will consist in systematising them by putting a little coherence and order into them. They will still appear to be but a vision, one more utopia, even to democrats, of whom the majority, taking their right hand for their left, have never known how to develop anything but dictatorship from the sovereignty of the people.

  §I 511

  In every society I find the distinction between two kinds of constitution, one of which I call the SOCIAL constitution and the other the political constitution; the first, native to humanity, liberal, necessary, the development of which consists above all in weakening and gradually eliminating the second, [which is] essentially factitious, restrictive and transitory.

  The social constitution is nothing but the equilibrium of interests founded upon free CONTRACT and the organisation of ECONOMIC FORCES, which are in general: Labour, Division of Labour, Collective Force, Competition , Commerce, Money, Machines, Credit, Property, Equality in transactions, Reciprocity of guarantees, etc.

  The political constitution has AUTHORITY as its principle. Its forms are: Class Distinctions, Separation of Powers, Administrative Centralisation, Judicial Hierarchy, Representation of Sovereignty by Election, etc. It was first thought up and then gradually developed in the interests of order and for lack of social constitution, the principles and rules of which were only discovered later after long experience and are still the subject of socialist controversies.

  These two constitutions are, it is easy to see, of utterly different and even incompatible natures: but, as it is the destiny of the political constitution incessantly to provoke and produce the social constitution, there is always something of the latter slipping into and landing in the former, which very soon, rendered unsatisfactory, appearing contradictory and odious, finds itself propelled from concession to concession towards its final abolition.

  It is from this point of view that we are going to take a closer look at the general theory of political constitutions, reserving the study of the social constitution for another time.

  In the beginning the political idea is vague and undefined, reducible to the notion of Authority. In ancient times, when the legislator always speaks in the name of God, Authority is immense and constitutional regulation more or less non-existent. There is nothing in all of the Pentateuch512 even vaguely resembling a separation of powers, all the more such laws as are considered organic, having the purpose of defining the attribution of those powers and bringing the system into play. Moses had no idea whatsoever of a primary, so-called legislative power, or of a second, the executive, or a third, the bastard of the two others called the judicial order. The conflicts of attributions and jurisdictions had never revealed to him the necessity of a State Council; even less had political disputes, the inevitable result of the constitutional mechanism, made him feel the importance of a High Court. The constitutional idea had remained a closed book to the Prophet; not until four centuries of popular resistance to the Law had passed did this idea appear for the first time in Israel, and that was specifically to justify the election of the first king. Mosaic513 government had been found weak and it was felt to be desirable to fortify it: this amounted to a revolution. For the first time the constitutional idea manifested itself in its true character, the separation of powers. At that time, as at the time of Philippe-le- Bel514 and Bonifacius VIII515, they could only know two of these, the spiritual and the temporal. The distinction is easy to grasp: at the side of the Pontiff appeared the King. This did not go without protest, or to speak the language of the period, without a menacing revelation by the priesthood.

  “Here is what will be the royal statute,” the constitution of government, Samuel said when the people’s delegates came to summon him to anoint a king for them. Take note of this: it is the preacher who is responsible for the king’s investiture; among all people, even when the priesthood is rebelled against, all power is of divine right. “He will take your sons and make them conscripts and your daughters to be perfumers and cooks and bakers. And when he has attained power he will impose taxes on persons, houses, furniture, lands, wine, salt, meat, commodities, etc, in order to maintain his soldiers and pay his servants and mistresses.”

  “And you yourselves shall become his servants.”516

  It is in these terms that Samuel, the successor to Moses, presented the future political constitution; and all our political commentators, from the Abbé Sieyès to M. de Cormenin, agree with him. But how could an anticipated criticism outweigh the necessity of the moment? The priesthood had served order badly, it was eliminated; this was justice. If the new government proved to be treacherous or incompetent it would be treated in the same way, and so on, until liberty and well-being were achieved, but one would never go backwards: that is the argument of all revolutions. In any case, far from being frightened off by the preacher’s sinister warnings, the appetites of the day, corresponding to the needs of the epoch, would rather be all the more thrillingly excited by them. Was not the political constitution, that is royalty, first of all in fact taxation, entailing honours and sinecures? Was it not monopoly, revenues, great property, leading to the exploitation of man by man, the proletariat? Wasn’t it in the last analysis liberty within order, in the words of Louis Blanc, liberty surrounded by pikes and arrows, and thus the omnipotence of the soldier? All the world wanted it: the Phoenicians, the English of the day, had enjoyed it for some time already; why should the Jewish people, which called itself the Messiah of nations, like all the rest of us, French, Polish, Hungarians or Cossacks—for it seems to be a mania—have remained behind its neighbours, we vainly cry? Truly, there is nothing new under the sun, not even constitutionalism, Christomania and Anglomania.

  The great domain of political constitutions is, as I say in my letter to Le Moniteur, mainly the separation of powers, that is to say the distinction of the two natures—no more, no less—in government, spiritual nature and temporal nature, or, which comes to the same thing, legislative nature and executive nature, as in Jesus Christ, both God and man together: it is amazing how we always find theology at the basis of our politics.

  But, you will say, does the people not know how to do without this mechanism? Does not the people, which after all established both royal families and priesthoods, know how to dispense with the two of them for its government instead of maintaining them both together? And supposing that for its religious duties and the protection of its interests it actually needs a double Authority, what need is there to further subdivide the temporal one? What is the good of a constitution? What can be the use of this distinction of two powers, with their prerogatives, their conflicts, their ambitions and all their perils? Isn’t it enough to have an Assembly which as the expression of national needs makes the laws and implements them by means of the ministers which it chooses from its members?

&nbs
p; It was M. Valette (from the Jura) who, among others, spoke in this manner at the Assembly of 1848.

  It is this question that reveals the fatal logic which leads peoples and determines revolutions.

  Man is destined to live in society. This society can only exist in two ways: either by the organisation of economic forces and the equilibrium of interests or by the institution of an authority which, in the absence of industrial organisation, serves as arbiter, checks and protects. This latter manner of conceiving and realising order in society is what is called the State or Government. Its essential attribute, the condition of its effectiveness, is centralisation.

  The Government able to define itself as the centralisation of the nation’s forces—whatever they are—will be absolute if the centre is a single one; it will be constitutional or liberal, if there is a double centre. The separation of powers has no other meaning. While it is pointless in a small State, where the citizens’ assembly can intervene in public affairs on a day to day basis, it is indispensable in a nation of several million men who are forced by their great number to delegate their powers to representatives. It thus becomes a guarantee of public liberties.

  Imagine all the powers concentrated in a single assembly: you will only have augmented the threats to liberty by taking away from it its last sureties. Government by assembly is just as dangerous as that by a despot, without even the personal responsibility of the latter. Experience even proves that the despotism of assemblies is a hundred times worse than the autocracy of a single person, for the reason that a collective is impervious to those considerations of humanity, moderation, respect for others’ opinions, etc. that govern individuals. If therefore the unity of powers, i.e. the absence of a political constitution, has no other effect but to absorb the powers of a responsible president into the powers of an irresponsible majority, the conditions of government otherwise remaining the same, what progress has been made? Would it not be better to divide authority, make one of the powers the controller of the other, giving the executive the liberty of action while the legislative controls it as a counter-weight? Thus, we either get the separation of powers or the absolutism of power: the dilemma is inevitable.