Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  From these premises, radically contrary to those of Luxembourg, they conclude in favour of an organisation of the mutualist principle on a much larger scale.—Service for service, they say, product for product, loan for loan, insurance for insurance, credit for credit, security for security, guaranty for guaranty, etc. : such is the law. It is the ancient lex talionis; an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, a life for a life, but in a completely inverted manner, translated from criminal law and the atrocious practices of vendetta into economic law, the products of labour and services rendered in free fraternity. From this all the institutions of mutualism: mutual insurance, mutual credit, mutual aid, mutual education, reciprocal guarantees of job opportunities and markets, of exchange, of labour, of the good quality and fair pricing of goods, etc. This is what mutualism intends to create, with the help of certain institutions, a principle of the State, a law of the State, I even would say a sort of religion of the State, the practice of which is as easy for citizens as it is beneficial to them; one which requires neither police, nor repression, nor constraints, and cannot, under any conditions, for anyone, become a cause of deception and ruin.

  Here, the worker is not a serf of the State, engulfed in a communitarian ocean; he is a free man, truly sovereign, acting under his own initiative and his own personal responsibility; certain to obtain for his products and services a fair and sufficiently remunerative price, and sure to encounter among his fellow-citizens, for all the objects he consumes, honesty and the most perfect guarantees. Likewise, the State, the Government, is no longer sovereign; here, authority is not at all the antithesis of liberty: State, government, power, authority, etc. are expressions serving to designate liberty itself from another perspective; general formulas, borrowed from an old language, by which one designates, in certain cases, the sum, the union, the identity and solidarity of particular interests.

  Consequently there is no longer any cause to ask, as in the bourgeois system or in that of Luxembourg, if the State, the Government, or the community should dominate the individual, or rather if it should be subordinated to him; if the prince is more than the citizen, or the citizen more than the prince; if authority takes precedence over freedom, or if it is its servant: all these questions are pure nonsense. Government, authority, State, community, and corporations, classes, companies, cities, families, citizens, in two words, groups and individuals, moral persons and real persons, all are equal before the law, which alone, sometimes by this agency, sometimes by this ministry, rules, judges, and governs: Despots ho nomos.661

  Whoever stands for mutuality pictures the distribution of land, division of properties, independence of labour, separation of industries, specialisation of functions, individual and collective responsibility depending on whether the work is done by individuals or groups; reduction to the minimum of general fees, suppression of parasitism and poverty.—Whoever stands for community [communauté], on the other hand, is calling for hierarchy, indivision, centralisation, a multiplicity of jurisdictions, complication of state apparatuses, subordination of wills, waste of forces, development of unproductive functions, indefinite growth of general fees, and consequently the creation of parasitism and the advance of poverty.

  CHAPTER VIII

  Application of the Principle of Mutuality to Labour and to Wages—Of True Commerce and Agiotage

  BEFORE THE REVOLUTION of ’89, society and government, both constituted on the principle of authority, had the form of a hierarchy. The Church itself, despite the sentiments of democratic equality with which the Gospels are peppered, had given its sanction to this ranking by conditions and fortunes, outside of which one conceives only nothingness. In the priesthood as in the State, in the economic order as in the political order, a law reigned unquestioned that ends up being taken for the expression of justice itself, a law of universal subordination. Not a protest was heard, as the law seemed rational, divine even; and despite this no one was happy. The discontent was general: the worker and the peasant, their wages reduced to the minimum, complained of the hard-heartedness of the bourgeoisie, the nobility or the priesthood; the bourgeois in their turn, despite their legal privileges, their monopolies, complained about the taxes, about the infringements of their colleagues, about the judges and the clergymen; the nobles bankrupted themselves, and once they had sold or pledged their goods, were left with no means of support besides the prince and their own prostitution. Each was looking, begging for an improvement in his bad fortune: increases in wages and salaries, growth in profits; one would clamour for the reduction of his farm rent while the other would find even this insufficient; those who cried the loudest were the best provided for, abbots who received benefices and taxes [bénéficiaires et traitants].662 In brief, the situation was intolerable: it finished with the revolution.

  Since ’89 society has made an immense 180–degree turn, and the situation does not seem to have improved. More than ever the world demands to be well-housed, well-clothed, well-fed, and to work less. The workers band together and strike for a reduction in the length of the work day and an increase in salaries; the bosses, obligated, it would seem, to give in from this side, search for economies of production at the expense of the quality of the products; even the parasites complain that their sinecures are not sufficient to keep them alive.

  In order to assure the decrease in the hours of labour to which they aspire before everything, to maintain the high level of their wages and perpetuate an agreeable status quo, the workers are not content to merely organise themselves into coalitions against the entrepreneurs; they organise themselves in certain places against competition from foreign workers, to whom they forbid entry into their cities; they co-ordinate resistance against the use of machines, put themselves on guard against the admission of new apprentices, keep watch on the bosses, intimidating and constraining them by an occult and irresistible policing.

