Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  Democracy has never produced a convincing response to this argument. Without a doubt, as the critics have well observed, the division of authority into two powers is the source of all the conflicts which have been tormenting our country for the last sixty years and pushing it to revolution more than despotism itself managed to. But this does not destroy the fundamental objection that without the separation of powers there can only be absolutist government, and that suppressing that division within the Republic is in effect establishing dictatorship in perpetuity.

  The democratic Republic, the Republic without distinction of powers, has also never seemed to unprejudiced minds to be anything but a contradiction in terms, a veritable retraction of liberty. And I confess that for my part—given the hypothesis of a centralisation in which all social powers converge in a single centre, the sovereign initiator and ruler—I very much prefer separate and responsible presidential government controlled by an assembly to the absolute and irresponsible government by assembly alone, and government by a constitutional royalty to government by elective presidency. Whatever the type of Government that is to be divided, monarchy or senate, the separation of powers is the first step towards a social constitution.

  This is therefore the basic pattern according to which society, ignorant of the constitution that might be appropriate to it, has hitherto sought to create within itself for the purpose of maintaining order:

  First of all a centralisation of all its forces, both material and moral, political and economic, in a word, royalty, a government;

  Secondly, to escape the inconvenient aspects of this absolutism, a central duality or plurality, which is to say, the separation and opposition of powers.

  Given this last point, for political theoreticians the problem has been to constitute the separate powers in such a way that they could never either be fused or enter into conflict, and to find a way for society to be aided and not repressed by them in the manifestation of its wishes and the development of its interests.

  It is this triple problem which all ancient and modern constitutions have endeavoured to solve, and which has represented a stumbling block for them all. The Constitution of 1848 succumbed to it as did the others.

  The Constitution of 1848, an imitation of the Charter of 1830, is basically socialist but has a political or see-saw form. On its socialist side it promises instruction, credit, work, assistance; it creates universal suffrage and submits to progress: these are new principles not recognised by ancient legislators and which the constitutive Assembly added to the Creed. In its political form its object is to maintain order and peace while guaranteeing the exercise of ancient rights.

  Now the Constitution of 1848, just like its predecessors, is incapable of actually keeping any of its promises, whether they be political or social; and, if the people were to take it too seriously, I venture to say that the government would find itself faced daily by the choice between a 24th of February or a 26th of June.

  The reason for this inability is, as we will see, partly because the socialist prescriptions introduced into the Constitution are incompatible with the political allocations; the other aspect is that the tendency of government is always, whatever happens, to take centralisation to its logical conclusion, by which I mean to say: to reconcile the constitutional powers in absolutism.

  One cannot accuse the parties of these contradictions: they are the natural product of both ideas and time. Governmentalism has always existed; it was in the majority in the Assembly, it was unthinkable for anyone to wish to abolish it. As to Socialism, it had been around in people’s minds long before the Constitutive Assembly was convoked and the February Revolution took place; even without any actual representatives it just had to be officially proclaimed owing to the need of the epoch and in consequence of the revolution. And if Louis-Philippe had remained on the throne, the same movement, which came into being through his fall, would have done so under his rule.

  Three elements form the socialist part of the new pact:1. The declaration of rights and duties, including the right to assistance in place of and as compensation for the RIGHT TO WORK.

  2. The idea of progress, the origin of Article 111, which established the perpetual power of improvement for the country.

  3. Universal suffrage, the still unnoticed but inevitable effect of which will be to change the public law utterly by suppressing government.

  It is my view that these elements, in which it is necessary to see an incomplete and disguised expression of the social constitution, are by themselves incompatible with any form of governmentalism, and that furthermore when powers have been separated such declarations will inevitably become for them a perpetual occasion of division and conflict. The result of this is not only the fact that the powers are unable to fulfil the duties imposed on them by the Constitution but that thanks to those very duties they cannot fail to enter into conflict and, if that occurs, one or the other or both will provoke civil war.

  As facts are the best demonstration of ideas, let us take the right to assistance as an example.

  Who does not see at once that the right to assistance, guaranteed by the government as a substitute for work, it is the same thing as the right to work travestied by an appeal to selfishness? The right to assistance was granted in HATRED of the right to work; it is as if it were paying off a debt or paying ransom for a property that the Government regards itself as obliged to reorganise public charity. Now, for anybody with a sense of logic or law and who knows the way in which obligations between people are carried out, it is evident that the right to assistance, equally odious to those who receive it and those who dispense it, cannot become part of the institutions of a society, at least in this form, and therefore cannot be the object of a mandate given by the sovereign People to the government.

