171 Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings (London: Jonathan Cape, 1973), 100.
172 Quoted in Ehrenberg, 111.
173 There is some irony in knowing that Marx eclipsed Proudhon thanks to these two developments that were dominated by Proudhon’s own followers.
174 Douglas, 54.
175 “Anarchism Reconsidered,” Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2009), Vol. 2, Robert Graham (ed.), 280.
176 Namely, racism and sexism. While he did place his defence of the patriarchal family at the core of his ideas, they are in direct contradiction to his own libertarian and egalitarian ideas. In terms of racism, he sometimes reflected the less-than-enlightened assumptions and prejudices of the nineteenth century. While this does appear in his public work, such outbursts are both rare and asides (usually an extremely infrequent passing anti-Semitic remark or caricature). In short, “racism was never the basis of Proudhon’s political thinking” (Gemie, 200–1) and “anti-Semitism formed no part of Proudhon’s revolutionary programme” (Robert Graham, “Introduction,” General Idea of the Revolution, xxxvi). To quote Proudhon: “There will no longer be nationality, no longer fatherland, in the political sense of the words: they will mean only places of birth. Man, of whatever race or colour he may be, is an inhabitant of the universe; citizenship is everywhere an acquired right” (General Idea of the Revolution, 283).
177 Woodcock, Anarchism and Anarchists, 75. Marx fortuitously turned up to the founding meeting in 1864 after being invited by some German socialist exiles. The IWMA did not become “Marxist” until the gerrymandered Hague Congress of 1872 approved the expulsion of Bakunin and imposed the necessity of “political action” (i.e., standing for elections to capture political power) upon the organisation. It promptly collapsed, although the libertarian sections (such as Belgium, Spain and Italy) successfully organised their own IWMA congresses until 1877.
178 According to Archer, “the philosophical structure of Tolain’s address derived” from Proudhon while the “preponderance of organisers and members of the International in France were Proudhonist” (23). Varlin was “an autodidact bookbinder, labour organiser and leading Proudhonist member of the International” (Tomes, 81).
179 Woodcock, Anarchism, 198–9.
180 Archer, 45.
181 G.D.H. Cole, A History Of Socialist Thought (London: Macmillan , 1961), Vol. 2, 140.
182 Quoted in Hayward, 246. Proudhon had “predicted in March 1848 the internationalism of the Red Flag” (Hayward, 246).
183 Archer, xxi.
184 Archer, xxi, 69, 101. As an example of the ambiguity of words used at the time, public ownership was to be achieved by means of the state, although the “state” was defined as a “collectivity of individuals” with “no interests apart from society” (Quoted in Archer, 101).
185 Archer, 171.
186 Archer, 128.
187 Quoted in Guérin, Anarchism, 47. At the Brussels Congress, De Paepe had “reminded Tolain and other opponents of collective property that they were in favour of collectivising mines, railroads, and canals” (Archer, 127).
188 Anarchism, 47.
189 Archer, 170.
190 Anarchism and Anarchist Communism (London: Freedom Press, 1987), 16–7.
191 Cole, 168.
192 Quoted in Archer, 196.
193 Berry, 17.
194 Tomes, 84, 117–8. Gustave Courbet was one of France’s most famous painters, one of the Commune’s leading members and Proudhon’s close friend.
195 The Paris Commune of 1871: The View From the Left (London: Cape, 1972), Eugene Schulkind (ed.), 68–9. The “socialism of the Commune was almost exclusively the work of individuals with close ties to the International” (Archer, 258).
196 Anarchist Portraits (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988), 232, 231.
197 Thomas, 194.
198 Tomes, 73.
199 Marx-Engels Reader, 633.
200 Vincent, 232. It “might have been written by Proudhon himself” (Woodcock, Proudhon, 276).
201 Marx-Engels Reader, 633, 632, 635.
202 No Gods, No Masters, 78–9. Proudhon raised similar demands in his pamphlet Democracy earlier that year while Bakunin had been advocating mandated and recallable delegates to federal social organisations for some time before 1871 (ibid., 181–2).
203 Schulkind (ed.), 191.
204 Michael Bakunin and Karl Marx (Melbourne: A. Maller, 1948), 212–3.
205 Archer, 260.
206 Schulkind (ed.), 164, 167.
207 Marx-Engels Reader, 635.
208 Schulkind (ed.), 63–4.
209 Marx-Engels Reader, 626.
210 No Gods, No Masters, 78.
211 System of Economical Contradictions, 132.
212 Marx-Engels Collected Works 23: 370.
213 Marx-Engels Collected Works 42: 326.
214 Tomes, 93.
215 Vincent, 232.
216 Discussion of this important issue is outside the scope of this introduction. Those interested in the anarchist analysis and critique of the Paris Commune, and of Marxist accounts of it, can consult my article “The Paris Commune, Marxism and Anarchism” (Anarcho-Syndicalist Review 50 [2008]).
217 Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, 261.
218 Proudhon drew on such movements and ideas, such as the mutualist ideas of the French workers, particularly those in Lyon, as well as libertarian tendencies in the Great French Revolution.
