Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Could it be otherwise? No, and the discussion of the point of law does not require a long speech.

  The fallen system could define itself as the society’s government by the bourgeoisie, that is, by the aristocracy of talent and wealth. The system that they are working right now to establish—democracy—may be defined by its opposite—the society’s government by the vast majority of its citizens, who have little talent and no wealth. The exceptions that may be encountered in either of those systems do nothing to this principle, neither changing nor modifying the trend. Under a representative monarchy, it is inevitable that the People will be exploited by the bourgeoisie, and under a democratic government, it is inevitable that they will be exploited by the proletariat.

  But whoever wills the end wills the means.

  If monarchic representation were formed of representatives with an imperative mandate revocable upon the will of the electors, the bourgeoisie would soon lose its privileges, and royalty, which personifies that monarchic representation, would be reduced to zero. At the same time, if the democratic assembly were comprised of bourgeois individuals, powerful due to their talent and the wealth devoted to their principles and instantly replaceable if they betrayed those principles, the dictatorship of the masses would fall quickly, and the proletarians would return to their proletariat.

  Therefore, it is necessary for each form of government to surround itself with the stability conditions best for its particular nature: hence, M. Guizot’s resistance to electoral reform, universal suffrage and [Minister of Public Education] M. Carnot’s bulletin.

  But because nothing that creates a division in the People can last, it is also inevitable that those forms of tyranny will perish one after the other and, remarkably, always for the same reason: the bourgeoisie’s tyranny by the proletariat’s misery and the proletariat’s tyranny by the bourgeoisie’s ruin, which is universal misery.

  This was not the trend of thought on February 22nd, 23rd and 24th.

  The bourgeoisie, tired of its own government’s shamefulness, marched alone with cries of “Long live reform!” to the republic, and the working masses, enthusiastically repeating the cry of reform, caressing the bourgeoisie with their eyes and voices, also marched alone to the republic. The fusion of ideas and hearts was complete. The goal was the same although no one knew the route to which they were committed.

  Since February 25th, the revolution, misunderstood, has become deformed. The social that was in everyone’s thoughts was made political because it is always the political that is occupied with labour in the state (under the pretext of organisation), and the demarcation line between the bourgeoisie and the People, momentarily erased, reappeared deeper and wider. Incapable of understanding the republican ideal, handed over to demagogic and mercenary routine, the provisional government is working to organise civil war and horrible misery instead of labour.

  If the National Assembly does not end this despicable policy, France will soon learn through the most painful experience how much distance there is between a republic and democracy.

  5. Democracy is materialistic and atheistic

  If monarchy is the hammer that crushes the People, democracy is the axe that divides them: they concur on the death of liberty.

  Universal suffrage is a kind of atomism through which legislators, who cannot make the People speak as a unit about their essence, invite citizens to express their opinions one-by-one, viritim, absolutely like the Epicurean philosopher explains thought, will and intelligence as combinations of atoms. It is political atheism in the worst meaning of the word. As if adding up some quantity of votes could ever produce unified thought!

  “It’s from the clash of ideas that sparks of intelligence fly,” say the elders. It is both true and false, like all proverbs. Between the clash and the spark, a thousand years may pass. History has only begun to reveal itself to us for half a century; the ideas that once agitated Rome, Athens, Jerusalem and Memphis are only just enlightening us today. The People has spoken, no doubt, but no one has understood its words because it has been diffused in individual voices. The light of ancient ideas had been concealed from modern society. It shone for the first time in the eyes of the Vicos, Montesquieus, Lessings, Guizots and Thierrys and their emulators. Will we have to cut our own throats for posterity, too?

  The most certain way of making the People lie is to establish universal suffrage. The individual vote, with regard to government, as a means of observing the national will, is exactly the same thing as a new division of land would be in the political economy. It is the agrarian law transported from the soil to authority.

  Because the authors, the first of whom were concerned with the origin of governments, have taught that the source of all power is national sovereignty, it has been boldly concluded that it is best to have all citizens vote verbally, by rump or ballot and that the majority of votes thus expressed was equal to the People’s will. They have taken us back to the practices of barbarians who, lacking rationality, proceeded by acclamation and election. They have taken a material symbol for the true formula of sovereignty and have told the proletarians that when they vote, they will be free and rich, that they will rule capital, profit and wages, that they will, as other versions of Moses have, make thrushes and manna fall from heaven, that they will become like gods because they will not have to work anymore or will work so little that it will be nothing.

