Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Let us agree then: whoever was the first, separating in his thought speculation from exchange, the chance element from the cumulative element, the profit based in speculation from that based in trade, to leave the realities of commerce to others and to content himself with speculation on fluctuations, he not only drew the consequence of the state of war, egoism, and general bad faith within which we all live; he also established himself, if I dare say it, at the expense of the public, as the censor of transactions, in laying bare, by fictitious operations, the spirit of inequity which presides over real operations. It is up to us to profit from this lesson, since we can regard such an enterprise as prohibiting the games of the Stock Market and the futures markets by mere police measures to be as unrealisable and nearly as abusive as agiotage itself.

  Mutualism proposes to cure this leprosy, not by enveloping it in a network of penalties that will not necessarily be judicious and will almost always be applied in vain; not at all by hindering the freedom of commerce, the worst of all remedies: but by treating commerce as assurance, I would say by enclosing it in all public guarantees, and thereby restoring it to mutuality. The partisans of mutuality know as well as anybody else the law of supply and demand; they would not dare to contravene it. Detailed statistics, frequently recalculated; precise information on needs and supplies, an honest decomposition of the retail price; planning for all eventualities; fixing between producers, traders, and consumers, after amiable discussion, a maximum and minimum rate of profit, according to the difficulties and the risks; the organisation of regulatory associations: these are pretty much all the measures by which they would dream of disciplining the market. Let the degree of freedom be as great as one likes, they say; but let what is still more important than freedom, sincerity and reciprocity, guide us all. This being observed, let the customers be as diligent and honest as possible. Such is their motto; can one believe that after several years of this reform, our mercantile customs would not be entirely changed, to the great benefit of public happiness?

  CHAPTER XIII

  On Association, Within Mutuality

  I have believed it necessary to consecrate a special chapter to this question, which holds a very large place in the preoccupations of the workers, and over which still reigns a profound obscurity. As do their comrades from [the] Luxembourg [Commission], the authors of the Manifesto, advocate for association, considering it to be a powerful means of order, morality, wealth, and progress. But neither the former nor the latter have yet to know how to recognise it; they invoke its name pell-mell with that of mutuality, many times confounding it with community [communauté]; no one, outside of the civil and business Codes (which furthermore the workers concern themselves very little with), has known how to disentangle the useful or dangerous characteristics of this idea; above all, no one has recognised the modifications that it is destined to receive in the mutualist regime.

  I will try, as much as I can, to shine a bit of light on this interesting subject, and, in the interest of the workers’ societies which are developing everywhere and in which a crowd of political notabilities are taking the keenest interest, to fill in this important lacuna with a few words.

  I call economic forces certain methods of action, the effect of which is to multiply the power of labour far beyond what it would be, if it had been left entirely to individual liberty.

  Thus, what we call the Division of labour or the separation of industries is an economic force: it has been proven a thousand times since A. Smith, that a given number of workers will return four, ten, twenty times more work, if this work is partitioned between them in a systematic fashion, than they would have had if they each worked separately, each performing all the same tasks, without agreement and without combining their efforts.

  For the same reason, or rather for the inverse reason, that which I was one of the first to name, the force of the collectivity, is also an economic force: it is equally proven that a given number of workers will execute with ease and in a small amount of time a task which would be impossible for these same workers, if, instead of grouping their efforts, they purported to act individually.

  The application of machines to industry is also an economic force: this requires no demonstration. In bestowing upon man a greater productivity, labour becomes more useful, the product greater: the accumulation of wealth that results attests to the presence of an economic force.

  Competition is an economic force, by virtue of the excitement that it induces in the worker;

  Association is another, by virtue of the confidence and the security that it inspires in the worker;

  Exchange, finally, credit, gold and silver monies, property itself, which no scruple prevents me from naming here, are, at least in anticipation, economic forces.

  But of all the economic forces, the greatest, the most sacred, that which, in the combinations of labour, unites all the conceptions of the mind and the justifications of conscience, is mutuality, in which one can say that all the others come to be combined.

  Through mutuality, the other economic forces enter into right; they become, so to speak, integral parts of the right of man and of producer: without this they remain indifferent to the good (or bad) of society; they have nothing obligatory about them; they offer no moral character by themselves. We are familiar with the excesses (not to mention the massacres) of the Division of Labour and of the use of machines;—the frenzies of competition, the frauds of business, the despoliations of credit, the prostitutions of money, the tyranny of property. All of this critique has for a long time been exhausted; and, under the current Democracy, it would be a waste of time to insist on it here. We are preaching to the converted. Only mutuality, which holds at the same time intelligence and conscience; the synallagmatic pact, so long neglected, but which secretly inspires all workers, obligates man at the same time that it makes his work fruitful; only mutuality is unassailable and invincible: since mutuality, in human society and in the universe, is at once right and might.

