Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Utility is worth utility;

  Function is worth function;

  Service pays for service;

  The work day balances the work day,

  And everything produced shall be paid for by the product which will have cost the same amount of trouble and expenses.

  If, in such a transaction, there had been a favour to be accorded, this would not be due to brilliant, agreeable, honorific functions the likes of which the whole world seeks to carry out; this favour should be accorded, as Fourier had said, to the taxing labours which shock our sensitivity and are repugnant to our pride. A rich person has a fancy to take me on as a valet: “All work is honourable,” I will say to myself; “there are only dishonourable men. The attentions that are to be given to the person are more than useful labours, they are acts of charity, which place the person rendering them below the person receiving them. Therefore, as I do not intend to be humiliated, I will place a condition on my service: that is that the man who wishes to have me as a domestic servant will pay me half of his revenue. Otherwise, we will no longer be in a relationship of fraternity, equality, and mutuality: I will have to say even that we have left behind justice and morality as well. We are no longer democrats, we are a society of servants and aristocrats.”

  But, you will say to me, it is not true that the function, as I have said to you, equals function, that service pays for service, and that the work day of anyone is worth as much as the work day of someone else. On this point the universal conscience protests; it declares that our mutuality will be iniquity. It is necessary, therefore, whether wanted or not, to hold ourselves to the law of supply and demand, tempered, in its ferocity and untruth, by education and philanthropy.

  I would agree with this, I admit, except that here one is asking me to suppose that the workers, public functionaries, scientists, merchants, labourers, peasants, in a word that all those who labour, produce, and make useful works, are to one another as animals of different genera, animals of unequal species, between which one cannot establish a comparison. What is the dignity of a beast compared to that of a man, and what common measure can there be between servitude on the one hand and nobility and free action on the other?...This is how the theoreticians of inequality reason. To their eyes, there is more distance between this man and that man, than there is between this man and that horse. They conclude that not only are the products of human labour incommensurable quantities; men themselves are, as they have written, unequal in dignity, divided in rights, and all that is done to try and level the situation is to go against the will of nature. Here, they say, in this inequality of people themselves, is the principle behind the inequality of ranks, conditions, and fortunes.

  To those, because of class interest and conceit in the system, hate the truth, can always be taken in by empty words. Pascal, looking for a philosophy of history, conceived humanity as a single individual which could not die, accumulating in itself all knowledge and realising successively all ideas and all progress. It is thus that Pascal represented to himself the unity and identity of our species, and then elevated this identity into the highest thought on the development of civilisation, government of Providence, the solidarity of States and races. The same conception is applied to political economy. Society is considered as a giant with a million arms, which carries out all industries, simultaneously produces all wealth. A single consciousness, a single thought, a single will animates it; and within the interlocking gears of its labours is revealed the unity and identity of its person. Whatever it takes on, it always remains itself, as admirable, as dignified in the execution of the smallest details as in the most marvellous combinations. In all the circumstances of its life, this prodigious being is equal to itself, and one can say that each of its actions, each of its moments compensates the others.

  You insist, and you say: When we accord to each individual of which society is composed the same moral dignity, they are nevertheless, from the point of view of their abilities, unequal to each other, and this suffices to ruin democracy, the laws of which we purport to submit them to.

  Without doubt individuals, who are the organs of society, are unequal in abilities, even if they are equal in dignity. What must we conclude from this? A single thing: while we are sure as to what makes us all equal, we have to take, as much as we can, the measure of our inequalities.

  Thus, apart from the human personality, which we declare inviolable, the moral being and the facts of conscience set aside, we have to study the man of action, or the worker, in his means and his products. Now, at first glance we discover this important fact: that is, if the human faculties of one subject and another are unequal, these greater or lesser differences do not go to infinity: they remain within passably restrained limits. Just as in physics we can achieve neither absolute heat or absolute cold and our measures of temperature oscillate here and there in small deviations around a mean we improperly call zero; it is similarly impossible to assign a negative or positive limit for intelligence or strength, either in men and in animals, or in the Creator and the world. All that we can do, with regard to the mind for example, is to mark the degrees, necessarily arbitrary, below or above a conventional fixed point that we call common sense; again, for strength, we settle on a metric unit, for instance the power of a horse, and then count how many of these units and fractions of this unit of force each of us is capable of.

  As in the measurement of temperature, we will have therefore, for intelligence and strength, extremes and an average. The average is the point where the greatest number of subjects are to be found; those who approach the extremes are more rare. I had just said that the difference between these extremes was very small: in fact, a man who within himself has the strength of two or three men is a Hercules; a man with the intelligence of four would be a demi-god. To these limits imposed on the development of human faculties are added the conditions of life and nature. The maximum duration of existence is between 70 and 80 years, inside of which one has to allow for a period of infancy, of education, of retirement and decrepitude. For everyone the day has just 24 hours, of which, depending on the particular circumstances, only somewhere between 9 to 18 hours can be given to work. Likewise, each week has a day of rest; and while the year has 365 days, one can barely count on 300 of these being given over to work. We see that if the industrial faculties are unequal, this inequality does not prevent the ensemble from being sensibly approximated: it is like a harvest in which all the ears of corn are unequal, but which nevertheless capable of being treated like a level plain, extended to the horizon.

