Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  It is in the capital that are found the academies, the institutions of higher education, even the schools of mining; the great theatres are there, as the great financial and industrial companies have their headquarters there. It is there that the export business has its principal establishments. It is the Bank and the Stock Market of Paris which constitute, evaluate, and liquidate all the great enterprises, operations, loans, etc. of France and of the world. All of this, you have to admit, has nothing to do with the municipal level.

  To leave these things to the discretion of a municipality would be to abdicate [responsibilty]. To try to separate the affairs of the municipality from those of the capital would be to try to make an impossible division; in any case, [it would be] to create a perpetual conflict between the municipality and the Government, between the Empire and the capital. Separate, then, in the embellishments of Paris, what it owes to its own resources from those which comes to it from the budget of the state; separate, in the development of this immense capital, what is correctly attributed to the activity, industry, and influence of its inhabitants from that which belongs to the superior influence of the Government and the Country! For better or for worse, it is necessary that the mayors be nothing but the subordinates of the Prefecture. The competition of the Hôtel-de-ville, from ’89 to ’95, struck some severe blows against the monarchy; it hardly did less damage to the Revolution, and I am astonished that the partisans of unity, such as M. Picard, contemplate resuscitating such a power. No, as long as Paris remains what politics and history has made it, the seat of our national agglomeration; as long as, capital of the French Empire (or Monarchy, or Republic—whatever name you choose), it aspires to the even higher title, of metropolis of civilisation, Paris will not belong to itself. For such a possession of itself would be a veritable usurpation; even if the Government would consent to it the departments would never allow it. Paris has an existence apart: like the Rome of the emperors, it cannot be administered except by imperial magistrates.

  What I say is so true and follows so much from the nature of things that, even in a confederated France, under a regime that one may regard as the ideal of independence, the first act would be to return to the communes the plenitude of their autonomy and to the provinces their sovereignty, Paris, no longer an imperial city but becoming a federal city, could not combine the attributions of its two natures, and would have to furnish guarantees to the provinces, admitting federal authority over parts of its administration and government. Without this Paris, thanks to its powerful attraction, to the incalculable influence which would give it its double quality of the most powerful of the confederated States and the capital of the Confederation, would again soon become king of the Republic, to the domination of which the provinces would never manage to escape from except by, like the Swiss, making the federal authority nomadic, and assigning as its seat, sometimes Rouen or Nantes, sometimes Lyons, Toulouse, or Dijon, and Paris, only once every ten years. And there is no stronger reason why Paris, administrative centre of the Empire, could not aspire to an autonomy which would be for the Empire the division of sovereignty, or else even an abdication!

  Moreover, examine the physiognomy of the capital, study its psychology, and you will recognise, if you do so in good faith, that Paris marched in unison with the Country and the Government. The more it has come into its glory, the more it has lost of its individuality and its character, the more its population, incessantly renewed by the departments and by foreigners, moves away from nativity.694 Out of the 1,700,000 inhabitants who compose the population of the department of the Seine, how many are true Parisians? No more than 15 percent: all the rest have come from elsewhere. Out of the eleven representatives that the city of Paris sent to the legislative Body, I do not believe that there are four of the Parisian race. As for the opinions of these representatives, which we might generously suppose to be the opinion of the city of Paris, what can we think of them? Who will tell me the opinions of Paris? Is it that of the 153,000 electors of the Opposition? How then have they named subjects as disparate as MM. Thiers, Guérolt, Havin, J. Favre, E. Ollivier, J. Simon, Garnier-Pagès, Darimon, Pelletan? And what became, on the one hand the 82,000 votes given to the government, and on the other the 90,000 which were abstentions?... What to say about the 400,000 souls out of the total of 1,700,000 who are not represented? Is it by the newspapers that we will know the Parisian opinion? But they contradict each other as much as the representatives, and for anyone who has seen up close their various dens, all respect collapses instantly. Paris is a world: that means that one must not seek in it any one individuality, nor one faith, one opinion, one will; it is a plurality of forces, of thoughts, of elements, in chaotic agitation. Paris, considered as a free city, an independent commune, a collective individuality, a singularity, has had its day. In order for it to become again such a thing, it would be necessary for it to start, conscientiously and resolutely, a movement in the opposite direction; for it to set down, along with its mural crown,695 the crown of capital city, and to fly the flag of the federation. If this is the signal that M. Picard intended to give, claiming in the name of the city of Paris the reestablishment of municipal liberties, fine. We can applaud his efforts. In the contrary case, M. Picard is completely misled, and M. Billaut is right to tell him that the Government will never relinquish the administration of the capital.