  I am not talking of the problems of implementation, which are almost insurmountable.—Is assistance the same as charity? No. Charity cannot be organised or be the subject of a contract, it has no place in a legal system, it is animated solely by conscience. Assistance, when it is covered by the law and is the subject of an administrative or judicial action, recognised as a right by the Constitution, is something different from charity: it is unemployment compensation. But if the right to assistance is a compensation, what will be the minimum of compensation rendered as assistance? Will it be 25, 50, 75 centimes? Will it be the same as the minimum wage?...What will be the maximum? Which individuals will have a right to receive assistance? What will be the payment according to age, sex, profession, infirmities, domicile? Will conditions be set for the needy? Will they for example be obliged to live in special lodgings and prescribed localities—in the country more than in towns? We are falling into the regime of prisons [maisons de force]: assistance, or dole becomes a monstrous thing, compensation for lack of liberty. That is not all: who will bankroll the assistance—the proprietors? 200 million won’t be enough; new taxes will therefore have to be created, proprietors will have to be burdened to subsidise the proletariat. Will there be a system of making deductions from salaries? Well, then it is no longer the State or the proprietors and capitalists who render assistance but the workers who assist one another mutually: the working-man who has work pays for the one who hasn’t, the good pays for the bad, the thrifty for the wasteful and the dissolute. In all these cases assistance becomes a pension for misconduct, a give-away for laziness: it is the supporting pillar of beggary, the providence of poverty. Pauperism thus becomes a constitutional matter; it is a social function, a profession hallowed by law, paid, encouraged, multiplied. The poverty tax is an argument for disorder against savings accounts, pension funds, tontines517 etc. While you inject moral fibre into the people by means of savings and credit institutions, you demoralise them by means of assistance. Once more: I do not wish to stir up controversy in such delicate questions, where abuse is always mixed with the good and useful, where justice is only preferential treatment. I would like to know what can be the action of power in an institution f
unctioning on the twin principles of envy and hate? An institution that confirms, maintains and sanctifies the antagonism of the two castes and seems to figure in the Declaration of Rights and Duties as the stepping stones to a social war?

  Evidently the right to assistance, as with the right to work, is not within the field of competence of the government. These two principles, affirmed by universal conscience, are part of a completely distinct order of ideas, incompatible with the political order whose base is authority and whose sanction is force. It may be, and for my part I affirm this, that the rights to work, assistance, property etc. can be realised within another Constitution; but that Constitution has nothing in common with the one that rules us at present; it is diametrically opposed to it and completely antagonistic.

  I myself unintentionally contributed to the exclusion of the right to work from the Constitution—and I do not regret sparing my colleagues, as well as my country, this new lie—by a response I made to M. Thiers in the finance committee. Let me have the right to work, I said to him, and you are welcome to the right to property. By that I wished to indicate that as work incessantly modifies property and consequently the Constitution and the exercise of authority, the guarantee of work would be the signal for a complete reform of the institutions. However, my remark was not taken as such but as a menace to property, and I was not in the mood for explaining myself. The conservatives immediately vowed that work would be protected but not guaranteed, which from their point of view appeared fair just because they did not guarantee property itself any more than work. They thought they were working wonders and employing the ultimate tactical finesse by passing, in the absence of work, THE RIGHT TO ASSISTANCE, a nonsense instead of an impossibility. Could I not have said to these blind men: Oh well! Let me have the right to assistance and you are welcome to the right to work?... Then, hating the right to assistance, which had become as risky for all thinking persons as the right to work, it would have been necessary to fall back on another guarantee, or not grant anything at all, which was impossible. And as I could have reproduced the same argument every time in response to everything proposed by conservative philanthropy, on and on, ad infinitum, as social guarantees are after all nothing but the reverse of political guarantees, if I had wanted to I could have relied on making the conservatives reject everything including the very idea of the constitution, simply by pressing for those political guarantees.

  It is the same with all the political and economic elements that society is founded on as with the right to work and the right to assistance: all can be replaced by one another, because they are incessantly converting and transforming themselves into one another, because they are just as correlative as they are contradictory.

  Grant me education free of charge [gratuité de l’enseignement], I said on another occasion, and you are welcome to freedom of teaching [liberté de l’enseignement].518

  In the same way I could also have said: Give me the right to credit and I’ll let you have the right to work and the right to assistance in one go.

  Give me the equal treatment of all religions and I’ll let you have a State religion.

  Give me the power of revision and I’ll obey the Constitution for ever and ever.

  Give me the perpetual exercise of universal suffrage and I accept all the results of universal suffrage in advance.

  Give me the liberty of the press and I will, being more tough-minded than you who prohibit the discussion of principles, permit you to discuss even the principle of liberty itself.