  On their side the bosses are hardly to be outdone by the workers: this is the struggle of capital against wages, a struggle in which victory is assured not to the biggest battalions but to the fattest wallets. Which will resist unemployment the longest, the strongbox of the master or the stomach of the worker? As I write these lines, the war is so active in certain parts of Great Britain, that one fears that free trade, imagined to be the triumph of English capitalism, of the great English industries, will turn against England, the people, the organisation, and the equipment of which do not have the flexibility that distinguishes them here in France.663

  It is necessary however to leave all this suffering behind, to find the remedy for this distress; what does science say? (And I’m speaking here of official science.) Nothing: it keeps harping on its eternal law of supply and demand; a lying law, in the terms in which it is posed, an immoral law, suitable only for ensuring the victory of the strong over the weak, of those who have over those who have not.

  And mutuality, which we have availed ourselves of already in order to reform insurance and to make a happy correction to the law of supply and demand, can it really have nothing to offer in this situation as well? How do we apply it to the question of labour and wages?

  In wooded countries, when at the onset of winter it is time to cut wood for the season, the peasants assemble themselves: everyone together goes to the forest; some fell the trees, others bundle up the firewood, the shooks,664 etc. the children and the women collect the shavings: then, the bundles having been made, they draw lots. This is labour in common; it is an example of association, if you like: this is not what we demand by these words: application of mutuality to labour and wages.

  A village has been destroyed by fire; everyone dedicated themselves to warding off disaster: saving some furniture, some food, some livestock, some tools. The first thing to do is to rebuild the houses. The villagers reunite anew; they share in the difficult labour; some digging new foundations, others taking care of the construction, others dealing with the carpentry, the finish work, etc. Everyone puts their hands to the work, the labour advances righ
t before their very eyes, and soon each family has recovered its house, larger and more embellished. Each having worked for each other, and all for everyone, the assistance having been reciprocal, one discovers in the work a certain character of mutuality. But this mutualism could only appear on one condition, namely the joining of all efforts, and the fusion, for a time, of all interests, of a sort that here we still have more of a temporary association than a mutuality.

  In order for there to be a perfect mutuality, it is therefore necessary that each producer, in committing to a certain involvement with the others, who, for their part, commit themselves in the same manner with respect to the first, retains his full and complete independence of action, all his freedom of behaviour, all his individuality of operation: mutuality, according to its etymology, being more consistent with the exchange of services and products than with the unification of forces and the community of labour.

  The unification of forces, just like the separation of industries, is a powerful economic instrument; and the same can be said, in certain cases, of association or community. But nowhere in all of this is mutuality to be found, nothing here is able to resolve the problem of free labour and just wages: and it is with this problem, the special application of mutuality, that we are concerned with at this moment.

  To arrive at this goal, we have to take a rather long route, and put more than one idea into play.

  1. Since 1789, France has become a democracy. All are equal before the law (civil, political, and economic). The ancient hierarchy has been levelled; the principle of authority has evaporated before the declaration of rights and of universal suffrage. We all possess the right to own property, the right to form business enterprises, the right to compete; most recently we have been given the right to form unions and to strike.665 This acquisition of new rights, which formerly could have passed for rebellion; this democratic progress is a first step towards a mutualist constitution for the nation. No more exceptions made for certain people; no more privileges of race or class; no more prejudices of rank; in the end, nothing that would oppose itself to the free transactions between each and every citizen, all now become equal. The equality of persons is the first condition of the levelling of fortunes, which will only result from mutuality, that is to say, from liberty itself.

  But it is nonetheless clear that this grand political equation does not also give us the answer to the riddle: what is the relationship between the right to vote, for example, and the determination of just wages? Between equality before the law, and the equilibrium of services and products?

  2. One of the first ideas to be conceived by the democratised France was that of setting prices [tarification]. The laws of the maximum666 were essentially revolutionary. The instinct of the people wanted it thus, and this instinct has its eminently juridical and judicial side. I asked this for the first time a long time ago, and never have I obtained a response: What is the just price of a pair of shoes? How much is a wheelwright’s day worth? A stone cutter’s? A blacksmith’s? A cooper’s? A dressmaker’s? A brewer’s? A clerk’s? A musician’s? A dancer’s? A digger’s? A manual worker’s? Since it is evident that if we knew this, the question of wages and salaries would be decided: nothing would be easier than to enact justice, and in enacting justice we would have security and well-being for all. How, by the same reason, should we account for the time of the doctor, the notary, the judge, the professor, the general, the priest? How much for a prince, an artist, a virtuoso? How much is it just that the bourgeois, supposing that there would be bourgeois, would earn over the worker? How much to grant him for his mastery?