  These considerations taken into account, we are able to define the work day: this is, in all industries and professions, the services that can be provided or the value that can be produced by a man of average strength, intelligence, and age, knowing well his state and his diverse parts, for a given duration, this being ten, twelve, or fourteen hours for those situations where the work can be appraised by the day; or a week, a month, a season, or a year for those which demand a long period of time.

  For the child, the woman, the old man, the sick man or the man of weak complexion, all not generally able to attain the average of the able-bodied man, the work day will only be a fraction of the official, normal, legal day which is taken as the unit of labour. I would say as much of the fragmented workday, in which the purely mechanical service, demanding not so much intelligence as routine, cannot be compared to a real industrial work day.

  On the other hand and reciprocally, the superior worker, who conceives, executes more rapidly, gets more and better quality work done than another; all the more reason that those who, owing to this superiority of execution bring together the genius of direction and the power of command, those surpassing the common measure, will receive a greater salary: he will be able to earn one and a half, two, three days of work and beyond. Thus the rights of strength, of talent, of character even, as well as those of labour, are mixed: if justice is no respecter of persons, it will no longer be mistaken about any
capacity.

  Well! I would say that nothing is more easy than to settle all these scores, balance all these values, to make right out of all these inequalities; as easy as paying a sum of 100 francs, with coins of forty, twenty, ten, and five in gold; with coins of five, two, one, one-half, and one-quarter in silver, and with coins of ten, five, two and one centimes in copper. All of these quantities being fractions of the others, they can represent each other, complement each other, pay for and make up for each other: this is a speculation of the most simple arithmetic.

  But in order for this liquidation to operate, it is necessary, I repeat, to have the co-operation of good faith in the appreciation of labour, services, and products; it is necessary that the labouring society comes to this degree of industrial and economic morality: that all submit themselves to the justice which will be done to them, without regard for the pretensions of vanity and personality, without any consideration for titles, ranks, precedence, honorific distinctions, celebrity, in a word the value of opinion. Only the utility of the product, the quality, the labour and the expenses it required, should here enter into the account.

  This calculation, I affirm and repeat, is eminently practical: and our duty is to hold ourselves to it with all our strength: it would exclude fraud, surcharges, charlatanism, sinecurism, exploitation, oppression; but, it must be said, it cannot be treated like a domestic affair, a family virtue, an act of private morality. The evaluation of work, the measure of values, endlessly renewed and repeated, is the fundamental problem of society, a problem that the social will and the power of the collectivity can alone resolve. In this regard, it is still very much necessary that I say that neither science, nor power, nor the Church has fulfilled their mission. What am I saying? The incommensurability of products has been raised up into a dogma, mutuality declared a utopia, inequality exaggerated, in order to perpetuate, along with a generalised absence of solidarity, the distress of the masses and the lie of the revolution.

  Now it is up to the workers’ democracy to take up this question. What it pronounces, and, under the pressure of its opinion, it will be equally necessary for the State, organ of society, to enact. That if the workers’ democracy, satisfied to agitate in its workshops, to pester the bourgeois and to distinguish itself in futile elections, remains indifferent about the principles of political economy, which are those of the revolution, it is necessary that it be known, that it is lying about its duty, and it will be pilloried one day in front of posterity.

  The question of labour and wages brings us to that of commerce and agiotage, with which we conclude this chapter.

  Among almost every people commerce has been held in distrust and denigration. The patrician or noble who engages in commerce demeans himself. All commercial operations have been forbidden to the clergy, and it made an immense scandal, in the 17th century, when the speculations and benefices of the Jesuits were revealed. Amongst other traffics, the Reverend Fathers secured for themselves the monopoly over cinchona.673—From where comes this condemnation, as old as civilisation, which neither our modern customs nor our economic maxims has made up for? From the dishonesty which at all times has appeared inherent in trade, and which moralists, theologians and men of State have been desperate to purge. The Punic or Carthaginian faith was noted for its infamy in antiquity. But what was this Punic faith? The same faith as the Greeks, the Attic faith, the Corinthian faith, the faith of Marseille, the Judaic faith; the same finally as the Roman faith itself: this was the commercial faith.

  In order for commerce to be honest and without reproach, it would be necessary that, independently of the mutual evaluation of services and products of which we have spoken in the previous article, transport, distribution, and exchange of goods take place in the least expensive way and to the greatest advantage of everyone. For this to be the case, it would be necessary that in each country all producers, traders, shippers, brokers, and consumers, reciprocally informed and duly guaranteed about everything that concerns the provenances, raw materials, existences, qualities, weights, cost prices, shipping expenses, handling costs, etc., would additionally commit themselves (those who are supplying and those who are receiving an agreed upon quantity) to determined prices and conditions. Statistics should therefore be perpetually published on the state of the harvests, the workforce, wages, risks and accidents, abundances and shortages of labour, the consequences of demand, the movement of markets, etc., etc.

