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Property Is Theft!

Page 110

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

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

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  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).

 

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