Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Confronted with divine right, the Revolution thus posits the sovereignty of the people, the unity and the indivisibility of the Republic. Meaningless words, fit only to serve as a mask for the most appalling tyranny, and sooner or later contradicted by events, if they do not refer to the higher organisation, formed by the relation of industrial groups, and with the commutative power that results from it.

  The Revolution, renewing civil right as well as political right, places in labour, and in labour alone, the justification for property. It denies that property founded on man’s arbitrary whim and considered as manifestation of pure ego is legitimate. This is why it abolished ecclesiastical property, which was not founded on work, and why, before the new régime, it turned the priest’s benefice into wages.604 However, what is property, thus balanced by work and legitimated by right? The realisation of individual power. But the social power is composed of all the individual powers: of which it also expresses a subject. The Revolution could not affirm its realism more energetically.

  Under the regime of divine right, the law is a commandment: it does not have its principle in man. The Revolution, in the person of Montesquieu, one of its fathers, changes this concept: it defines the law as the relation of things,605 and with stronger reason, as the relation of persons, i.e., of faculties or functions, giving birth to the social being through their co-ordination.

  Turning to the matter of government, the Revolution says formally that it must be made up according to the double principle of the division of powers and their balance. However, what is the division of powers? The same thing as what the economists call division of labour, which is nothing more than a particular aspect of the collective force. As to the balance of powers, a subject otherwise little understood, I need say only that it is the condition of existence for organised beings, for which the absence of balance entails disease and death.

  It is useless to recount the more or less regular steady stream of acts accomplished since 1789 under the terms of this revolutionary ontology: administrative centralisation, unification of weights and measurements, the creation of the general ledger, the foundation of the centralised school system, the establishment of the Bank of France, the amalgamation, under our very eyes, of the railroad systems in preparation for their operation by the State and their conversion into a system of workers’ associations. All these facts, and many others, testify to the realistic thought that governs our public law. Thanks to all these achievements, France has become a great organism, whose power of assimilation would sweep the world, were it not corrupted by those who exploit and govern it.

  Q.—Why, for seventy years, has the application of these ideas made so little progress? Why, instead of the free State, identical and adequate to society itself, have we preserved the feudal, royal, imperial, military, dictatorial State?

  A.—That is due to two causes, henceforth easy to appreciate: one is that the balance of products and services did not cease to be a desideratum of economy; the other, that the appropriation of the collective forces was maintained, even extended, as if by natural right.

  From this follows the whole series of inevitable consequences: in the nation, the conservation of the old prejudice in favour of the inequality of conditions and fortunes, formation of a capitalist feudality in the place of the feudality of the nobles, a recrudescence of the ecclesiastical spirit and a return to the practices of divine right; in government, the substitution of a seesaw system for the balance of forces, a concentration leading to despotism, a monstrous development of the military and police forces, the continuation of machiavellian politics, the destruction of Justice by raison d’État, and, to conclude, increasingly frequent revolutions.

  Q.—What is it that you call the seesaw system?

  A.—The seesaw, also called doctrine,606 is in politics what the theory of Malthus is in economics. Just as the Malthusians claim to establish balance in the population by mechanically blocking the generative function, in the same way the doctrinaires make the balance of power by transpositions of majority, electoral manipulations, corruption, terrorism. The constitutional machine, such as we have seen it function since 1791, with its distinctions of Upper House and Lower Chamber, legislative and executive power, upper classes and middle classes, large and small colleges, responsible ministers and irresponsible royalty, is inevitably a seesaw system.

  Q.—One could not better explain, in relation to the reality of the social being, the inmost thought of the Revolution. But the Revolution is also freedom, that above all: in this system of balances, what becomes of it?

  A.—This question brings back to us to that of weighting forces which we have just raised.

  Just as several men, by grouping their efforts, produce a force of collectivity, superior in quality and intensity to the sum of their respective forces, in the same way, several labouring groups, placed in a relation of exchange, generate a power of a higher order, which we have specifically considered as being social power.

  For this social power to act in its plenitude, for it to yield all the fruit that its nature promises, it is necessary that the forces or functions of which it is composed should be in balance. However, this balance cannot be the effect of an arbitrary determination; it must result from the balancing of forces acting on one another with complete freedom and equalising one another. Which presupposes that the balance or proportional mean of each force being known, everyone, individuals and groups, will accept this as the measure of its right and subject himself to it.

  Thus public order results from the citizen’s reason; thus this social sovereignty, which initially seemed to us to be the resultant of individual and collective forces, presents itself now in the form of an expression of their freedom and their justice, the attributes par excellence of the moral being.