  Certainly association, viewed in a good light, is sweet and fraternal: God forbid that I should dishonour it in the eyes of the people!... But association, by itself, and without a thought for the right which rules over it, is nevertheless an accidental link based on a pure physiological and selfish sentiment; a free contract, terminable at will; a limited grouping, of which one can always say that the members, being associated only for their own benefit, are associated against the whole world: this, moreover, is how it has been understood by the legislator: he could not have understood it in any other way.

  What is the goal, for example, of our great capitalist associations, organised according to the spirit of mercantile and industrial feudalism? To monopolise production, exchange, and profits; to this end, to group the most diverse specialists under the same management, to centralise trades, to agglomerate functions; in a word, to leave no place for small industry, to kill small scale commerce, by this, to transform the most numerous and the most interesting part of the bourgeoisie into wage-workers: all this for the profit of the so-called organisers, founders, directors, administrators, councillors and shareholders of these gigantic speculations. Numerous examples of this unfair war made by the big capitalists on the small can be seen in Paris: It is useless to cite them. There has been talk of a centralised bookstore which would be financed by M. Péreire and would replace the majority of current bookstores: It is a new method of ruling over the press and ideas. There is hardly a society of men of letters that, jealous of the profits of bookstores, does not dream of making themselves editors of all the works published by living authors. This mania for invasive conquest, no longer has any limits: an unequivocal sign of the poverty of the spirit. I knew of a printing establishment which combined, along with typesetting and printing, which one can hardly separate, retail and wholesale bookselling, paper-making, the casting of letters, the manufacture of presses, engraving, binding, woodworking, etc. There were plans to create a school for apprentices and a small academy there. Thi
s monstrous establishment quickly collapsed due to waste, parasitism, oversupply, general expenses, the emergence of competition, the growing disproportion between expenses and receipts. Industrial feudalism has the same tendencies; it will meet the same end.

  What about the workers’ associations following the Luxembourg system? What is their goal? To supplant, through coalitions of workers subsidised by the Government, the capitalist associations, in other words, to make war upon industry and free commerce, through the centralisation of business, the agglomeration of workers, and the superiority of capitals. In place of the one or two hundred thousand businesses which exist in Paris, there would only be about a hundred great associations, representing the diverse branches of industry and commerce, into which the population of workers would be regimented and enslaved by the raison d’État of fraternity, just as at this moment it tends to be by the raison d’État of capital. Would we here have won liberty, the happiness of the public, civilisation? Never. We would have exchanged our old chains for new ones, and, what is sadder still, and which shows the sterility of the legislators, entrepreneurs, and reformers, the social idea would not have advanced one step; we would always continue to be subject to the same arbitrary despotism, not to mention the same economic fatalism.

  At this first and quick glance, the same holds as much for the communist associations, which anyway remain at the project stage, as it does for general partnerships, mixed liability companies, and publicly traded companies, such as have been conceived within mercantile anarchy and are pursued, with the sanction of the legislator and the protection of the Government, by the new feudalism. The result: that the former as much as the latter have been founded on private interests and with an eye towards selfish goals; that nothing in them indicates a single thought of reform, any superior view of civilisation, nor the least concern for the progress and destiny of humanity; on the contrary, acting, like individuals, in an anarchic fashion, they can always be considered merely as small churches organised against the largest one, in the centre and at the expense of which they live.

  The general characteristics of these associations, as recorded by the Code, show their narrowness of spirit and the limits of their impact. They are composed by a determinate number of people, to the exclusion of all others; these persons naturally are designated by their names, professions, residences, qualities; everyone furnishes a contribution to the capital of the enterprise; the society is formed for a special goal and an exclusive interest, and for a limited duration. Nothing in all of this corresponds to the great hopes that the workers’ Democracy had placed in the idea of the association: by what right does it flatter itself that it will produce results any more human than those we have seen? The association is a thing that defines itself, and the essential characteristic of which is its particularity. Could one make it such that this were not the case, [placing] everyone alongside each other, separate and distinct, [with] an association of carpenters, of masons, of lamp-sellers, one of tailors, of boot-makers, etc., etc.? Wouldn’t this be to follow the option suggested by those who see these associations founded one upon the other, forming one single and equivalent general association? We can boldly refuse to let the workers’ Democracy land itself in a similar mess; that is, we can refuse to allow, not just the workers, but their counsellors, the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, the legislative corps, the School of Law, en masse, to propose a formula for association that would unify two heterogeneous groups, such as the masons and the cabinetmakers, [so] confusing their actions and their interests. Therefore, if the associations are distinct, inevitably they will also be rivals; their interests will diverge; there will be contradictions and hostilities. You will never escape this.

