Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  This, then, is the puzzle that we have to solve: it relates equally to centralisation and to federation per se.

  1. Why is it that unitary states, be they monarchist, aristocratic or republican, are forever disintegrating?

  2. And at the same time what is it that leads federations to tend to evolve towards unity?

  This is what we must tackle first, before we offer any opinion on the comparative value of centralised and confederated States. And this is precisely the answer I mean to provide, in accordance with the principles set out in the previous chapter, namely, that Truth and Right are the only foundations of order, the absence of which renders all centralisation voracious and all federation hypocrisy:

  What made States, unitary and federated alike, prey to disintegration and ruin, is that, in the case of the former, society is bereft of any sort of political and economic guarantee; and, in the case of the others, no matter how perfectly constituted Authority may be thought to be, society itself has thus far been underpinned only by political guarantees, never economic ones. Neither in Switzerland nor in the United States do we discover an organised mutuality: now, without a battery of mutualist institutions, without economic right, the political format remains impotent, government is always precarious—a whited sepulchre, as Saint Paul would have it.

  What then must be done in order to preserve confederations from decomposition, while upholding a principle thus defined: The right of every component town, territory, province and populace, in short, every State, to join the confederation and to quit it, at will?

  Note that no such facility was ever offered to free men; no such problem was ever mooted by any publicist. De Bonald and Jean-Jacques, the divine right man and the demagogue, are as one in declaring, after the manner of Christ, that any kingdom divided against itself shall perish. But Christ was speaking in a spiritual sense; and our authors are out and out materialists, supporters of authority and make their stand on a basis of slavery.

  What must be done in order to render confederation indestructible is at last to furnish it with the sanction for which it is still waiting, by proclaiming economic Right as the basis of the right of federation and all political order.

  It is here above all that we ought to look to the revolution that is going to be carried out in the social system, simply because of the mutualism, a few instances of which we have previously identified for the reader. Already we have seen that the mutuality principle, carried over from private dealings into the collective, relies upon a battery of institutions that one can readily anticipate will grow. To refresh our memory, we shall review only the most salient of these.

  A. Economic functions

  1. CHARITABLE purposes and personal assistance, a transition from the charitable injunction of Christ and the system of justice introduced by the Revolution; an assistance agency, medical service, homes, crèches, sanatoriums, penitentiaries, etc. All of which, of course, is pretty much already in existence, but what is missing is the new spirit which is the only thing that can render it effective, banishing parasitism, hypocrisy, begging and profligacy.

  2. INSURANCE, against flood, fire, navigational and rail mishaps, epizooty,682 hail, disease, old age and death.

  3. LOANS, commerce and discount; banks, bourses, etc.

  4. Public TRANSPORT services by rail, canal, river and seaways.—Such services pose no threat to private enterprises, serving indeed to regulate and complement them.

  5. WAREHOUSING, docks, market and price listing services. The object being to ensure steady optimum distribution of produce to the benefit of both producers and consumers. Spelling the end for commodity speculation, hoarders, cartels and speculation on futures.

  6. A service handling STATISTICS, advertising and bulletins setting prices and determining values. Social agencies serving as regulators of retail trade.

  7. WORKERS COMPANIES for the carrying out of paving, reforestation, land clearance, road- and path-building and irrigation works.

  8. WORKERS COMPANIES for bridge, aqueduct, dam, port, tunnel construction and for erecting public monuments, etc.

  9. WORKERS COMPANIES operating mines, water services and forestry.

  10. WORKERS COMPANIES servicing ports, rail stations, markets, warehousing, shops, etc.

  11. CONSTRUCTION COMPANY servicing the construction, maintenance and leasing of homes and cheap housing in towns.

  12. PUBLIC EDUCATION along scientific and vocational lines.

  13. PROPERTY, overhauling the laws of property title, formation, distribution, means of transference, etc. Reform and consolidation of the allodial system.683

  14. TAXATION…

  Remarks—1.—Hitherto, the institutions or functions which we have chosen to designate as economic have been an afterthought in society. We do not invent them, nor do we conjure them up out of some arbitrary whim; we merely identify them in accordance with a principle as simple as it is peremptory. Indeed it has been shown that in a number of circumstances individual initiative is powerless to achieve what is derived effortlessly and at considerably lesser expense from co-operation by all. Where-so-ever private efforts do not avail, it is only fair, by right and by duty that collective effort, mutuality, be deployed. It is absurd to sacrifice public wealth or happiness to some impotent freedom. Therein lies the principle, the goal and the underlying motivation behind economic institutions. Everything that can be performed by an individual, consistent with the laws of fairness, will therefore be left to the individual; anything that is beyond the powers of one person will fall under the responsibility of the collective.