  For my part, I will end by declaring: I believe, as an axiom of my reason, as a general thesis, that all evolution of a finite being must have an end, that this end is the beginning of another being; in particular, that the development of French unity, beginning almost 2,000 years ago, is nearing its end; that our centralising process no longer has anything to engulf, Power nothing more to absorb, the tax office nothing more to squeeze; that, moreover, the old spirit of the communes is dead, long dead, witness Paris, and that the simulacrum of municipal institutions, which have been deluding us since the proclamation of the famous one and indivisible Republic, has had its day. I believe that we are separated from pure political and economic communism only by the thickness of the constitution,—I mean by a sheet of paper. And since, as I say, nations cannot die nor can civilisation regress, I remain convinced, in the depths of my soul, that the moment approaches when, after a last crisis, a movement in the opposite direction, heeding the call of new principles, will begin. Then and only then will we recover our liberties. I communicate this opinion, which certainly is not only my own, by the means of the press, to the public, to the workers’ Democracy, of which I have only deduced the basic principles at this time. I do not know what the Democracy will make of my warnings; but it will agree with me at least on one thing: that is with such thoughts in our hearts (on the conditions of municipal liberty, and on political centralisation), we, my friends and I, have only to send a representative to the legislative Body, and there were we know in advance that, if he stays true to his mandate, he can only cause a scandal; if, on the contrary, he obeys his oath [of office], he will become a traitor to his political religion and his friends.

  APPENDIX: THE THEORY OF PROPERTY

  1865

  Translation by Shawn P. Wilbur

  “If I ever find myself a proprietor, may God and men, the poor especially, forgive me for it!”

  PROUDHON’S Théorie de la propriété WAS POSTHUMOUSLY PUBLISHED from an unfinished manuscript in the year of his death by his friends. It was started in 1860/1 but, significantly, Proudhon never completed it, preferring to write and publish other works (such as The Federative Principle). Given that he completed The Political Capacity of the Working Classes on his death-bed, the question remains as how important this work is in terms of the overall evolution of his ideas. This is why this extract is in an appendix.

  What becomes clear from this work is that there is no significant change in Proudhon’s perspective on property and possession. The usual themes of his work are there, such as the land as common property, workers’ associations and the absolutist nature of property. His ap
parent new found support for “property” is not for capitalist private property. Rather, it is for property which combines ownership and use. As such, rather than a conversion away from his previous ideas this work represented more a slight shift in his position. The vision expounded is the familiar Proudhonian one of an artisan, peasant and workers co-operative based economy.

  CHAPTER IX

  SUMMARY

  THE DEVELOPMENTS THAT I have given to my theory of property can be summed up in a few pages.

  A first thing to observe is that, under the generic name of property, the apologists for that institution have confused, either through ignorance or through artifice, all manners of possession: communal system, emphyteusis, usufruct, feudal and allodial systems;696 they have reasoned about capital as if it were income, of fungible property as if it were immovable property. We have done justice to that confusion.

  Possession, indivisible, untransferable, inalienable, pertains to the sovereign, prince, government, or collectivity, of which the tenant is more or less the dependent, bondman or vassal. The Germans, before the invasion, the barbarians of the Middle Ages, knew only it; it is the principle of all the Slavic race, applied at this moment by the Emperor Alexander to sixty million peasants. That possession implies in it the various rights of use, habitation, cultivation, pasture, hunting, and fishing—all the natural rights that Brissot697 called property according to nature; it is to a possession of that sort, but which I had not defined, that I referred in my first Memoir and in my Contradictions. That form of possession is a great step in civilisation; it is better in practice than the absolute domain of the Romans, reproduced in our anarchic property, which is killing itself with fiscal crises and its own excesses. It is certain that the economist can require nothing more: there the worker is rewarded, his fruits guaranteed; all that belongs legitimately to him is protected. The theory of possession, principle of civilisation of the Slavic societies, is the most honourable of that race: it redeems the tardiness of its development and makes the crime of the Polish nobility inexpiable.

  But is that the last word of civilisation, and of right as well? I do not think so; one can conceive something more; the sovereignty of man is not entirely satisfied; [its] liberty and vitality are not great enough.

  Simple or allodial property—divisible and alienable—is the absolute domain of the holder over something, “the right of use and of abuse,” known initially as the quiritary law; “within the limits of the law,” the collective consciousness adds later. Property is Roman; I find it clearly articulated only in Italy; and yet its formation is slow.

  The justification of the domain of property has always been the despair of jurists, economists, and philosophers. The principle of appropriation is that every product of labour,—such as a bow, some arrows, a plough, a rake, a house,—belongs by right to whoever has created it. Man does not create matter; he only shapes it. Nevertheless, although he did not create the wood from which he fashions a bow, a bed, a table, some chairs, or a bucket, it is the practice that the material follows the form, and that property in labour implies property in materials. It is presupposed that this material is offered to all, that no one is excluded, and that each may appropriate it.