219 As such mutualism must be considered as one of the four main forms of social anarchism alongside collectivism, communism and syndicalism (see section A.3.2 of An Anarchist FAQ).
220 Avrich, 137.
221 Avrich, 140, 139.
222 Mutual Banking (West Brookfield: O. S. Cooke, 1850), 49–50, 37, 34.
223 Quoted in Avrich, 141.
224 Instead of a Book, 323.
225 Frank H. Brooks, “Ideology, Strategy, and Organization: Dyer Lum and the American Anarchist Movement,” Labor History 34: 1 (1993): 72, 71.
226 See section G.1.3 of An Anarchist FAQ. Sections G.4.1 and G.4.2 discuss the contradictions in supporting wage labour while opposing political authority and supporting “occupancy and use.”
227 Paul Avrich, Anarchist Voices: An Oral History of Anarchism in America (Edinburgh/ Oakland: AK Press, 2005), 5.
228 Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings, 198.
229 “Modern Science and Anarchism,” 74, 78.
230 Bakunin on Anarchism, 2nd edition (Montréal: Black Rose, 1980), 402.
231 As do other forms of socialism. This can be seen from libertarian communist William Morris who classed the French anarchist as “the most noteworthy figure” of a group of “Socialist thinkers who serve as a kind of link between the Utopians and the school of... scientific Socialists.” As far as his critique of property went, Morris argued that in What is Property?, Proudhon’s “position is that of a Communist pure and simple” (Political Writings: Contributions to Justice and Commonweal 1883–1890 [Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1994], 569–70).
232 Anarchist Essays (London: Freedom Press, 2000), 20–1.
233 While firmly supporting the patriarchal family, Proudhon also stressed that he did “not mistake the family for the model of society” as he considered it “the rudiment of royalty” while “the model of civil society is the fraternal association” (No Gods, No Masters, 79).
234 “On Being Human,” Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE-1939) (Montréal: Black Rose Books, 2005) Robert Graham (ed.), 68–71.
235 Quoted in Carolyn J. Eichner, “‘Vive La Commune!’ Feminism, Socialism, and Revolutionary Revival in the Aftermath of the 1871 Paris Commune,” Journal of Women’s History 15: 2 (2003): 75.
236 The Basic Bakunin, 153, 152.
237 The Political Philosophy of Bakunin, 293. Even a large co-operative sector would be unlikely to reform society. As Emma Goldman noted, after readi
ng Proudhon’s General Idea in the light of the Spanish Revolution, had Proudhon been accurate then, the collectivisation of the economy after the start of the civil war “should have weakened the republican government, but as a matter of fact it has not.” It only gave the state “a breathing space so that they could reorganise their forces and become the dead weight of the Revolution” (Vision on Fire [Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2006], 275).
238 See section H.2.8 of An Anarchist FAQ.
239 “As early as the 1860’s and 1870’s, the followers of Proudhon and Bakunin in the First International were proposing the formation of workers’ councils designed both as a weapon of class struggle against capitalists and as the structural basis of the future libertarian society” (Paul Avrich, The Russian Anarchists [Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2005], 73). Echoing Proudhon, leading syndicalist Fernand Pelloutier argued that the aim was “to constitute within the bourgeois State a veritable socialist (economic and anarchic) State” (Quoted in Jeremy Jennings, Syndicalism in France: A Study of Ideas [London: Macmillan, 1990], 22). The IWW’s “we are building a new world in the shell of the old” has obvious similarities to Proudhon’s 1848 call that “a new society be founded in the centre of the old society” (Œuvres Completès 17:25).
240 Proudhon’s anti-communism is well known but there are different schools of communism, just as there are different schools of socialism. As Kropotkin argued “before and in 1848, the theory [of communism] was put forward in such a shape as to fully account for Proudhon’s distrust as to its effect upon liberty. The old idea of Communism was the idea of monastic communities under the severe rule of elders or of men of science for directing priests. The last vestiges of liberty and of individual energy would be destroyed, if humanity ever had to go through such a communism” (Act for Yourselves [London: Freedom Press, 1988], 98). This is not to suggest that Proudhon would have agreed with communist-anarchism (after all, he rejected Joseph Déjacque’s communistic interpretation of his ideas) merely that Proudhon’s opposition to state communism does not mean that anarchists cannot be libertarian communists. This was the position often taken by the American Individualist Anarchists around Tucker, with him in the lead. However, as discussed in section G.2.1 of An Anarchist FAQ, they also regularly admitted that voluntary communism was compatible with anarchism making their strident anti-communism both contradictory and needlessly sectarian.
241 The Conquest of Bread (Edinburgh/Oakland: AK Press, 2008), 189, 191, 188.
242 Guérin, “From Proudhon to Bakunin,” 33.
243 Vincent, 232.
244 Woodcock, Anarchism, 239. Significantly, when Bakunin met him at the International’s Basel Congress and, “once the program of the Alliance was explained to” him, Varlin said he “shared the same ideas and agreed to co-ordinate with their revolutionary plans” (Archer, 186).
