Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  So that we who, in the name of the Revolution and of the principle invoked by every single one of the parties who stand for it, are also and simultaneously striving for the abolition of capital and of the State, at a time when we should be rallying every opinion, find ourselves at odds with each of them, and upbraided and opposed by all of the very people whose cause we serve! Politics! If you want to get surely to power then refrain from being in the right against everybody.

  And so the Revolution that the middle class and the proletariat, by virtue of their shared ideas and needs, seemed to be competing to accomplish, has been stopped in its tracks by the short-sighted, illogical parting of the ways between their views and their interests. Since February 26th, when it looked as if everyone was agreed upon giving it a formidable forward thrust, the Revolution has been faced with the entire nation split into two antagonistic camps—those who, with Messieurs Dunoyer, Frédéric Bastiat, etc., following in the footsteps of J-B Say, were ready to surrender the State, were championing capital; and the rest, who, together with the provisional government, Louis Blanc, Pierre Leroux and the entire democratic and utopian tradition, were bent on turning the State into the creator of freedom and order.

  For, and we can say this without fear of misquotation and calumny, it was in all seriousness that Pierre Leroux, who rejects man’s governance of his fellow man, or so he assures us, nevertheless craves, in the name of the Triad and the consent of each one, to establish over all the sovereignty of THE FEW. The draft for a Triadic Constitution published by Pierre Leroux, which we will some day make time to examine, reeks of its author’s governmental tendencies. And it was also with the utmost seriousness that Louis Blanc, for all his celebrated dictum about going “from the master-State to the servant-State,” wants an authority formed, as all authorities are, through delegation by the citizenry; a State that is the organ and representative of society: in short, a government that may be to the people as the head is to the body, which is to say, master and sovereign.

  This is the contradiction which we are striving with all the vigour of our consciousness and all the might of our reason to banish. Whilst the political thinking by which the middle class is prompted and the economic rationale pursued by the people should, through mutual complementation, resolve into one and the same notion that would thus encapsulate the Revolution’s past and its future and reconcile those two classes, these two ideas are at war with each other and by virtue of their clash, stopping movement and jeopardising public safety.

  And this also lies at the root of the recriminations that our polemic has sparked every time that, contrary to one of the half-baked ideas competing for influence, it falls to us to expand upon one of the great principles of February. On our right we find the old liberalism, inimical to the authorities, but protective of interest and exclusive property; on our left, the governmentalist democrats, inimical, like us, to man’s exploitation of his fellow man, but full to the brim with faith in dictatorship and the omnipotence of the State; and in the centre ground stands absolutism, its banners emblazoned with the two faces of the counter-revolution; and, bringing up the rear, the moderates whose phoney wisdom is always ready to compromise with all shades of opinion.

  Each party ascribing its own contradictions to us, we are simultaneously accused by the democratic socialists of treason; by the liberal economists, of frivolity; by the moderates, of exaggeration. The first take us to task for preaching individualism after having opposed property. They tell us: you see only one term in the republican equation of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity; this AN-ARCHY of yours is Monsieur Dupin’s every man for himself, each to his own; what you attack under the name of government is the core idea of the age, association.

  The economists, in turn, ask us how it is that, rejecting State initiative, we could nonetheless look to the initiative of the people; they contend that putting society in the place of government through the organisation of the free interplay of wills and interests, still amounts to going around in the same circles and to opposing freedom.

  The moderates acknowledge the correctness of our reasoning: they give their blessing to our principles; but they refuse to follow us all the way to our conclusions. Following a principle through to its every consequence is, they say, tantamount to sacrificing truth on the altar of logic, venturing beyond the target one wishes to reach and going astray through exaggeration.

  As for the absolutists, they are, of all our adversaries, the ones who best understand us. They level no charges against us and do not slander us; they take the line that we are playing into their hands by making our reductio ad absurdum of all of the notions shared by pubic opinion, democracy, constitutional monarchy, economism, socialism and philosophism; and, bedazzled by their illusions, they gravely wait for us to be converted and repent our errors. However, the situation must become clear and this already too longlived error must come to its end.

  Who, then, is contradicting himself, us, or the governmental socialists whose noxious tendencies we have been denouncing these past twenty months and whose every defeat we have foretold? Us, or the liberal economists whose errors we have been refuting these past ten years? Us, or the pig-headed doctrinaires whom we are forever telling that their alleged moderation is nothing but impotence and arbitrariness? Who is it that needs to win his adversary over—we who have kept to the broad thoroughfares of progress all the way, or the supporters of absolutism, as rigid as milestones, at the furthest extremity of the horizon?

  All doubts will be dispelled and the public spared many a discussion if, just the same way as we agree in acknowledging, on the one hand, the bourgeoisie’s liberal inclinations and, on the other, the proletariat’s egalitarian tendencies, we might yet agree that they are one and the same.

  Is it true that socialism, an expression of the proletariat, is at war for all eternity against capital, indeed, against property?—Yes.