  But, you say to me, don’t we have the principle of mutuality to bring accord to our associations and make them live together in peace without dissolving them [into one another]?...

  Excellent! See here how mutuality appears as Deus ex machinâ. Let us know therefore what it teaches us; and, to start, let us note that mutuality is not the same thing as association, and that as a friend of liberty as much as that of the group, it shows itself equally remote from all fantasy and all intolerance.

  A little while ago we spoke of the division of labour. A consequence of this economic force is that as much as it engenders specialities it creates sources of independence, which implies the separation of enterprises, precisely the opposite of that sought by the instigators of communist associations as well as by the founders of capitalist associations. Combined then with the law of natural grouping of populations by regions, cantons, communes, and streets, the division of labour arrives at this decisive consequence: that not only is each industrial speciality called upon to develop itself and to act in full and complete independence, under the conditions of mutuality, responsibility, and security which form the general condition of society; but also that it is the manufacturers which, in their respective localities, each individually represent a speciality of labour: in principle these manufacturers should remain free. The division of labour, freedom, competition, political and social equality, the dignity of man and citizen, permits no subordination. The Sixty say in their Manifesto that they no longer want clients: this is only the counterpart of that. It is always the same idea, it is the same thing.

  It follows from this that the principle of mutuality inasmuch as it concerns association, is not to associate men except insofar as it is required by the exigencies of production; the low prices for products, the demands of consumption, the security of the producers themselves, requires it, there where it is possible neither for the public to bind itself to a particular industry, nor for it to assume responsibility for and run the risks of enterprises alone. Thus conceived, it is no longer the dream of a system, the calculation of ambition, the spirit of a faction, or a vain sentimentality that unites subjects; it is inevitable, in the nature of things, and this is why in associating in this way they obey only the inevitable, which can conserve, even within the association, their liberty.

  This side of the mutualist idea, following from the general principles posited by the Manifesto of the Sixty, is naturally intended to reconcile the keenest sympathies of the petit bourgeois, small manufacturers and small shopkeepers with the new democracy.

  What about in large-scale manufacture, extraction, metallurgy, the maritime industries? It is clear that there is a place for association here: no one contests this. Again, what about one of the great concerns that have the character of a public service, such as railways, credit establishments, ports? I have proved elsewhere that the law of mutuality is such that these services are delivered to the public at a price that covers operating expenses and maintenance, while excluding all capitalist profit. In this case again it is obvious that the guarantee of good execution and a good price can be given neither by monopolistic companies, nor by communities patronised by the State, building the concern in the name of the State and on behalf of the State. This guarantee can only come from free co-operators,676 engaged on the one hand towards the public, by the mutualist contract, and on the other with each other by the ordinary contract of association.

  Now, is it a question of these thousands of trades and businesses which exist in such great numbers in the cities and the countryside? There, I no longer see the necessity or utility of association. I see it all the less inasmuch as the fruit one promises will be acquired by the ensemble of mutualist guarantees, mutual assurances, mutual credit, the organising of markets [police des marchés], etc., etc. I will it say again: in the case of which we are speaking, given these guarantees, there is more security for the public in dealing with a single entrepreneur, rather than with a company.

  Who does not see, for example, that the raison d’être of the small shop is in the need that large companies find to establish on all sides, for the convenience of their clients, stores and local offices, in a word, branches? Now, in a regime of mutuality, we are all clients of one another, subordinates of one another, servan
ts of one another. This is what our Solidarity consists of, this solidarity that the authors of the Manifesto affirm along with the Right to Work, with the Freedom of Labour, with the Mutuality of credit, etc. What an inconvenience, therefore, would these authors find in the fact that the same man who, in a system of feudalism such as that of the great capitalist companies or those of the communities of Luxembourg, would be condemned to remain a waged subordinate,677 an ordinary wage-worker, becomes in the system of mutuality where agiotage is no longer anything but a word, a free shopkeeper? The mission of the shopkeeper is not only to buy and sell, from the exclusive point of view of private interest; they must also elevate themselves alongside the social order of which they form a part. Before everything, the shopkeeper is a distributor of products, and he must be an expert in the qualities, manufacture, provenance, and value of these products. It is necessary that he keeps the consumers of his district up to date on prices, new articles, the risks of price increases, the probabilities of price drops. This is a continual work, which demands intelligence, zeal, honesty, and which, I repeat, in the new conditions we establish with mutualism, requires nothing of the rather suspect security offered by the great association. A general reform of morals according to principles is sufficient here for the security of the public. I ask myself therefore why this economic individuality should disappear? What forces us to meddle with it? Let us organise rights and let the shopkeepers be. The favour of the shoppers will go to the most diligent and the most upstanding.