245 Quoted in Hayward, 211.
246 Quoted in Hayward, 172.
247 Quoted in Woodcock, Proudhon, 13.
248 What Is Property?, 264. Critiques of utopianism played a large role in System of Economic Contradictions.
249 Quoted in Woodcock, 55.
250 Woodcock, 66.
251 Woodcock, 74.
252 Woodcock, 123.
253 La Représentant du Peuple (February to August 1848); Le Peuple (September 1848 to June 1849); La Voix du Peuple (September 1849 to May 1850); Le Peuple de 1850 (June to October 1850).
254 Quoted in Woodcock, 119.
255 “Never modest concerning his abilities, Proudhon wrote in his notebooks that the Revolution was doomed without his help” (Vincent, 169).
256 Ehrenberg, 103.
257 As Proudhon himself recognised in 1850, he was a “man of polemics, not of the barricades” (Quoted in Vincent, 169).
258 Œuvres Completès, 17: 45.
259 “Most of the votes for Proudhon were cast in working-class districts of Paris—a fact which stands in contrast to the claims of some Marxists, who have said he was representative only of the petite bourgeoisie” (Hoffman, 136).
260 No Gods, No Masters, 68.
261 Quoted in Vincent, 186.
262 Poverty of Philosophy, 200.
263 Woodcock, 136.
264 Ehrenberg, 122.
265 Quoted in Vincent, 189.
266 He rejected a Church wedding: “When the Pope becomes a social democrat I will allow him to bless my marriage” (Quoted in Hayward, 207). The first of three daughters: Catherine, Marcelle and Stephanie. Sadly, Marcelle died of cholera in the summer of 1854, aged two.
267 Correspondance, 3: 377.
268 December 2, 1851: Contemporary Writings on the coup d’état of Louis Napoleon (Garden City, N.J.; Doubleday, 1972), John B. Halsted (ed.), 253, 276, 283, 261, 307.
269 Œuvres Completès, 22: 264. These are possible because labour is “reconciled by its free nature with capital and property, from which wage-labour banished it, [and so] cannot cause a distinction of classes.” This “makes society, as well as [economic] science, safe from any contradiction.”
270 Pacifist thinker Leo Tolstoy was so impressed by this work he borrowed its title for his own masterpiece.
271 Œuvres Completès 14: 327, 272, 300, 330.
272 In fact, he dictated its last chapters as he lay in bed dying.
273 Second division, near the Lenoir alley, in the tomb of the Proudhon family.
274 This was prepared by J.A. Langlois, his old friend and follower, and others from the notes Proudhon had been working on during the three last years of his life. Except for the first chapter, it was not completed by Proudhon.
275 Woodcock, Proudhon, 239–40. Ironically, Proudhon recognised the confusion this would cause in 1841: “it is proper to call different things by different names, if we keep the name ‘property’ for [individual possession], we must call [the domain of property] robbery, repine, brigandage. If, on the contrary, we reserve the name ‘property’ for the latter, we must designate the former by the term possession or some other equivalent; otherwise we should be troubled with an unpleasant synonym” (What Is Property?, 373).
276 Selected Works, 129.
277 Quoted in Douglas, 45.
278 Selected Works, 33.
279 Selected Works, 133, 141, 140, 134, 129.
280 De la Capacité Politique des Classes Ouvrières (Paris: Lacroix, 1868), 142.
281 Principle of Federation, 41, 40–1.
282 Graham (ed.), Vol. 1, 74–5.
283 “The anarchists soon saw... that it was rather dangerous for them to use the same word as the authoritarians while giving it a quite different meaning. They felt that a new concept called for a new word and that the use of the old term could be dangerously ambiguous; so they ceased to give the name ‘State’ to the social collective of the future” (Guérin, Anarchism, 60–1). While, for some, this may appear to be purely a case of semantics, anarchists would reply that it just shows intellectual confusion to use the same name to describe things that are fundamentally organised in different ways and for different purposes. See section H.2.1 of An Anarchist FAQ.
284 As he put it in the 1860s, “centuries will pass before that ideal may be attained” but he wished to “grow unceasingly nearer to that end, and it is thus that I uphold the principle of federation” (Quoted in Woodcock, Proudhon, 249).
285 Anarchy is one of “four forms of government,” government “of each by each” and the phrase “anarchic government” was not “impossible” nor “the idea absurd” (Principle of Federation, 8–9, 11).
286 No Gods, No Masters, 46.
287 Graham (ed.), Vol. 1, 77.
288 Quoted in Woodcock, Proudhon, 251.
289 The peasants “desired to own the property they worked” and Proudhon was “quite content to call such ownership ‘proprietary.’” Before ownership limited to what was necessary to earn a living was termed “possession” while “property” was “reserved for onerous seigniorial types of ownership. Proudhon was now perfectly happy to consider posses
sion a form of property. There was a change in terminology, but there was no change in position” (Vincent, 195).
290 Thomas, 193.
291 In response to a comment in Marx’s “Political Indifferentism” on Proudhon’s attitude to strikes even the editor of a collection of Marx’s works had to state “[t]o give Proudhon his due, he was not so much justifying the actions of the French authorities as exposing the ‘contradictions’ he saw as an inevitable evil of the present social order” (The First International, 330).
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