  Whatever they do and say, universal suffrage, evidence of discord, can only produce discord. I am ashamed for my homeland that for seventeen years they have agitated the poor people with this miserable idea! It is why the bourgeoisie and workers have sung the Marseillaise in chorus at seventy political banquets and, after a revolution as glorious as it was legitimate, why they have given in to a sect of doctrinaires! For six months, the deputies of the opposition, like actors on holiday, travelled through the provinces, and what did they bring back to us as the result of their benefit performances upon the stage of political privilege? Agrarian politics! It is under this divisive banner that we have claimed to preserve the initiative of progress, to march at the forefront of nations in the conquest of liberty, to usher in harmony around the world! Yesterday, we had pity for the Peoples who did not know as we do how to raise themselves up to constitutional sublimity. Today, fallen a hundred times lower, we still pity them, but we will go with a 100,000 bayonets to make them share the benefits of democratic absolutism with us. And we are the great nation! Oh, be silent! If you do not know how to do great things, or express great ideas, at least let’s preserve common sense.

  With 8 million or 8,000 electors, your representation with some different qualities will be worth the same.

  The law, whether 900 or 90 deputies create it, sometimes more plebeian, sometimes more bourgeois, will be no better or no worse.

  If I place any hope in the National Assembly, it is indeed due less to its origin and the number of its members than to events that can only advise it and the work of public reason, which will be to the National Assembly as light is to the daguerreotype.454

  6. Democracy is retrograde and contradictory

  In monarchy, the government’s acts are the deployment of authority; in democracy, they constitute authority. The authority in monarchy that is the principle of governmental action is the goal of government in democracy. The result is that democracy is inevitably retrograde and contradictory.

  Let us place ourselves at the point of departure for democracy, at the moment of universal suffrage.

  All citizens are equal and independent. Their egalitarian combination is power’s point of departure: it is power itself, in its highest form, in its fullness.

  According to democratic principle, all citizens must participate in the formation of the law, the government of the state, the exercise of public functions, the discussion of the budget and the appointment of officials. Everyone must be consulted and give their opinions on peace and war, treaties of commerce and alliance, colonial undertakings, works of public u
tility, the award of compensation and the infliction of punishments. Finally, they all must pay their debt to their homeland as taxpayers, jurors, judges and soldiers.

  If things could happen in this way, the democratic ideal would be attained. It would have a normal existence, developing directly in line with its principle, as do all things that live and develop. That is how the acorn becomes an oak and the embryo an animal; that is how geometry, astronomy and chemistry are the infinite development of a small number of items.

  It is completely different in democracy, which, according to the authors, exists fully only at the moment of elections and in the formation of legislative power. Once that moment has passed, democracy retreats; it withdraws into itself again and begins its anti-democratic work. It becomes AUTHORITY. Authority was M. Guizot’s idol as it is that of the democrats.

  It is not true, in fact, that in any democracy all citizens participate in the formation of the law: that prerogative is reserved for the representatives.

  It is not true that they deliberate on all public affairs, domestic and foreign: that is no longer even the representatives’ privilege, but the ministers’. Citizens discuss affairs, but ministers alone deliberate on them.

  It is not true that each citizen has public functions: those functions that do not produce marketable goods must be reduced as much as possible. By their nature, public functions exclude the vast majority of citizens. In ancient Greek society, each citizen held a position paid by the state treasury: in that context, the democratic ideal was achieved in Athens and Sparta. But the Greeks lived off slave labour, and war filled their treasuries: the abolition of slavery and the increasing difficulty of war have made democracy impossible in the modern nations.

  It is not true that citizens participate in the nomination of officials; moreover, that participation is as impossible as the preceding one, since it would result in creating anarchy in the bad sense of the word. Power names its own subordinates, sometimes according to its own arbitrary will, sometimes according to certain conditions for appointment or promotion, the order and discipline of officials and centralisation requiring that it be thus. Article 13 of the Charter of 1830, which assigned the king the appointment of all positions in public administration, is customary in both democracy and monarchy. In the revolution that has just been achieved, everyone understood this to such a degree that we could believe that it was the dynasty of Le National that succeeded the Orléans dynasty.

  Finally, it is not true that all citizens participate in justice and in war: as judges and officers, most are eliminated; as jurors and simple soldiers, all abstain as much as they can. In short, because hierarchy is government’s primary condition, democracy is a chimera.

  The reason that all the authors give for this merits our study. They say that the People is unable to govern itself because it does not know how, and when it does know how, it will not be able to do it. EVERYBODY CANNOT COMMAND AND GOVERN AT THE SAME TIME; authority must belong solely to some who exercise it in the name of and through the delegation of all.

  According to democratic theory, due to ignorance or impotence, the People cannot govern themselves: after declaring the principle of the People’s sovereignty, democracy, like monarchy, ends up declaring the incapacity of the People!