  2. I classify agencies handling Charity, Public Education and Taxation under the heading of economic functions or institutions. The nature of things points to the reason for this classification. The eradication of poverty and the relief of human wretchedness have, down through the ages, been regarded as the hardest nuts for science to crack. Like idleness in the worker, social wretchedness goes to the very heart of production and has a direct bearing upon public happiness. So a science, a precise policy is required if this entire class of agency is to be removed from the purview and influence of the powers that be.—The same should hold true for Taxation. In this regard, the Revolution of ’89 and all of the Constitutions emanating from it have set out the true principles, determining that taxation demanded by Government needed the assent of the nation, and that the general councils and municipalities should determine how the burden should be shared. The Prince does not bear his own costs: it is the country that bears the costs of its proxy: from which it follows that what we today call the Finance Ministry does not at all fall within the remit of the Authorities.—As for public education, which is merely the extrapolation of domestic education, its economic function has to be acknowledged, lest it be reconverted into a function of religion and the family per se be denied.

  3. Articles 4, 7, 8, 9, 10 and 11 of the list above show the importance accorded in the New Democracy to workers’ associations which are deemed to constitute economic agencies and mutual institutions. Their object is not just to service the interests of the worker, but also to furnish an answer to the legitimate will of society, namely, to remove the railways and mines from the monopolies of joint stock companies—publicly useful constructions from the biased adjudications and whim of State engineers—water resources and forests from the depredations of State property, etc. Such workers companies, established in accordance with the precepts of the Civil and Commercial Code and subject to laws of competition, as stated in the Manifesto, and answerable for their performance, are also tied to society which uses them to meet its mutualist obligations so as to ensure that their services are made accessible at the best possible price.

  Added to this list of economic functions, there is a further, complementary series described as political. Like the preceding series, these may vary in terms of numbers and definition: but there can be no mistaking their character.

  B. Political functions

  15. The ELECTORAL B
ODY, or universal suffrage.

  16. The LEGISLATIVE AUTHORITY.

  17. The EXECUTIVE AUTHORITY: Administration.

  18. The “ “ : Police, Courts.

  19. The “ “ : Religion.

  20. The “ “ : Warfare.

  The ministries of Agriculture, Trade, Public Education, Public Works and Finance have been revamped and amalgamated into economic functions.

  Remarks:—1. These functions are described as political to distinguish them from the foregoing so-called economic ones, because their responsibility extends beyond persons and goods, production, consumption, education, work, credit and property, to the collective State, the social Body as a whole in its dealings both with the outside world and with itself.

  2. These same functions, moreover, are subordinated to the others and might be described as sub-functions because, for all their majestic apparatus, they play a much less vital role than economic functions. Before legislating, administering, building palaces, temples, and waging war, society works, labours, navigates, exchange and exploits soil and seas. Before kings are consecrated and dynasties instituted, the people lays the foundations of the family, contracting marriages, building towns and establishing property and inheritance. In principle, these are political functions still mixed in with economic ones: in fact, nothing within the specialisation of government and the State is alien to the public economy. That widespread belief, focusing upon the governmental agency, then appears to confer a sort of birthright upon it, is down to the impact of an historical illusion to which we are now immune, now that we have retraced the whole genealogy of society and put everything in its proper place. Between economic functions and political functions there is a relationship analogous to that which physiology suggests obtains between the functions of organic life and the functions of the life of relations; it is through the former that the animal manifests itself to the outside world and fulfils its mission among creatures; but it is through the latter that it exists and, to tell the truth, everything that it does in exercise of its freedom of action is merely a more or less reasoned conclusum of its underlying potential.

  3. Thus, under the democratic constitution, insofar we can judge from its most salient ideas and most authentic aspirations, the political and the economic are one and the same, a sole and single system based upon a single principle, mutuality. As we have seen, through a sequence of mutualist dealings, the great economic institutions step forward one after another to form this vast humanitarian organism which, previously, there was nothing to convey; similarly, the machinery of government itself is, by dint of some unfathomable fictional convention, imagined as being for the good of the republic and is as quickly withdrawn as posited, but this time on the basis of a genuine contract wherein the sovereignty of the contracting parties, instead of being gobbled up by some central majesty that is both personal and mystical, represents a positive guarantee of the freedom of States, communes and individuals.

  Thus, no longer do we have the abstraction of people’s sovereignty as in the ’93 Constitution and the others that followed it, and in Rousseau’s Social Contract. Instead it becomes an effective sovereignty of the labouring masses which rule and govern initially at beneficent meetings, chambers of commerce, crafts and trades bodies, and workers companies; in the stock exchanges, the markets, the academies, the schools, agricultural fairs and finally election meetings, parliamentary assemblies and councils of State, national guards and even the churches and temples. It is still universally the same collective force that is brought forth in the name of and by virtue of the principle of mutuality: the final affirmation of the rights of Man and the Citizen.

