Property Is Theft!
Page 110
revocability of delegates
revolution
and hypothetical capitalist encirclement
and internationalism
and large-scale industry
and liquidation
as historical necessity
day after
dual political and economic character
inevitability of
internationalism
necessity of
permanent
revolutionary consciousness
revolutionary internationalism
revolutionary consciousness
Revue des Deux Mondes
Revue Economique of 1842
Ricardo, David
de Richelieu, Armand Jean du Plessis
right
resulting from contract
Rittinghausen, Moritz
de Robespierre, Maximilien François Marie Isidore
Rocker, Rudolf
Roland, Pauline
Roman law
Roman Republic (1848)
Rome (ancient)
Rossi, Pellegrino
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques
Russia
S
Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de
salariat. See also wage labour
Samuel
Sarrut, Germain
Sauzet, Paul Jean Pierre
Say, Jean-Baptiste
scarcity
Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph
Schwartz, Justin
Schweickart, David
Schwitzguébel, Adhémar
science
and conscience
law of historical evolution
relationship to philosophy
scientific revolution
scientific socialism
secession
Second Empire
security
seesaw system
self-government
selfishness
self-management. See also autogestion
Senard, Antoine Marie Jules
separation of powers
philosophic rejection of
sexism
Sieyès, Abbé
de Sismondi, Jean Charles Léonard
slavery
in the US
small businesses
Smith, Adam
sociability
social constitution
identity with political constitution
social contract
socialisation
socialism
ambiguity of term
and compulsion
and factionalism
and financial organisation
and State Power
and the State
and utopian systems
as religious dogma
market
socialistic democracy
society
and economic equilibrium
relation to power
universal character of
versus government
solidarity
as mutual interdepedence of economic actors
industrial
Sonderbund
sovereignty
Spanish Revolution
speculation. See agiotage
spontaneity
the State
and confederation
and corruption
as absence of self-government
as welfare provider
class character of
disappearance of
finances
force of as defender of capitalist social relations
ministries of
post-revolutionary
postrevolutionary
socialism. See also socialism
state industries
unconscious prejudice in favour of
utopian transformation of
state of nature
statistics
stock market
St. Paul
Stretton, Hugh
style
supply and demand
surplus value
Switzerland. See also Helvetic federation
synallagmatic
T
de Talleyrand-Périgord, Charles Maurice
taxation
distributive tax [l’impôt de répartition ]
proportional tax [l’impôt de quotité]
self-
tax resistance
under Socialism
Terror
Thales of Miletus
Thatcher, Margaret
theocracy
Thiers, Louis-Adolphe
things
in philosophy
Third Estate
Thouret, Antony
de Tocqueville, Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel
Tolain, Henri-Louis
Tolstoy, Leo
Tomes, Robert
Toullier, Charles Bonaventure Marie
de Tracy, Antoine Louis Claude Destutt, comte de
trade. See also commerce, exchange international
Trélat, Ulysse
tribune
Troplong, Raymond-Théodore
truth
Tucker, Benjamin
Liberty
Turgot, Anne-Robert-Jacques
U
unification of forces
Union of Public Safety
unions
and strikes
reactionary character of
right to form, right to strike
unitarists
unity
of social power
of society
universal
universal suffrage
as invalidation of the right to resistance
generalisation of
restriction by law of 31st May 1850
use value
usufruct
usury
Utopia
V
Valette, Claude Denis Auguste
value
Varlin, Eugène
Vergniaud, Pierre Victurnien
Vésinier, Pierre
Vico, Giambattista
Villiaumé, Nicolas
Vincent, Steven K.
violence. See force
La Voix du Peuple
voting
property qualifications
W
wage labour
wages
calculated based on the capacities of the average worker
guaranteed
minimum necessary for reproduction of the laborer
not equal to product under capitalism
Walras, Léon
war
Warren, Josiah
Watt, James
weights and measures
Williams, Raymond
Wilson, Charlotte M.
Wolowski, Louis François Michel Raymond
women
Woodcock, George
work
right to
workers’ associations
and self-education
workers’ companies
workers’ co-operatives
workers’ corporations
workers’ democracy
workers’ societies
working class. See also proletariat
Support AK Press!
AK Press is one of the world s largest and most productive anarchist publishing houses. We’re entirely worker-run and democratically managed. We operate without a corporate structure—no boss, no managers, no bullshit. We publish close to twenty books every year, and distribute thousands of other titles published by other likeminded independent presses from around the globe.