  This is why the Revolution, abolishing the corporative regime, the privileges of mastery and the entire feudal hierarchy, declared the principle of public right to be the freedom of industry and trade; therefore it raised above all councils of State, above all parliamentary and ministerial deliberations, the freedom of the press, universal control, and proclaimed, by instituting the jury, the jurisdiction of the citizen over any individual and any thing.

  Freedom was nothing: it is everything, since order results from its balancing by itself.

  Q.—If freedom is everything, in what does government consist?

  A.—For us to form an idea of it, let us look at it from the point of view of the budget, and posit a principle.

  The government has the aim of protecting freedom and making sure that Justice is observed. However, by their nature, freedom and Justice tend to be gratuitous: they take care of themselves, so to speak. Just as work, exchange, and credit have only to be defended against the parasites who, under the pretext of protecting and representing them, absorb them.

  What does freedom of trade cost? Nothing; perhaps a supplement of expenses for the maintenance of the markets, ports, roads, channels, railroads, moved by the larger multitude of the merchants.

  What does freedom of industry cost, the freedom of the press, all freedoms? Again, nothing, if not some measurements of order relating to statistics, improvement and patents, royalties, etc

  In two words, the old State, by the anomaly of its position, tends to complicate its mechanisms, which means increasing its expenses indefinitely; the new one, by its liberal nature, tends to reduce them indefinitely: such is the difference between them, expressed in budgetary language.

  Thus, to have a government that is free, reasonable, and cheap, it is enough to simply cut off, reduce, or modify all the articles in the current budget that are contrary to the principles here established. That is the whole system: there is nothing else to be concerned with.

  Q.—Give an outline of the new budget.

  A.—Let us suppose the Revolution to have been accomplished, peace with the outside world assured by the federation of peoples, stability guaranteed to the interior by the balance of values and servic
es, by the organisation of labour, and by the restoration of the people to ownership of its own collective forces.

  National debt—Nothing. It would imply a contradiction, in a society where services are balanced, fortunes levelled, credit organised on the principle of reciprocity, to suppose that the State should contract debts, as if this society had at its disposal anything but its means of production and its products. No one can become his own lender, otherwise than by labour. What the old government is unable to do, the new democracy shall do always: it shall provide for its non-recurring expenses [dépenses extraordinaires] by a non-recurring effort [travail extraordinaire]. Justice demands it, and it will never cost a quarter of what the capitalists demand.

  Pensions—Nothing. Any individual, whatever category of service to which he may belong, has a life-long duty to work, except in case of disease, infirmity, or mutilation. In this case, his subsistence is regulated by the law of general insurance and carried by the account of his corporation.

  Civil list607—Nothing.

  Senate—Nothing. The duality of chambers is a product of class distinctions, or, what amounts to the same thing, to the divergence of interests, marked by these two terms: labour and capital. In democracy, these two interests are fused. The senate, an inert body in the empire, would be an insult to the Republic.

  Council of State—Nothing. The function of the Council of State is absorbed by the legislative Body and the ministers.

  Legislative body, or assembled representatives: this costs approximately two million today. Let us accept this figure.

  Beside the legislative body will be created an office of jurisprudence, a bureau of historical, legal, economic, political, statistical information, to enlighten the representatives in their work. The supreme court of appeal belongs to this office. Expense to be added to the preceding.

  Thus, since the national debt, consolidated and lifelong, forming, along with the expenses of war, the police force, the dynasty, and the aristocracy, the most unproductive part of the budget, is approximately 1,000 million to 1,200 million, one can judge, by this economy, what an ordering power there is in freedom and Justice.

  Ministers’ service—The legislative power is not distinguished from the executive power. Representatives of the nation, being deputy chiefs of the various public services, industrial groups, corporations and all territorial districts, are, by this fact, real ministers.

  These ministers, amongst whom the parliamentary monarchy had such difficulty maintaining agreement, although their number did not exceed seven or eight, now numbering two hundred and fifty or three hundreds, bearing all the titles of their respective and perpetually revocable categories, form, by their meeting, a national convention, the Council of Ministers, a Council of State, a legislature, a sovereign court. As for their agreement, notwithstanding the heat of the deliberations, it is guaranteed by that of the same interests as they represent.

  Q.—And what guarantees the agreement of interests?

  A.—As we have already said, their mutual weighting.

  Q.—Will you pass on to the budget ministries?

  A.—The expenditure of the ministries is of two species, according to whether they belong to the overheads of the nation, or that they must be brought back to the service of which the minister, or deputy, is the body. In the first case, they must be charged to the budget of the State: such are the expenditure of the legislative Body itself, of the monuments; in the second, they fall to the charge of the territorial groups, corporations and districts: such are the expenditure of the railroads, the budget of the communes, etc.

  This distinction having been established, one can proceed to the ruling.