  This is what is our democrats mean: once they are in the government, they dream only of consolidating and strengthening the authority in their hands. This is what the multitude understood when they threw themselves upon the doors of the Hôtel de Ville, demanding government employment, money, work, credit, bread! And there indeed is our nation, monarchist to its very marrow, idolising power, devoid of individual energy and republican initiative, accustomed to expecting everything from authority and doing nothing except through authority! When monarchy does not come to us from on high, as it did formerly, or on battlefield, as in 1800, or in the folds of a charter, as in 1814 or 1830, we proclaim it in the public square, between two barricades, in the electoral assembly or at a patriotic banquet. Drink to the People’s health, and the multitude will crown you! What then? Is monarchy the end and democracy the means?

  The authors can think whatever they like, but the republic is as opposed to democracy as it is to monarchy. In the republic, everyone reigns and governs; the People think and act as one person. Representatives are plenipotentiaries with the imperative mandate and are recallable at will. The law is the expression of the unanimous will: there is no other hierarchy besides the solidarity of functions, no other aristocracy besides labour’s, no other initiative besides the citizens’.

  Here is the republic! Here is the People’s sovereignty!

  III

  […]

  But democracy is the idea of the endless extension of the State; it is the combining of all agricultural operations into one agricultural operation, all industrial companies into one such company, all mercantile establishments into one such establishment and all partnerships into one. However, it is not the endless decrease of general costs, as it must be under the Republic, but the endless increase of those costs.

  Thirty days of dictatorship have exposed democracy’s powerlessness and uselessness. All its old memories, philanthropic prejudices, communist instincts, conflicting passions, sentimental phrases and anti-liberal tendencies have been expended in one month. It went through utopia and routine, consulted quacks and charlatans, welcomed skilful speculators, listened to the preaching of the lawyers and received the Monsignor’s holy water. Yet, in everything that democracy proposed, decreed, sermonised and blustered for a month, who would dare to say that the People were recognised even once?

  I will conclude by repeating my question: the People’s sovereignty is the starting point of the social sciences, so how is that sovereignty established and expressed? We cannot take one step forward until we solve that problem.

  Of course, I repeat it so that I am not misunderstood. I do not in any way want to deny the workers, the proletarians, the exercise of their political rights: I only maintain that the manner in which they aspire to exercise them is only a mystification. Universal suffrage is the Republic’s symbol but not its reality.

  Furthermore, look at the indifference with which the working masses greet that suffrage! The most that can be gotten from them is their registration to vote. While the philosophers praise universal suffrage, popular common sense mocks it!

  The Republic is the organisation through which all opinions and activities remain free, the People, through the very divergence of opinions and wills, thinking and acting as a single man. In the Republic, all citizens, by doing what they want and nothing more, directly participate in the legislation and the government as they participate in the production and circulation of wealth. Therefore, all citizens are kings because they all have complete power; they reign and govern. The Republic is a positive anarchy. It is neither liberty subject to order, as in the constitutional monarchy, nor liberty imprisoned in order, as the provisional government understands it, but liberty delivered from all its obstacles, superstition, prejudice, sophistry, speculation and authority; it is a reciprocal, not limited, liberty; it is the liberty that is the MOTHER, not the daughter, of order.

  This is the program of modern societies. May democracy be forgiven for having, so to speak, formulated it through the very spectacle of its contradictions.

  ORGANISATION OF CREDIT AND CIRCULATION

  AND THE SOLUTION OF THE SOCIAL PROBLEM

  31st March 1848

  Translators: Clarence L. Swartz and Jesse Cohn

  PROGRAMME

  IT HAS BEEN PROVED THAT SOCIALIST DOCTRINES ARE POWERLESS TO RELIEVE the People in the present crisis.455 Utopia needs for its realisation capital accumulated, credit opened, circulation established and a prosperous state. It has need of everything we now lack; and these it is powerless to create.

  It has been proved that political economy, both descriptive and routinière, is as impotent as Socialism in the present situation. The school which is based wholly upon the
principle of supply and demand would be without means or power on the day when everybody would demand and nobody would want to supply.

  It has been proved, finally, that dictatorships, seizure of power, and all revolutionary expedients, are powerless against the universal economic paralysis, as moxa is without action on a corpse.

  At present the field is open to other ideas, public opinion calls for them, their sway is assured. I no longer hesitate to propose that which speculative study of social economy shows me is most applicable to the situation in which we find ourselves; it rests with you, citizen reader, to see in my proposition a goal for our future.

  Work is at a standstill—it must be resumed. Credit is dead—it must be resuscitated.

  Circulation is stopped—it must be re-established. The market is closed—it must be reopened.

  Taxes never suffice—they must be abolished. Money hides itself—we must dispense with it.

  Or better still, since we should express ourselves in an absolute manner, for what we are going to do today must serve for all time:

  Double, triple, augment labour indefinitely, and in consequence the products of labour; Give credit so broad a base that no demand will exhaust it;

  Create a market that no amount of production can supply;