The Friends of AK program is a way that you can directly contribute to the continued existence of AK Press, and ensure that we’re able to keep publishing great books just like this one! Friends pay a minimum of $25 per month, for a minimum three month period, into our publishing account. In return, Friends automatically receive (for the duration of their membership), as they appear, one fre
e copy of every new AK Press title. They’re also entitled to a 20% discount on everything featured in the AK Press Distribution catalog and on the website, on any and every order. You or your organization can even sponsor an entire book if you should so choose!
There’s great stuff in the works—so sign up now to become a Friend of AK Press, and let the presses roll!
Won’t you be our friend? Email friendsofak@akpress.org for more info, or visit the Friends of AK Press website:
http://www.akpress.org/programs/friendsofak
1 The Political Philosophy of Bakunin (New York: Free Press, 1953), 278.
2 Sadly, it is necessary to explain what we mean by “libertarian” as this term has been appropriated by the free-market capitalist right. Socialist use of libertarian dates from 1858 when it was first used by communist-anarchist Joseph Déjacque as a synonym for anarchist for his paper La Libertaire, Journal du Mouvement Social. This usage became more commonplace in the 1880s and 1895 saw leading anarchists Sébastien Faure and Louise Michel publish La Libertaire in France (Max Nettlau, A Short History of Anarchism [London: Freedom Press, 1995], 75–6, 145, 162). By the end of the 19th century libertarian was used as an alternative for anarchist internationally. The right-wing appropriation of the term dates from the 1950s and, in wider society, from the 1970s. Given that property is at its root and, significantly, property always trumps liberty in that ideology, anarchists suggest a far more accurate term would be “propertarian” (See my “150 Years of Libertarian,” Freedom 69: 23–24 [2008]). We will use the term libertarian in its original, correct, usage as an alternative for anti-state socialist.
3 Proudhon, General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (London: Pluto Press, 1989), 100.
4 “On Proudhon’s ‘What is Property?’” (The Raven 31 [Autumn 1995]), 21.
5 The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869–1871 (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books, 1992), Robert M. Cutler (ed.), 105.
6 Quoted in George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1986), 127.
7 “Modern Science and Anarchism” in Evolution and Environment (Montréal: Black Rose, 1995), 27.
8 Instead of a Book: By a Man Too Busy to Write One (New York: Haskell House Publishers, 1969), 391.
9 My Past and Thoughts: The Memoirs of Alexander Herzen (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 1982), 416, 417.
10 Quoted in Jack Hayward, After the French Revolution: Six Critics of Democracy and Nationalism (Hemel Hempstead: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1991), 213.
11 Anarcho-Syndicalism: Theory and Practice (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2004), 4–5.
12 The Paris Commune 1871 (Harlow/New York: Addison Wesley Longman, 1999), 91, 73.
13 The First International in France, 1864–1872: Its Origins, Theories, and Impact (Lanham /Oxford: University Press of America, Inc, 1997), 23.
14 French Revolutions, 1815–1914: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 196.
15 K. Steven Vincent, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 165.
16 “Preface,” Karl Marx, The Poverty of Philosophy (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 1995), 9.
17 Vincent, 3–4.
18 This can be seen from Proudhon’s defining work of 1840, entitled What Is Property? not What Is the State?.
19 Quoted in Nettlau, 43–44.
20 A History of Economics: The Past As The Present (London: Hamilton, 1987), 99.
21 Quoted in Vincent, 212–3.
22 Mutualism was first used by Fourier, the French utopian socialist, in 1822 while “mutualist” was coined by a follower of Robert Owen in America four years later (Arthur E. Bestor, Jr., “The Evolution of the Socialist Vocabulary,” Journal of the History of Ideas 9:3 [1948]: 272–3). Proudhon first used the term in 1846’s System of Economic Contradictions.
23 Vincent, 164.
24 Hayward, 191.
25 Marx-Engels Collected Works, 4: 32. Moreover: “Not only does Proudhon write in the interest of the proletarians, he is himself a proletarian, an ouvrier. His work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat” (41).
26 Louis Blanc’s claim, repeated by Marx, that Proudhon took this phrase from J.P. Brissot de Warville, a Girondin during the Great French Revolution, is thoroughly debunked by Robert L. Hoffman (Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P-J Proudhon [Urbana: University of Illinois, 1969], 46–48).
27 In addition, following the best traditions of French rationalism Proudhon also tried to prove that it was contradictory (and so “impossible”).