  Supply and demand, the economist of the English school, the disciple of Adam Smith, Ricardo, and Malthus, responds imperturbably. Isn’t this stupidity irritating? All jobs must yield something to at least keep those who perform them alive; otherwise they would be abandoned, and rightly so. Therefore, for wages, and consequently for labour, a first limit, a minimum , below which we cannot go. It is neither supply nor demand that pertains here: it is necessary to be able to live while working, as the workers of Lyon said in 1834.667 If this minimum can be improved upon, so much the better: let us not envy the worker the good that he procures for himself through work. But in a society where the industries are recognised as parts of the same body, where the price of each thing exerts a constant influence on the prices of everything else, it is clear that amelioration by raising the amount of this minimum will not go very far. Each resists the ambition of his neighbours, since the elevation of their wages will necessarily translate itself, no matter how much good will towards all we might have, into a loss for ourselves. Our question returns in this form, and it seems to me to be perfectly reasonable: having found the minimum of expenses necessary for the worker to live, to suppose that the norm of wages could be similarly determined, i.e., to find the conditions for an increase in general well-being in our social environment.

  Let us therefore leave aside maximums, price controls, regulations, and the whole apparatus of 1793. For us, this is not what is important. The revolution, in democratising us, has launched us on the paths of industrial democracy. This is a first and very great step to have taken. A second idea arose from it, that of a determination of labour and wages. A long time ago, this idea would have been a scandal; today it appears as nothing but logical and legitimate: we will retain it.

  3. In order to equitably value the day of a worker, it is necessary to know of what it is composed, what quantities enter into the formation of the price, if there are not to be found there foreign elements, non-values.

  In other words, what is it that we understand ourselves to buy and that we must faithfully remunerate in a worker’s day of labour, or, to generalise our thought, of anyone who renders us a service?

  That for which we must pay those from whom we ask a service, the only thing that we understand ourselves to acquire, is the service itself, nothing more, nothing less.

  But in practice this is hardly what happens: there is a multitude of circumstances where we pay something extra on top of the value of the product of the service asked for, according to the rank, birth, illustriousness, titles, honours, dignities, renown, etc. of the functionary. Thus a counsellor of the imperial court is appointed at 4,000 fr., while the president has 15,000. A chief of a ministry division is taxed at 15,000 fr.; the minister gets 100,000. The incumbents of rural parishes have been paid for several years now at 800 fr., and add to that 50 fr. unofficially; the bishops receive at least 20,000 fr. A lead player in the Théâtre-Français or the Opera claims a fixed salary of 100,000 fr. per year, and I don’t know how much on top of that; stand-ins will get 500 fr. per month. The reason for these differences? It is all a matter of dignity, title, rank; a matter of something metaphysical and ideal, which, being beyond such venal considerations, could never be paid for...

  While we might exaggerate the revenue of some by holding too high an opinion of their functions and their persons, a far greater number see their salaries and nourishment reduced to almost nothing by the contempt in which their services are held and the state of indignity in which they are systematically kept. One is the counter-part of the other. Aristocracy presupposes servitude: there we have opulence, and here as a consequence we have privations. For ages, the right to his own product has been denied to the slave: so that in this regard he is practically the same as a feudal serf, from whom the seigneur took up to five days of work per week, leaving the serf but one day to secure his weekly sustenance, since of course Sundays were sacred. The concession made to the worker of the right to dispose of his own work and the products of that work dates back to 1789. And should we imagine that today there is no longer any servile work? I do not mean that there is absolutely unpaid labour: no one would dare impose such a thing; but rather whether there is work for which the payment is below that which is absolutely necessarily required, simple respect for humanity? Those who have some doubts in this matter have but to open Pierre Vinçard’s book.668 Our factories, our
workshops, our factories, our cities and our countrysides are filled with people who live on less than 60 centimes a day; some of these, they say, do not even have 25. The description of these miseries shames humanity: it reveals the profound bad faith of our epoch.

  You are going to say to me that all of this is just a matter of fortunate or unfortunate exceptions; that nations love to honour themselves in raising high the civil list and the emoluments of their princes, judges, great functionaries and illustrious talents, which it is hardly reasonable to equate with the vulgarity of workers and labourers.

  But descend the social ladder, from the summit which I have brought you to on down, and you will see to your surprise that all professions of men judge themselves identically. The doctor and the lawyer, the cobbler and the milliner, charge according to the vogue they enjoy; there are even people who put a price on their probity, such as the chef who, for a higher wage, promises to not make the handle of the basket dance.669 What is the man who does not hold himself in just a little more esteem than his compatriots, and does not imagine himself to be doing you an honour by working in order that you can pay him? In all fixing of wages, when it is the producer who does this, there are always two parts, that of the personage, nominor qui leo670, and that of the worker. There are in France one hundred surgeons who would not have been embarrassed to remove the ball from Garibaldi’s foot671: but it was necessary to find an illustrious person to operate on such an illustrious victim; Garibaldi in this was made to seem ten times more heroic and M. Nélaton672 ten times more skilled. Each had their publicity: thus the economic world.

  Since therefore we are in a democracy, that we all enjoy the same rights; that the law accords to us all equal preference and consideration, I conclude that, when we engage in business, all question of precedence should be jettisoned, and that in reciprocally setting a price for our services, we should take into account only the innermost value of the work to be done.