  I declare here and now that the labouring masses are actually, positively and effectively sovereign: how could they not be when the economic organism—labour, capital, property and assets—belongs to them entirely: as utter masters of the organic functions, how could they not be all the more emphatically masters of the functions of relations? Subservience to the productive might of what was hitherto, to the exclusion of anything else, the Government, the Powers that be, the State, is blown apart by the way in which the political organism is made up:a. An ELECTORAL BODY, spontaneously coming together, laying down policy on operations and reviewing and sanctioning its own acts;

  b. A delegation, LEGISLATIVE BODY or Council of State, appointed by the federal groups and susceptible to re-election;684

  c. An executive commission selected by the people’s representatives from among their own number, and liable to recall;

  d. Finally, a chairman for that commission, appointed by it and liable to recall.

  Tell me, is this not the system of the old society turned on its head; a system in which the country is decidedly all; where what once was described as the head of State, the sovereign, autocrat, monarch, despot, king, emperor, tsar, khan, sultan, majesty, highness, etc., etc., surfaces once and for all as a gentleman, the first among his fellow-citizens, perhaps, in terms of honorific distinction, but definitely the least dangerous of all public officials? You may brag this time that the issue of political guarantee, the issue of making the government subservient to the country, and the prince to the sovereign, is done and dusted. Never again will you see usurpation or coup d’état; and the authorities revolting against the people, authority and the bourgeoisie in coalition against the plebes becomes impossible.

  4. Taking all of this as read, I turn again to the issue of unity raised earlier; under federative law, how can the State retain its stability? How might a system that enshrines as its underlying thought the right of secession enjoyed by every federated component, then act coherently and maintain itself?

  To be honest, that question went unanswered as long as confederated States had no basis in economic rights and the law of mutuality: divergent interests sooner or later were fated to lead to damaging splits and unity under monarchy to replace republican error. Now everything is different: the economic order is founded upon entirely different factors: the ethos of the States is no longer what it was; in terms of the truth of its principle, the confederation is indissoluble. Democracy, once so hostile to all thoughts of schism, especially in France, has nothing to fear.

  None of the sources of division between men, cities, corporations and individuals obtains among mutualist groups: not sovereign power, not political coalition, not dynastic rights, nor civil list, honours, pensions, capitalist exploitation, dogmatism, sectarian mentality, party rivalry, racial prejudice or rivalry between corporations, towns or provinces. There may be differences of opinion, belief, interests, mores, industries, cultures, etc. But these differences are the very basis and the object of mutualism: so they cannot, ever, degenerate into Church intolerance, papal supremacy, overbearing locality or city, industrial or agricultural preponderance. Conflicts are impossible: one would have to destroy the mutuality before they could resurface.685

  From where would the rebellion come? On what pretext would discontent rely?—In a mutualist confederation, the citizen gives up none of his freedom, as Rousseau requires him to do for the governance of his republic! Public authority lies in the hands of the citizen: he himself yields it and profits from it: if he has a grievance, it is that neither he nor anyone else can any longer usurp it and stake a claim to exclusive enjoyment of it. There are no more hostages to fortune to be given: the State asks nothing of him by way of taxation beyond what is strictly required for the public services which, being essentially reproductive, when fairly distributed, makes a trade out of an imposition.686 Now, trade amounts to an increase in wealth:687 so, from that angle too, there need be no fear of disintegration. Might the confederates scatter in the face of a civil or foreign war? But in a confederation founded upon economic Right and the law of mutuality, there could be only one source of civil warfare—religion. Now, setting to one side the fact that the spiritual counts for very little once other interests are reconciled and mutually assured, who can fail to see that the corollary of mutuality is mutual tolerance: whic
h rules out the likelihood of such conflict? As for foreign aggression, from where might that spring? The confederation, which acknowledges that every one of its confederated States enjoys a right of secession, is scarcely likely to want to bully the foreigner. The idea of conquest is incompatible with its very principle. So there can be only one foreseeable possibility of war emanating from without, namely, the possibility of a war for principle: should the surrounding States, hugely exploitative and hugely centralised, determine that the existence of a mutualist confederation cannot be reconciled with their own principle, just as, in ’92 the Brunswick manifesto declared that the French Revolution was incompatible with the principles governing other States! To which my response is that the outlawing of a confederation rooted in economic right and the law of mutuality would be the very thing that could happen, in that it would incite federative, mutualist republican sentiment to put paid once and for all with the world of monopoly and bring about the victory of Labour Democracy right around the world ..

  But need we labour this point further?

  The principle of mutuality, as it moves into the terrain of law-making and mores, and gives rise to economic right, comprehensively overhauls civil law, commercial and administrative law, public law and common law. Or rather, in the working out of that over-riding and underlying category of law, economic Right, the principle of mutuality gives rise to unity of juridical science: better than ever before, it highlights the fact that law is one and the same, that there is a uniformity to all its prescriptions, all its maxims and corollaries, all its laws and variations upon the same law.

  The old right, which the science of the old jurisconsults had sub-divided into as many specialised branches as it had different objects, was broadly characterised by a negativity in all its ramifications: by the fact that it thwarted rather than enabled; that it prevented conflicts rather than creating guarantees; repressed a range of acts of violence and fraud rather than offering protection against violence and fraud and for the creation of wealth and the common weal.