  Is it a fact that liberalism, an expression of the middle class, has, since time immemorial, been resisting the factiousness of government, the ventures of the authorities, the prerogatives of the State?—Again, yes.

  Those two points made, what say we?

  That what, in politics, goes under the name of Authority is analogous to and synonymous with what is termed, in political economy, Property; that these two notions overlap one with the other and are identical.

  That an attack upon one is an attack upon the other.

  That the one is incomprehensible without the other, and vice versa.

  That if you do away with the former, you still have to do away with the latter, and vice versa.

  That where capital is stripped of all interest, government is rendered useless and impossible; and, on the other hand, capital, in the absence of a government to support it, cloak it with its prerogatives and guarantee it the exercise of its privileges must, of necessity, remain unproductive and all usury unfeasible.

  Finally, that Socialism and Liberalism are the two halves of the wholesale opposition that Liberty has, ever since the world began, mounted against the principle of AUTHORITY as articulated through property and through the State.

  Are we wrong now, are we being frivolous, disloyal to our cause and treacherous to our principles when we champion this grand, magnificent conclusion? Is it our fault if the proletariat and the middle class, divided right now by the selfishness of their respective tendencies, are, in essence, of one mind on principles as well as on aims and on means?

  And just because self-styled revolutionaries, capitalising upon hatred, service this factious antagonism for the benefit of their own despicable ambitions, are we supposed to stay silent about our ideas, the same ideas as February? Should we cravenly shy away from the risk of calumny and unpopularity?

  But, they tell us, you are forever mistaking civilisation’s trends for its laws and this is where you go astray: that is the origins of the contradictions, inconsistencies and exaggerations of which the entire people accuses you.

  Thus one social
ist says, it is correct, and we were delighted to welcome this truth, that capital and products should circulate free of charge and that use of the instruments of labour should be guaranteed for all at no cost other than what covers the costs of depreciation. This, indeed, is one of the laws of society: and you yourself have demonstrated it mathematically. But, by the same token, it is not true that society can and should dispense with government. In the absence of government, in the absence of the State, who would then extend loans to the worker, organise commerce and ensure that everyone gets education and work?

  But, responds an economist from the liberal school, that is the very opposite of what is true. The abolition of governments is what societies dream about; and the elicitation of order by means of the boundless spread of freedom is their law. As for reducing interest, the phenomenon of social economics should be seen as a mere tendency rather than as a principle of amelioration. Rent on capital dwindles as capital proliferates; this is a fact. But it is nonsensical to claim that interest ever falls to zero; in that case who would be willing to make loans? Who would save? Who would work? Discard your political and egalitarian mirages, therefore, socialist, and follow freedom’s banner: the banner of 1789 and 1830!

  THE SOCIALIST: You do not want a social Revolution! You support usury! You actually advocate man’s exploitation of his fellow man! There is enough intelligence, initiative and patriotism within the people for it to be able to complete the Revolution on its own. It will be able to do without a suspect alliance: it will never tag along behind the bourgeoisie.

  THE ECONOMIST: Liberty is indebted to the bourgeois for all its gains; it is to it that the labouring class is beholden for the welfare and the rights that it enjoys, Thus far, it is this valiant and disciplined bourgeoisie that has, all unaided, shouldered the burden of Revolution: it will never allow itself to be overtaken, nor dragged along. It will never be carried along in the wake of the proletariat.

  Now, now, citizens. If you cannot see eye to eye with one another, then at least try to see eye to eye with common sense. How can you fail to see that every tendency points to a law? That tendency is law itself, not in the form of a latency, but in the form of action? Aristotle used to teach that the first cause of motion is the intelligible heavens, by which he meant pure Idea, Reason, Law. Thus what we describe in bodies as attraction, or in man as love or passion, is in society, tendency or progress; in organised creatures, life; in the universe, destiny. All of which is nothing more than a manifestation of the Idea, the Law, the Intelligible Heavens, commanding the creature, nurturing it, shaping it and magnetically commanding obedience...

  But let us put psychology, ontology and metaphysics to one side. Let us turn to facts and evidence. For as long as the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, in their mutual suspicion, hold each other in check, the Revolution, instead of growing peaceably, will do so in fits and starts; and at every step society will be in danger of a general dislocation. Let us show them both, therefore, that their principle is one and the same, their tendency one and the same and their pride one and the same: that whatever the one might do in the pursuit of its own interests would amount to a realisation of the wishes of the other, just as the victory of the one over the other would spell the suicide of them both.

  Odd, is it not, that, in order to break through universal ostracism, we should now need to effect a universal reconciliation?

  INTEREST AND PRINCIPAL

  DISCUSSION BETWEEN M. PROUDHON AND M. BASTIAT ON INTEREST ON CAPITAL

  1850

  Translation by Benjamin R. Tucker

  FIRST LETTER

  19TH NOVEMBER 1849

  THE OBJECT OF THE FEBRUARY REVOLUTION, POLITICALLY AND ECONOMICALLY, is the realisation of absolute liberty for the man and the citizen.

