Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  This is nonsense, with Marx himself subsequently acknowledging that co-operatives show “[b]y deed instead of by argument” that “production on a large scale... may be carried on without the existence of a class of masters employing a class of hands.”339 In them “the opposition between capital and labour is abolished,” they are “a new mode of production” which “develops and is formed naturally out of the old.”340 So the steam-mill can be run without the industrial capitalist, by a workers association. Which was precisely what Proudhon did advocate:it is necessary to destroy or modify the predominance of capital over labour, to change the relations between employer and worker, to solve, in a word, the antinomy of division and that of machinery; it is necessary to ORGANISE LABOUR.341

  Marx’s comments were related to his dismissal of Proudhon’s “constituted value” which he asserted was incompatible with an advanced economy. Commodities “produced in such proportions that they can be sold at an honest price” was “only possible in the epoch in which the means of production were limited, and in which exchange only took place within very narrow limits” (72–3). Yet Proudhon has had the last laugh for, as capitalism has developed, the market price of goods has been replaced to a large degree with administered prices. Empirical research has concluded that a significant proportion of goods have prices based on mark-up, normal cost and target rate of return pricing procedures and “the existence of stable, administered market prices implies that the markets in which they exist are not organised like auction markets or like the early retail markets and oriental bazaars” as imagined in mainstream economic ideology.342 Proudhon’s notion of an economy based on the “just price,” one which reflects costs, has become more possible over time rather than less as Marx had asserted.

  Another area where Marx’s critique has proven to be lacking was his argument in favour of central planning. Given the actual experience of planned economies, it is amusing to read him suggest that “[i]f the division of labour in a modern factory, were taken as a model to be applied to an entire society, the society best organised for the production of wealth would be incontestably that which had but one single master distributing the work, according to a regulation arranged beforehand, to the various members of the community” (147). In reality, such a centralised system would be, and was, swamped by the task of gathering and processing the information required to plan well. Proudhon’s decentralised system would be the best organised simply because it can access and communicate the necessary information to make informed decisions on what, when and how to produce goods.343

  The core of Marx’s critique rested on a massive confusion of commodity production (the market) and capitalism. Yet in 1867 he was clear that wage-labour was the necessary pre-condition for capitalism, not commodity production, as “the means of production and subsistence, while they remain the property of the immediate producer, are not capital. They only become capital under circumstances in which they serve at the same time as means of exploitation of, and domination over, the worker.” When the producer owns his “conditions of labour” and “employs that labour to enrich himself instead of the capitalist” then it is an economic system “diametrically opposed” to capitalism.344

  While Proudhon was in favour of commodity production, he was against wage-labour, that is labour as a commodity. Yet this did not stop Marx asserting that in Proudhon’s system labour was “itself a commodity” (55). Marx did let that awkward fact slip into his diatribe:[Proudhon] has a misgiving that it is to make of the minimum wage the natural and normal price of direct labour, that it is to accept the existing state of society. So, to escape from this fatal consequence he performs a volte-face and pretends that labour is not a commodity, that it could not have a value... He forgets that his whole system rests on the labour commodity, on labour which is trafficked, bought and sold, exchanged for products... He forgets all. (62–3)

  Or, conversely, Marx remembers that Proudhon’s whole system rests on abolishing labour as a commodity.

  In short, the future Marx, with his comments on artisan production and co-operative workplaces, shows how wrong he was in 1847 to assert against Proudhon that the “mode of exchange of products depends upon the mode of production... Individual exchange also corresponds to a determined method production, which itself corresponds to the antagonism of classes. Thus there is no individual exchange without the antagonism of classes” (84).

  This is not the only area in which the Marx of 1847 is in direct contradiction to his more mature future self. Marx proclaims against Proudhon that “relative value, measured by labour-time, is fatally the formula of the modern slavery of the worker. Instead of being, as M. Proudhon would have it, the ‘revolutionary theory’ of the emancipation of the proletariat” (55). Come 1875, Marx-the-older proclaims in his Critique of the Gotha Programme the use of labour-notes in the period of transition to communism.345

  Key aspects of Marx’s later analysis of capitalism can be found in Proudhon’s work. Marx mocks the suggestion that labour “is said to have value, not as merchandise itself, but in view of the values supposed to be contained in it potentially. The value of labour is a figurative expression, an anticipation of effect from cause” which “becomes a reality through its product.”346 Marx argues:All the reasonings of M. Proudhon confine themselves to this: We do not purchase labour as an instrument of immediate consumption. No, we buy it as an instrument of production... Merely as a commodity labour is worth nothing and produces nothing. M. Proudhon might as well have said that there are no commodities in existence at all, seeing that every commodity is only acquired for some use and never merely as a commodity. (62)