28 What Is Property? (London: William Reeves Bookseller Ltd., 1969), 84–5.
29 What Is Property?, 77, 66.
30 What Is Property?, 251, 130, 264, 266, 259, 267.
31 What Is Property?, 142.
32 What Is Property?, 395, 129, 293.
33 Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (London: MacMillan, 1969), Stewart Edwards (ed.), 80.
34 “Value and Exploitation: Some Recent Debates,” Classical and Marxian Political Economy: Essays In Honour of Ronald L. Meek (London: Macmillan Press, 1982), Ian Bradley and Michael Howard (eds.), 180. Ironically, Marx was not above invoking unequal exchange to explain exploitation: “Capital is concentrated social force, while the workman has only to dispose of his working force. The contract between capital and labour can therefore never be struck on equitable terms, equitable even in the sense of a society which places the ownership of the material means of life and labour on one side and the vital productive energies on the opposite side” (The First International and After: Political Writings Volume 3 [London: Penguin Books, 1992], 91).
35 What Is Property?, 123–4.
36 What Is Property?, 98, 184–5.
37 Compare this to Engels’s explanation that the “value of the labour-power, and the value which that labour-power creates in the labour-process, are two different magnitudes” and so if “the labourer each day costs the owner of money the value of the product of six hours’ labour” and works twelve, he “hands over” to the capitalist “each day the value of the product of twelve hours’ labour.” The difference in favour of the owner is “unpaid surplus-labour, a surplus-product.” He gushes that the “solution of this problem was the most epoch-making achievement of Marx’s work. It spread the clear light of day through economic domains in which socialists no less than bourgeois economists previously groped in utter darkness. Scientific socialism dates from the discovery of this solution and has been built up around it” (Marx-Engels Collected Works 25: 189–90).
38 System of Economical Contradictions (Boston: Benjamin Tucker, 1888), 202.
39 Vincent, 64–5.
40 General Idea of the Revolution, 81–2.
41 John Ehrenberg, Proudhon and His Age (New York: Humanity Books, 1996), 56, 55.
42 Donny Gluckstein, The Paris Commune: A Revolutionary Democracy (London: Bookmarks, 2006), 72. Gluckstein does, implicitly, acknowledge Proudhon’s real position by noting that big capitalists “could be excluded from commodity production through mutualism, or workers’ co-operatives” (75). If Proudhon really thought that exploitation did not occur within the workplace then why did he advocate co-operatives? Why did he consistently argue for the abolition of wage labour?
43 This is not to suggest that Proudhon thought that exploitation only occurred in the workplace. Far from it! His analysis of rent and interest showed that it did, and could, occur when workers were not toiling for bosses. Usury can exist in noncapitalist economies. However, to suggest that Proudhon argued that exploitation did not happen in production is to make a travesty of his thought.
44 The Marx-Engels Reader (London: W.W. Norton & Co, 1978), 2nd Edition, 626.
45 Vincent, 156.
46 Quoted in Vincent, 156.
47 General Idea of the Revolution, 97–8.
48 Donny Gluckstein asserts that “Proudhon wante
d to return society to an earlier golden age” after admitting that, in 1871, “[o]lder forms of production predominated” and conceding “the prevalence of artisans and handicraft production” in France (73, 69)! How you “return” to something that dominates your surroundings is not explained.
49 What Is Property?, 137, 130.
50 Quoted in Vincent, 222.
51 Selected Writings, 63.
52 Proudhon called these worker-managed firms various names including workers’ associations, workers’ companies and corporations. The latter should not be confused with modern corporations but rather referenced the producer organisations in medieval France (i.e., like a Guild in Britain).
53 General Idea of the Revolution, 222–3.
54 Quoted in Martin Buber, Paths in Utopia (London: RKP, 1949), 29–30.
55 Hayward, 201.
56 “From Proudhon to Bakunin,” The Radical Papers (Montréal: Black Rose, 1987), Dimitrios I. Roussopoulos (ed.), 32.
57 “Associationism” was born during the waves of strikes and protests in the 1830s, with co-operatives being seen by many workers as a method of emancipation from wage labour.
58 No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 75.
59 David Schweickart, Against Capitalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 100. For a fuller discussion of co-operatives see section I.3 of An Anarchist FAQ, Iain McKay (ed.) (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2008).
60 Vincent, 224–5.
61 Selected Writings, 75, 79.
62 This mutated into a “waiting” theory although the argument is identical. The economist Alfred Marshall who popularised the change in terminology did so as the rich obviously did not abstain from anything (see section C.2.7 of An Anarchist FAQ).