Property Is Theft!

by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  We now continue and conclude.

  Workers’ Associations are the locus of a new principle and model of production that must replace present-day corporations, in which we do not know who is the more shamefully exploited, the workers or the shareholders.

  The principle that prevailed there, in place of that of employers and employees, after a trial entry into communism, is participation, that is, the MUTUALITY of services supplementing the force of division and the force of collectivity.

  There is mutuality, in fact, when in an industry, all the workers, instead of working for an owner who pays them and keeps their product, work for one another and thereby contribute to a common product from which they share the profit.

  However, extend the principle of mutuality that unites the workers of each group to all the Workers’ Associations as a unit, and you will have created a form of civilisation that, from all points of view—political, economic, aesthetic—differs completely from previous civilisations, that can no longer return to feudalism or imperialism, with all possible guarantees of freedom, fair advertising, an impenetrable system of insurance against theft, fraud, misappropriation, parasitism, nepotism, monopoly, speculation, exorbitant rent, living expenses, transportation and credit; against overproduction, stagnation, gluts, unemployment, disease, and poverty, with no need for charity because it will provide us instead, everywhere and always, with our right.

  Then, no more anticipated achievements, the bounty hunt, subsidies to be shared among ministers, procurers, lawyers and administrators; no more hush money paid by suppliers and disloyal managers; no more stock market killings, feats of accumulation and latifundia. The inequality of conditions and fortunes will have disappeared, returned to its basic expression that lies in the differences blind Nature creates among workers, which education and the division of labour, etc., must continually decrease.

  Probity, honour and morals have fled the bourgeois world as they fled the feudal world before the revolution. They will only be encountered there.

  Certainly, there is a great leap between a few hundred workers forming companies and the economic reconstitution of a nation of 36 million. Furthermore, we do not expect such a reform solely from the expansion of those associations. What is important is that the idea works, that it has been demonstrated by experience; law arises in practice as in theory.

  We already know that our French example is bearing fruit abroad: corporations of workers in England have decided that, in the future, instead of spending their funds on useless strikes, they will use them to create companies based on the Parisian model. The final shock, that aforementioned inevitable liquidation, has been coming for more than eight years: it will be easier to organise work throughout the country than it has been, since 1848, to form the first 20 workers’ groups in Paris.

  II. Consumers’ associations

  The goal of these associations, such as the Ménagère, is to resolve the special problem of industry-industry relations and therefore Association-Association relations. They are primarily due to bourgeois initiative. Their existence proves that if, in 1848 as always, popular instinct understands ideas in their synthesis, the average intellect, with some training, will address itself first of all and with remarkable nimbleness of intelligence to the heart of the question.

  Although the internal administration of these purely commercial Companies did not present the same problems as those of the Workers’ Associations, they had the valuable merit, in an era of revolutionary agitation, of appearing as a conciliation of interests. It was a step toward that fusion of employers and employees that the utopians denounced as treason toward the People and the radicals as an instant banishment of democracy.

  The combination in question was less, in fact, a Company than a coalition through which a certain number of consumers guarantee a business establishment a steady clientele and constant market in return for a reduction on the current prices of products. The businesses’ profits, which, due to random luck, were higher than those of the industry in general, permitted a significant reduction of prices and corresponding improvement in the position of consumers. The consequence, more or less rapid, for such establishments has been to gradually guarantee to each consumer, based on his consumption, the labour he needs in the same manner as that consumer guarantees a market to the merchant. All consumption presupposes production: those two terms are correlative and adequate to one another.

  We believe that there was reason for optimistic speculation: unfortunately, this exceeds the ordinary reach of workers, whose unmanageability is so difficult to overcome, and who do not provide the bourgeoisie with immediate enough advantages for them to resign themselves to the effort, advances, and possible sacrifices required at the beginning. However, Consumers’ Associations have started to multiply in the county seats of the departments thanks to the sponsorship of some bourgeois who have thus given their fellow citizens co-operative bakeries, butcher shops and grocery stores. The police closed several of them following December 2nd: we cannot report on the status of this movement today.

  JUSTICE IN THE REVOLUTION AND IN THE CHURCH

  1858

  Translation by Shawn P. Wilbur (Programme) and Jesse Cohn (Fourth

  Study: Little Political Catechism)

  PROGRAMME

  §I: THE COMING OF THE PEOPLE TO PHILOSOPHY

  AT THE BEGINNING OF A NEW WORK, WE MUST EXPLAIN OUR TITLE AND OUR design.

  Ever since humanity entered the period of civilisation, for as long as anyone remembers, the people, said Paul Louis Courier, have prayed and paid.

  They pray for their princes, for their magistrates, for their exploiters and parasites;

  They pray, like Jesus Christ, for their executioners;

  They pray for the very ones who should by rights pray for them.

  Then they pay those for whom they pray;

  They pay the government, the courts, the police, the church, the nobility, the crown, the revenue, the proprietor and the garnisaire, I meant the soldier;

  They pay for every move they make, pay to come and to go, to buy and to sell, to eat, drink and breathe, to warm themselves in the sun, to be born and to die;

  They even pay for the permission to work;

  And they pray to heaven to give them enough, by blessing their labour, to always pay more.

  The people have never done anything but pray and pay: we believe that the time has come to make them philosophise.

  The people cannot live in scepticism, after the example of the gentlemen of the Institute and of the beautiful souls of the city and the court. Indifference is unhealthy for them; they reject libertinage; they hasten to flee from that corruption which invades from on high. Besides, what they ask for themselves, they want for everyone, and make no exception for anyone. They have never claimed, for example, that the bourgeoisie must have a religion, that religion is necessary for the regulars at the Bourse, for the bohemians of the magazines and the theatres, or for that innumerable multitude living from prostitution and intrigue; but that, as for them, their robust consciences have no need of God. The people want neither to dupe nor to be duped any longer: what they call for today is a positive law, based in reason and justice, which imposes itself on all, and which nobody is allowed to mock.