  Marx-the-older, however, argued that the “purchaser of labour-power consumes it by setting the seller of it to work” and so “becomes in actuality what previously he only was potentially,” a worker who produces “a specific article.”347 Thus Proudhon “anticipated an idea that Marx was to develop as one of the key elements in the concept of labour power, viz. that as a commodity , labour produces nothing and it exists independently of and prior to the exercise of its potential to produce value as active labour.”348 Marx-the-older used this insight to argue that labour-power “is purchased for the production of commodities which contain more labour than [is] paid for” and so “surplus-value is nothing but objectified surplus labour.”349 In this he repeated Proudhon who argued that non-labour incomes are “but the materialisation of the aphorism, All labour should leave an excess.” As “all value is born of labour” it meant “that no wealth has its origin in privilege” and so “labour alone is the source of revenue among men.”350 Thus profit, interest and rent came from the capitalist appropriating the surplus-labour and collective force of workers:the worker... create[s], on top of his subsistence, a capital always greater. Under the regime of property, the surplus of labour, essentially collective, passes entirely, like the revenue, to the proprietor: now, between that disguised appropriation and the fraudulent usurpation of a communal good, where is the difference?

  The consequence of that usurpation is that the labourer, whose share of the collective product is constantly confiscated by the entrepreneur, is always on his uppers, while the capitalist is always in profit... and that political economy, that upholds and advocates that regime, is the theory of theft.351

  This analysis of exploitation occurring in production feeds into Proudhon’s few tantalising glimpses of his vision of a free society.352 Thus we discover that as “all labour must leave a surplus, all wages [must] be equal to product.” To achieve this, the workplace must be democratic for “[b]y virtue of the principle of collective force, workers are the equals and associates of their leaders” and to ensure “that association may be real, he who participates in it must do so” as “an active factor” with “a deliberative voice in the council” with everything “regulated in accordance with equality.” These “conditions are precisely those of the organisation of labour.” This requires free access and so all workers “straightway en
joy the rights and prerogatives of associates and even managers” when they join a workplace. This would ensure “equality of fortunes, voluntary and free association, universal solidarity, material comfort and luxury, and public order without prisons, courts, police, or hangmen.”353

  Needless to say, Marx ignores all this. Once acknowledged, it is incredulous to assert that Proudhon “borrows from the economists the necessity of eternal relations” and to end its troubles society has “only to eliminate all the ill-sounding terms. Let it change the language” and that such “activities form an essential part of the argument of M. Proudhon” (137, 61). In reality, Proudhon denounced “the radical vice of political economy” of “affirming as a definitive state a transitory condition—namely, the division of society into patricians and proletaires.” He noted that the “period through which we are now passing” is “distinguished by a special characteristic: WAGE-LABOUR.”354 His arguments for socialisation and self-management prove that he sought to end bourgeois relations within production. As Marx-the-older admitted, capital’s “existence” is “by no means given with the mere circulation of money and commodities.” This “new epoch” in social production requires the proprietor finding “in the market” the worker “as seller of his own labour-power. ”355 So “if one eliminates the capitalists, the means of production cease to be capital”356 and when “the workers are themselves in possession of their respective means of production and exchange their commodities with one another” then these commodities “would not be products of capital.”357

  This is not to suggest that Marx’s diatribe did not make some valid points. Far from it. Revolutionary anarchists would agree with Marx on unions being “a rampart for the workers in their struggle with the capitalists” and that “the determination of value by labour time, that is to say the formula which M. Proudhon has given us as the regenerating formula of the future, is... only the scientific expression of the economic relations of existing society” (187, 74). Such valid points should not blind us to the distortions that work contains, distortions which ultimately undermine Marx’s case.

  Significantly, while Marx’s 1847 work has become considered by Marxists as a key document in the development of his ideas, at the time its impact was null. Proudhon remained one of Europe’s foremost socialist thinkers and Marx’s attack “sank into obscurity” and “by 1864 his name meant nothing to the new generation of working-class leaders” in France.358 It is only after the eclipse of Proudhon by social democracy that it became better known. It undoubtedly helped that, unlike when it was written, few would have read Proudhon’s two volumes.

  Proudhon carefully read and annotated his copy of The Poverty of Philosophy . Sadly a family crisis followed swiftly by the outbreak of the February Revolution of 1848 stopped a reply being written. Proudhon, rightly, thought social transformation more pressing than bothering with an obscure German communist. That he never did so is one of the great lost opportunities of socialism as it would have clarified some of the issues raised by Marx and allowed Proudhon to extend his critique of state socialism to Marxism.