  Justice—The legal hierarchy reduced to its simplest expression the jury organised for civil as well as for criminal [law], the court expenses are composed: 1st, the salary of the judge directing the hearings and applying the law; 2nd, that of the bodies of the public ministry, charged to supervise the observation of the laws throughout the country. The first is the responsibility of the communes which choose the judge; the second is carried by the budget of the State.

  Interior—Joined together, part with the public ministry, which supervises but does not manage; part with the municipalities, part with other ministries.

  Police force—On the charge of the localities.

  Worship—Nothing. No more Church, no more temples. Justice is the apotheosis of humanity. The old budget for worship passes to the medical service and state education.

  State education—Partly to the charge of the localities, partly to the charge of the State.

  Finances—Joined with the central bank.

  Tax collection—The creation of public warehouses in the cantons and districts for the regularisation of markets will make it possible to receive everywhere tax or revenue in kind, which means revenue in labour, of all the forms of taxation the cheapest, the least vexatious, that which tends least to inequality of distribution and exaggeration of demands.

  It is useless to push these details further. Each can take the pleasure of doing so and judging for himself, by making the critique of the budget, what would become of government in a nation like France if this great principle were applied to it, at once a moral principle, a governmental principle, and a principle of taxation: That Justice and freedom subsist in themselves, that they are essentially free, and that they tend in all their operations to suppress their protectors as well as their enemies.

  INSTRUCTION V

  Question of the Agenda

  Q.—What would you do on the day after a revolution?

  A.—It is useless to repeat it. The principles of the economic and political constitution of society are known: that is enough. It is up to the people, to its representatives, to do what they must, taking account of the circumstances.

  From time immemorial, the question of the day after the revolution worried the old parties, whose every thought is to stop the cataclysm, as they say, by taking the side of the fire. It is to this end that for six years, issues of aristocratic, catholic, dynastic, even republican publications have appeared, whose authors ask nothing better than to pass for enemies of despotism and devoted to freedom. It would be most naïve to take such proclamations for models, and to play at formulating programs. Let the people be penetrated by the meaning and scope of this word, Justice, and take it into hand: there is its day after the revolution. As to its execution: the idea having been acquired, execution shall be infallible.

  Q.—What do you think of dictatorship?

  A.—What good is it? If the purpose of dictatorship is to found equality by principles and institutions, it is useless: one does not need for that anything other than the 20 districts of Paris supported by the people of the 86 departments, achieving their mandate in three times twenty-four hours. If, on the contrary, the only end of dictatorship is to avenge insults to the party, to rein in the rich and subdue a frivolous multitude, then it is tyranny: we have nothing more to say about it.

  Dictatorship has enjoyed popular acclaim at all times; it does so now more than ever. It is the secret dream of some lunatics, the most extreme argument that democracy can provide for the conservation of the imperial mode.

  Q.—What is your opinion on universal suffrage?

  A.—As all constitutions have established it since ’89, universal suffrage is the strangulation of the public conscience, the suicide of popular sovereignty, the apostasy of the Revolution. Such a system of votes can well, on the occasion, and despite all the precautions taken against it, give a negative vote to power, as did the last Parisian vote (1857): it is unable to produce an idea. To make the vote for all intelligent, moral, democratic, it is necessary, for having organised the balance of services and having ensured, by free discussion, the independence of the votes, to make the citizens vote by categories of functions, in accordance with the principle of the collective force which forms the basis of society and the State.

  Q.—What will be the foreign policy?

&
nbsp; A.—It is very simple. The Revolution must spread around the world: peoples depend upon one another, as do industrial groups and individuals in the State. As long as its balance has not globally established, the Revolution may be in danger.

  Q.—Will the Revolution, presumably made in Paris or Berlin, declare war on the whole world?

  A.—The Revolution does not act in the manner of the old governmental, aristocratic or dynastic principles. It is right, balance of forces, equality. It recognises neither cities nor races. It has no conquests to pursue, nations to subjugate, borders to defend, fortresses to build, army to feed, laurels to gather, hegemony to maintain. Its policy toward the outside consists in preaching by example. If it is realised in one place the world shall follow it. The power of its economic institutions, the gratuity of its credit, the brilliance of its thought, are enough for it to convert the universe.

  Q.—The old society will not yield without resistance: who are the natural allies of the Revolution?

  A.—Any alliance of a people with another people is given by the idea or the interest that dominates it. Is it capital that governs? then we have the English alliance; despotism? then we have the Russian alliance; the dynastic spirit? then we have the Spanish marriages and the wars of succession. The Revolution has for its allies all those who suffer oppression and exploitation: let it appear, and the universe will open its arms.

  Q.—What do you think of the European balance of power?