  The formula of this Revolution, in the political sphere, is the organisation of Universal Suffrage, or the absorption of the State in Society; in the economic sphere it is the organisation of circulation and credit, or the absorption of the function of the Capitalist in that of the Worker.

  Undoubtedly this formula alone does not convey a complete idea of the movement: it is only its starting-point, its aphorism. But it serves to show us the Revolution as it really is today; it authorises us, consequently, to say that the Revolution is and can be nothing else.

  […]

  “The extreme eagerness,” says M. Bastiat,559 “with which the French populace have engaged in the investigation of economic problems and the incredible indifference of the privileged classes with respect to these questions constitutes one of the most characteristic features of our epoch. While the older journals, the organs and mirrors of the upper classes, confine themselves to the discussion of the turbulent and fruitless questions of partisan politics, the papers devoted to the interests of the working classes are incessantly agitating the more fundamental questions of Socialism.”

  Well, we say to M. Bastiat:

  You yourself, unconsciously, are an example of this incredible indifference with which the members of the privileged classes study social problems; and, economist of the first rank though you consider yourself, you know nothing whatever about the present state of this question of Capital and Interest, which you have undertaken to defend. Behind the times, in ideas as well as facts, you talk exactly like a Capitalist of the ante-Revolutionary era. The socialism which for ten years has protested against Capital and Interest is wholly unknown to you; you have not read its literature; for, if you have, how happens it that, in trying to refute it, you pass by all its arguments in silence?

  Truly, to hear you reason against the Socialism of today, one would take you for an Epimenides suddenly awaking from an eighty years’ sleep. Is it really to us that you address your patriarchal dissertations? Is it the proletarian of 1849 that you are seeking to convince? Begin, then, by studying his ideas; familiarise yourself with his present doctrines; reply to the arguments, be they sound or otherwise, which govern him, and refrain from bringing forward your own, which he has known from time immemorial. Doubtless it will surprise you to hear it said that you, a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences, when you speak of Capital and Interest, do not touch the question! Nevertheless, that is what we undertake today to prove. Afterwards we will discuss the question itself, if you desire it.

  We deny, in the first place—and this you already know—we deny, with Christianity and the Bible, the legitimacy, per se, of Lending at Interest. We deny it, with Judaism and Paganism, with all the philosophers and law-givers of antiquity. For you will observe this primary fact, which is important as well as primary: Usury no sooner appeared in the world than it was denied. Law-givers and moralists have not ceased to oppose it, and if they have not achieved its extinction, they have, at least, succeeded to a certain extent in clipping its claws, in fixing a limit, a legal rate of Interest.

  This, then, is our first proposition, the only one, it seems, which you have heard stated: Everything which, in returning a loan, is given in excess of the loan is Usury, Spoliation. Quodcumque sorti accedit, Usura est.560

  But that which you do not know, and which, perhaps, you will marvel at, is that this fundamental denial of Interest does not destroy, in our view, the principle—the right, if you will—which gives birth to Interest, and which has enabled it to continue to this day in spite of its condemnation by secular and ecclesiastical authority. So that the real problem before us is not to ascertain whether Usury, per se, is illegitimate (in this respect we are of the opinion of the Church), nor whether it has an excuse for its existence (on this point we agree with the economists). The problem is to devise a means of suppressing the abuse without violating the Right—a means, in a word, of reconciling this contradiction.

  Let us, if possible, put this a little more clearly.

  On the one hand, it is very true, as you have unquestionably established, that a Loan is a service. And as every service has a value, and, in consequence, is entitled by its nature to a reward, it follows that a Loan o
ught to have its price, or, to use the technical phrase, ought to bear Interest.

  But it is also true, and this truth is consistent with the preceding one, that he who lends, under the ordinary conditions of the professional lender, does not deprive himself, as you phrase it, of the capital which he lends. He lends it, on the contrary, precisely because the loan is not a deprivation to him; he lends it because he has no use for it himself, being sufficiently provided with capital without it; he lends it, finally, because he neither intends nor is able to make it valuable to him personally, because, if he should keep it in his own hands, this capital, sterile by nature, would remain sterile, whereas, by its loan and the resulting interest, it yields a profit which enables the Capitalist to live without working. Now, to live without working is, in political as well as moral economy, a contradictory proposition, an impossible thing.

  The proprietor who possesses two estates, one at Tours, and the other at Orleans, and who is obliged to fix his residence on the one which he uses, and consequently to abandon his residence on the other, can this proprietor claim that he deprives himself of anything, because he is not, like God, ubiquitous in action and presence? As well say that we who live in Paris are deprived of a residence in New York! Confess, then, that the privation of the capitalist is akin to that of the master who has lost his slave, to that of the prince expelled by his subjects, to that of the robber who, wishing to break into a house, finds the dogs on the watch and the inmates at the windows.