  Finally, given how many people think Marx was extremely witty in reversing the sub-title of Proudhon’s book, it should be pointed out that even in this he was plagiarising Proudhon:Modern philosophers, after collecting and classifying their annals, have been led by the nature of their labours to deal also with history: then it was that they saw, not without surprise, that the history of philosophy was the same thing at bottom as the philosophy of history.359

  All in all, it is hard not to disagree with Edward Hyams’ summation: “since [The Poverty of Philosophy] no good Marxists have had to think about Proudhon. They have what is mother’s milk to them, an ex cathedra judgement.”360

  FURTHER READING

  SADLY, VERY LITTLE of Proudhon’s voluminous writings has been translated into English. Benjamin Tucker translated the First and Second Memoirs of What is Property? and volume 1 of System of Economic Contradictions and both are available on-line. He also translated numerous other shorter pieces. The First Memoir of What is Property? in a new translation is also available from Cambridge University Press. General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century was translated in 1923 by John Beverley Robinson (available on-line). The First Part and chapter one of the Second Part of Du Principe Fédératif was translated by Richard Vernon under the title The Principle of Federation. Other selections (mostly related to his Bank of Exchange, extracts from his exchange with Bastiat and a few parts of volume 2 of System of Economic Contradictions) have appeared in Clarence L. Swartz’s Proudhon’s Solution to the Social Question. Selected Writings of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon edited by Stewart Edwards has a comprehensive selection of short extracts on various subjects.

  Most anthologies of anarchism have selections from Proudhon’s works. George Woodcock’s The Anarchist Reader has a few short extracts, while Daniel Guérin’s essential No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism has a comprehensive section on Proudhon. Robert Graham’s excellent anthology Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas, Volume 1: From Anarchy to Anarchism (300CE–1939) has selections from Proudhon’s major works.

  The best introduction to Proudhon’s ideas is K. Steven Vincent’s Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism, which places his ideas within the context of the wider working class and socialist movements.361 George Woodcock’s Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography is the best available and is essential reading. Other studies include Robert L. Hoffman’s Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P-J Proudhon, Alan Ritter’s The Political Thought of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: His Revolution Life, Mind and Works by Edward Hyman. J. Hampden Jackson’s Marx, Proudhon and European Socialism is a good short overview of the Proudhon’s life, ideas and influence. Henri de Lubac’s The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of Proudhon is more concerned about Proudhon’s relationship with Christianity. Political Economy From Below: Economic Thought in Communitarian Anarchism, 1840–1914 by Rob Knowles presents a useful extended discussion of Proudhon’s economic ideas.

  Shorter accounts of Proudhon and his ideas include Robert Graham’s excellent introduction to the 1989 Pluto Press edition of General Idea. Jack Hayward has a comprehensive chapter entitled “Proudhon and Libertarian Socialism” in his After the French Revolution: Six Critics of Democracy and Nationalism. Martin Buber’s Paths in Utopia contains a useful account of Proudhon’s ideas. Other useful short pieces on Proudhon include George Woodcock’s “Pierre-Joseph Proudhon; An Appreciation” (in the anthology Anarchism and Anarchists) and “On Proudhon’s ‘What is Property?’” (The Raven 31). Daniel Guérin’s “From Proudhon to Bakunin” (The Radical Papers , Dimitrios I. Roussopoulos, ed.) is a good introduction to the links between the French Anarchist and revolutionary anarchism. Charles A. Dana’s Proudhon and his “Bank of the People” is a contemporary (1849) account of his economic ideas.

  George Woodcock’s Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements and Peter Marshall’s Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism, both have chapters on Proudhon’s life and ideas. Daniel Guérin’s Anarchism: From Theory to Practice is an excellent short introduction to anarchism which places Proudhon, with Bakunin, at its centre. Max Nettlau’s A Short History of Anarchism should also be consulted.

  For those Marxists keen to read a generally accurate and sympathetic account of Proudhon, albeit one still rooted in Marxist dogmas and dubious assumptions, then John Ehrenberg’s Proudhon and His Age would be of interest.362

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I WOULD LIKE to thank Shawn Wilbur, Paul Sharkey, Ian Harvey, Martin Walker, James Bar Bowen, Nathalie Colibert, Jesse Cohn, John Duda and Barry Marshall for their kindness in translating so much. Without their work, this anthology would be impoverished. I must also thank Shawn for his suggestions and toleration in replying to a constant stream of emails asking questions, clarifications and opinions on a whole host of issues
for this work. Lastly, I would like to thank Nicholas Evans and Alex Prichard for their useful comments on my introduction.

  A special note of thanks for Jesse Cohn who not only helped me work out two particularly puzzling translation issues but also did a wonderful job in proof-editing the manuscript. Many of the footnotes, for example, are his work.

  In addition, I would like to thank Robert Graham for providing me with the full version of Chapter XV of The Political Capacity of the Working Classes which had previously appeared in an edited form in volume 1 of his anthology Anarchism: A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas.

  Finally, I would like to thank my partner for her knowledge, experience and patience in answering my numerous questions on issues related to translating from French.

  A NOTE ON THE TEXTS

  THE TEXTS ARE presented in chronological order, so that readers can get a feel for how Proudhon’s ideas and ways of expressing himself changed over time. We have aimed to present newly translated material in full and have edited those which are available in English already. Any edits are indicated by bracketed ellipses and any additions are surrounded by brackets. We have tried to reproduce Proudhon’s own stresses and capitalisations.

  For those interested in reading the full versions of the material we present here, then please visit Shawn Wilbur’s New Proudhon Library (www.proudhonlibrary.org. ). A complete translation of The Philosophy of Progress is there, along with other material.