  Does the theory that the form carries the content apply to cultivated land? It is well-proven that the producer has a right to his product, the settler to the fruits that he has created. It is proven as well that one has a right to limit one’s consumption, accumulate a capital, and do with it whatever one likes. But the land question cannot be answered in this manner; it is a new fact which exceeds the limit of the right of the producer. That producer did not create the soil, [which is] common to all. It is proven that he who has readied, furnished, cleaned up and cleared the soil has a right to remuneration, to compensation; it will be demonstrated that this compensation must consist, not in a monetary sum, but in the privilege of planting the cleared soil during a given time. Let us go all the way: it will be proven that each year of culture, involving improvement, entails for the cultivator the right to a fresh compensation. Very well! The property is not perpetual. Farm leases of nine, twelve, or thirty years can take all of that into account with regard to the farmer, with respect to whom the proprietor represents the public domain. The land tenure of the Slavic commune also takes into account the sharecropper; the law is satisfied, labour compensated: there is no property. The Roman law and the Civil Code have perfectly distinguished all of these things: rights of use, usufruct, habitation, exploitation, possession. How do the economists pretend to confuse these with the right of property? What are we to make of M. Thiers’ paeans to of the bucolic and all the stupid declamations of the coterie?

  Social economy, like right, knows no domain, and exists entirely outside of property: concept of value, wages, labour, product, exchange, circulation, rent, sale and purchase, currency, tax, credit, theory of population, monopoly, patents, rights of authors, insurance, public service, association, etc. The relations of family and city have no more need of property; domain may be reserved to the commune, or to the State; rent then becomes tax; the cultivator becomes possessor; it is better than tenant farming, better than sharecropping; liberty and individuality enjoy the same guarantees.

  It must be well understood: humanity itself is not even proprietor of the earth: how could a nation, how could a private individual, say that it is sovereign over the portion that is its due? Humanity has not created the soil: man and the earth have been created for one another and come under a higher authority. We have received the earth in tenancy and usufruct; it has been given to us to be possessed, exploited by us jointly and individually, under our collective and personal responsibility. We become the cultivator, the possessor, by enjoying, not arbitrarily, but according to rules that consciousness and reason discover, and for an end which goes beyond our pleasure: these rules and this end exclude all absolutism on our part, and refer terrestrial domain to a higher authority than ours. Man, said one of our bishops one day, is the foreman of the globe. These words have been highly praised. Well, it does not express anything but what I have just said, that property is superior to humanity, superhuman, and that every attribution of that sort, to us poor creatures, is usurpation.

  All of our arguments in favour of property, that is, of an eminent sovereignty over things, only succeed in demonstrating possession, usufruct, usage, the right to live and to work, nothing more.

  We must always come to the conclusion that property is a true legal fiction; only it could be that the fiction is grounded in such a way that we must regard it as legitimate. Otherwise, we do not depart from the realm of the possessory, and all of our argumentation is sophistic and in bad faith. It may be possible that this fiction, which appalls us because we do not see the sense in it, is so sublime, so splendid, so lofty in its justice, that none of our most real, most positive, most immanent rights approach it, and they themselves only subsist by means of that keystone, a true fiction.

  The principle of property—ultra-legal, extra-juridical, anti-economic, superhuman—is nonetheless a spontaneous product of the collective Being and of society, and it falls to us to search in it for, if not a complete justification, at least an explanation.

  The right of property is absolute, jus utendi et abutendi, the right of use and abuse. It opposes itself to another absolute, government, which begins by imposing on its antagonist the restriction, quatenùs juris ratio patitur, “within the limits of the law.” From the reason of the law to raison d’État is only a step: we are in constant danger of usurpation and despotism. The justification of property, which we have vainly sought in its origins—first occupancy, usucapion,698 conquest, appropriation by labour,—we find in its ends: it is essentially political. Where domain belongs to the collectivity, senate, aristocracy, prince or emperor, there is only feudalism, vassalage, hierarchy and subordination; no liberty, consequently, nor autonomy. It is to break the bonds of collective sovereignty, so exorbitant, so formidable, that the domain of pr
operty has been raised against it, true sign of the sovereignty of the citizen; it is to break those bonds that this domain has been assigned to the individual, the State retaining only the parts deemed indivisible and common: waterways, lakes, ponds, roads, public places, waste lands, uncultivated mountains, forests, deserts, and all that which cannot be appropriated. It is in order to increase the ease of transport and circulation that the earth has been rendered liquid, alienable, divisible, after having been rendered hereditary. Allodial property is a division of sovereignty: on that account it is particularly odious to power and democracy. It is odious first because of its omnipotence; it is the adversary of autocracy, as liberty is the enemy of authority; it does not please the democrats, who are all on fire for unity, centralisation, and absolutism. The people are cheerful when they look to make war against the proprietors. And yet allodium is the basis of the republic.