  Let us suppose, for example, that with the most detailed and exact calculations, pursued over a series of years, it results that the median cost of wheat, in an average year, was 18 francs per hectolitre, the retail price varied between 19 and 20 francs, giving to the worker a net profit of 5.3 to 10 percent. If the harvest is bad, such that there was a deficit of a tenth, the price should be increased by a proportional quantity, on the one hand so that the worker is not alone in loss, on the other so that the public does not suffer an exorbitant increase: this is rather better than letting them perish due to scarcity. In good political economy, no more than in good justice, one cannot allow general distress to become a source of fortunes for a few speculators. If there is an abundance of wheat, on the contrary, the price should be lowered by an analogous proportion, so that on the one hand the price of cereals, in lowering itself, does not become for the worker a cause of deficit, as we have seen enough times, and so that on the other the public profits from this good fortune, either for the current year, or for the years to follow; the unconsumed surplus needing to be put into storage. In the two cases, one sees how production and consumption, in mutually guaranteeing each other, at a fair price, one the investment and one the purchase of wheat, would be regularised; how abundance and scarcity, in being distributed across the mass of the population, by the means of mercurial intelligence and good economic policy, no longer have as consequences for anyone either the exaggeration of profit or the excess of deficit; this is one of the most beautiful and fecund results of mutuality.

  But it is evident that such a precious institution could only be the act of the general will, and it is precisely against this will that the liberals of political economy, under the pretext of governmentalism, arise. Rather than put a stop to organised extortion, an unassailable extortion, invulnerable to philosophic protestation and private justice, they prefer to assist with the bacchanalia674 of mercantilism: is perfection therefore to be seen in this world, and isn’t liberty fecund enough to pay for their orgies?

  The Stock Exchange, the tribunals and the markets ring with complaints against speculation [agiotage]. Now, what is agiotage in itself? An apologist for the agiotage business, as good a logician as a man of an intelligence, said to us quite recently: it is the art, in a society given over to anarchic mercantilism, of foreseeing the oscillations in values, and thereby profiting from sales or purchases made in accordance with the increases or decreases in these values. What, he said, in this kind of operation (which, we must recognise, demands a high level of skill, consummate prudence, a multitude of knowledges), makes it immoral? ... In fact, the environment being what it is, the skill of the agiotage trader is as honourable as those of heroes; I shall not be the first to throw a stone at him. On the other hand it must be admitted that if, in a society that is in a state of war, speculation is in no way incriminating, it is nonetheless essentially unproductive. The person who is enriched by differences has no right to the recognition or respect of his fellow men. If he has neither cheated nor stolen from anyone—I speak here of the outstanding speculator [agioteur], who makes no use in his speculations of anything but his divinatory genius, employing neither fraud nor falsehood—he can also not flatter himself with having been the creator of anything with the least utility. Conscience would prefer it a thousand times better that he had directed his talents towards some entirely different career, leaving prices to follow their natural course, without coming to impose an extra charge on circulation that the public could definitively do without. Why this skimming off the top, parallel to the toll6
75 which was imposed at the gates of towns, and which does not have as this did the excuse of raising money to pay for the expenses of the city? Such is the motive which in all times has pronounced agiotage odious, to economists as well as moralists and men of State. A just motive, since it is founded on the universal conscience, whose judgements are absolute and enduring, very different in this respect from our tardy and transitory legislation.

  Those who, in testifying to their devotion to the social and political status quo, feign a measure of severity regarding speculators, therefore would do well to show themselves to be more consistent and not to stop themselves halfway through. In the current state of Society, commerce, given over to the most complete anarchy, without direction, without information, without points of reference and without principles, is essentially speculation; it could not be anything else. Therefore, it is necessary to condemn everything, or permit everything, or reform everything. This is what I am going to make understood in a few words.

  Is it not just that the private individual who takes on at his own risk and peril a vast commercial operation, from which the public is called to profit, should be honestly remunerated in the resale of his merchandise? The principle is entirely just: the difficulty is in rendering its application other than reprehensible. In fact, all profit realised in business, if it is not exclusively due to speculation, is more or less infected with speculation: its impossible to separate it out. In an environment characterised by a lack of solidarity, deprived of assurances, each works for himself, no one for others. Legitimate profit cannot be distinguished from that made in speculation. The whole world endeavours to carry off the greatest profit: the trader and the industrialist engage in speculation, as does the scientist, the poet, and even the actor, the musician, and the dancer, as do the doctor, the celebrity and the courtesan, all as much as any other; it is really only wage-earners, workers, manual labourers, or public functionaries who do not engage in speculation, because they are paid according to their appointment or at a fixed salary or wage.