  Society, which is an essentially intelligible affair, is completely based on these oppositions, synonymies or equivalencies which all interpenetrate one another, and the system of which is infinite. And the solution of the social problem consists in representing the different terms of the problem in such a way that they no longer appear to contradict one another, as they do at first in the very early epochs of social formation, but to be mutually deduced from one another: so that for instance the right to work, the right to credit, the right to assistance, all these rights, which are impossible to realise by taking the Government way, can be deduced from a primary transaction which is both outside and higher than the political system, as would be the Constitution of property, the equilibrium of values, the mutual guarantee of exchange, etc.; instead of awaiting the initiative of the public authority, it would actually make that authority subservient to itself.

  It is our ignorance of these transformations, together with our republican negligence, that makes us blind to our means and makes us always desire to inscribe promises into the text of our constitutions and add them to the catalogue of our laws, promises which it is not in the power of any government to fulfil, which are antipathetic to it, however it is organised, whether as an absolute government, a constitutional government, or a republican government.

  To put it concisely: is it your sole wish to produce political acts in society, to organise wars against foreign nations, to assure the supremacy of an aristocracy and the subordination of the working class domestically, to maintain privilege against the proletariat’s efforts to emancipate itself? The governmental system will suffice, with or without the separation of powers. It was invented for this purpose and has never served any other end. The separation of powers, which you propose as the primary condition of a free government, is nothing but a way of allowing the favoured classes of society to participate in the government’s revenues.

  But if on the contrary you wish to guarantee the following to all, together with legitimately acquired property: work, assistance, exchange, credit, education, cheap goods, the freedom of opinion, the right to publish, the equality of means? In a word, only the system of economic forces can satisfy you. But far from this system being something that may be established by way of authority and grafted on to the political constitution, so to speak, it is actually the negation of authority. Its principle is neither force nor number: it is a transaction, a contract.

  To vote for the Constitution of 1848, therefore, in which social guarantees are regarded as something emanating from authority, was to place the social constitution beneath the political constitution, the producer’s rights after the rights of the citizen; it was to abjure socialism and disown the Revolution.

  Neither Article 1 of the Preamble, positing the principle of progress, nor Article 13, expressing the right to assistance, nor Article 24, establishing universal suffrage, were able to compel me to support it: these three principles were subordinated by the Constitution to the political system, despite their lofty socialist and anti-governmental drift, and it was the facts no less than logic which were to prove very soon that progress, the right to assistance and universal suffrage were to fare in the same way at the hands of the new power as the right to work had at the hands of the constituent assembly.

  Progress! But it is evident that in the question of economic ideas the State is essentially stationary.

  To organise work, credit or assistance is to affirm the social constitution. Now, the social constitution subordinates and even disavows the political constitution: how should the Government take the initiative in such progress? Progress, for the Government, is the opposite of what it must be for the worker; it is also true, and the whole of history proves it, that far from progressing the Government tends to regress. Where would you like it to go, indeed, with its constitutive principle of the separation of powers? To an ever greater division? That would mean its downfall. From the point of view of political constitutions the four-year presidency and the unity of national representation are far from being a step forward but rather already a sign of the system’s degeneration. The true formula of the constitutional regime is the Charter of 1830, just as the perfection of government is absolute power. Do you really want to return to the July monarchy or regress to Louis XIV?—for it is only in this sense that power can progress. Let those who haven’t had enough of that speak up!

  Universal suffrage! But how could I have taken that into account, given a Constitution
which had arrogated to itself the prerogative of not only using it to create a lie but even of restricting it? By establishing electoral indignities the Constitution opened the door to [the law of] May 31st; and as for the veracity of universal suffrage and the authenticity of its decisions, what link can there be between the elastic product of a ballot and popular thinking, which is synthetic and indivisible? How could universal suffrage manage to manifest popular thinking—the real thought of the people—when that people is divided, by the inequality of wealth and by classes subordinated to one another, voting in servility or hate; when this same people, held on a leash by power, is not able to make its thought heard on any subject despite its sovereignty; when the exercise of its rights is confined to choosing its bosses and its charlatans every three or four years; when its reason, being fashioned according to the antagonism of ideas and interests, can only go from one contradiction to the other; when its good faith is at the mercy of a telegraphic dispatch, of an unforeseen event, of a captious question; when instead of inspecting its conscience its memories are evoked; when owing to the division of parties it can only avoid one danger by leaping into another, and is forced to lie to its conscience by the threat of losing its security? Society was immobilised by the 200 franc rule519: a poet personified it in the god Terminus. Since the establishment of universal suffrage it has been spinning—on the spot. Before that it was rotting away in its lethargy; now it suffers from vertigo. So, let us be more advanced, richer and more liberated when we have made a million pirouettes?...