  Would a reform of the old religion be enough to respond to this wish of the people? No. The people have realised that religion had not been legal tender for a long time among the upper classes, while they continued to believe in it; that, even in the temples, it had lost all credit and all prestige; that it counts for absolutely nothing in politics and business; finally, that the separation of faith and law has become an axiom of government everywhere. The tolerance of the State now covers religion, which is precisely the opposite of what had taken place in the past. Thus the people have followed the movement inaugurated by their leaders; it is wary of the spiritual, and it no longer wants a religion which has been made an instrument of servitude by clerical and anticlerical Machiavellianism.
Whose fault is that?

  But are the people capable of philosophy?

  Without hesitation we answer: Yes, as well as reading, writing and arithmetic; as well as understanding the catechism and practising a craft. We even go as far as to think philosophy can be found in its entirety in that essential part of public education, the trade: a matter of attention and habit. Primary instruction requires three years, apprenticeship three more, for a total of six years: when philosophy, the popularisation of which has become a necessity of the first order in our times, must be taken by the plebeian, in addition to the six years of primary and professional instruction to which he is condemned, an hour per week for six more years, would that be a reason to deny the philosophical capacity of the people?

  The people are philosophical, because they are as weary of praying as of paying. They have had enough of the pharisee and the publican; and all it desires, and the point we have reached, is to know how to direct its ideas, and to free itself from this world of tolls and paternosters. It is to this end that we have resolved, with some friends, to consecrate our forces, certain as we are that, if sometimes this philosophy of the people spreads a bit too much from our pen, the truth, once known, will not lack abbreviators.

  §II: THE DEFINITION OF PHILOSOPHY

  Philosophy is composed of a certain number of questions that have been regarded at all times as the fundamental problems of the human mind, and that for that reason have been declared inaccessible to the common people. Philosophy, it was said, is the science of the universal, the science of principles, the science of causes; this is why we can speak of universal science, the science of things visible and invisible, the science of God, of man and of the world, Philosophia est scientia Dei, hominis et mundi.581

  We believe that the questions which philosophy occupies itself are all questions of common sense; we believe all the more that, far from constituting a universal science, these questions only deal with the very conditions of knowledge. Before we think of becoming erudite, it is necessary to begin by being philosophical. Is that so much to boast of?

  Thus the first and most important question, for all of philosophy, is to know what philosophy is, what it wants, and above all what it can do. What does all this come down to? The reader will judge.

  Philosophy, following the etymological signification of the word, the constant practice of thinkers, the most certain results of their labours, and the best-accredited definitions, is the Search for, and, insofar as it is possible, the Discovery of the reason of things.

  It has required much time and effort by the seekers, to come to that conclusion, which it seems the first comer would have found, if he had only followed common sense, and which everyone will definitely understand.

  It follows that philosophy is not science, but the preliminary to science. Isn’t it rational to conclude, as we just did, that education, instead of ending with philosophy, must begin with it? What we call the philosophy of history, or the philosophy of the sciences, is only an ambitious way to designate science itself, that is to say, that which is most detailed, most generalised in our knowledge, scientists by profession liking to stick to the pure and simple description of facts, without seeking their reason. As the reason of things is discovered, it assumes its place in science, and the scientist follows the philosopher.

  Let us examine our definition more closely.

  The word thing, one of the most general in the language, must be understood here to refer, not only to external objects, in opposition to persons, but to all that which, in the man himself, both physical and moral, can furnish material for observation: sentiments and ideas, virtue and vice, beauty and ugliness, joy and suffering, speculations, errors, sympathies, antipathies, glory and decadence, misery and felicity. Every manifestation of the human subject, in a word, all that passes in his soul, his understanding and his reason, as well as in his body; everything that effects him, either as an individual or in society, or which emanates from him, becoming thus an object of philosophy, is considered, with regard to the philosopher, a thing.

  By reason we mean the how and why of things, as opposed to their nature , which is impenetrable. Thus, in each thing, the philosopher will note the beginning, duration and end; the size, the shape, the weight, the composition, the constitution, the organisation, the properties, the power, the faculties; the increase, the diminution, the evolutions, series, proportions, relations and transformations; the habits, variations, maxima, minima and means; the attractions, appetites, accompaniments, influences, analogies; in short all that can serve to name known the phenomenality of things and their laws. He will abstain from all investigation, and from any conclusion, on the very nature or en soi of things, for example on matter, mind, life, force, cause, substance, space or time, considered in themselves, and setting aside their appearances or phenomena.

  Thus, by its definition, philosophy declares that there is a side in things which is accessible to it, which is their reason, and another side about which it can know absolutely nothing, which is their nature: can one show at once more sincerity and more prudence? And what would be better for the people than this modesty?... Philosophy, by its own testimony, is the search for, and, if possible, the discovery of the reason of things; it is not the search for, and still less the discovery of their nature: we will not complain about this distinction. What would a nature be without a reason or appearances? And if the latter were known, who would dare to say that the former was to be missed?

  To render account, in three words, of that which occurs inside, that he observes or carries out outside, of which his senses and his consciousness give testimony, and the reason of which his mind can penetrate: that, for man, is what it is to philosophise, and all that which allows itself to be grasped by the eyes and the mind is matter for philosophy. As for the intimate nature of things, that je ne sais quoi of which metaphysics cannot stop talking, and which it imagines or conceives after having set aside the phenomenality of things as well as their reason, if that residue is not a pure nothing, we do not know what to make of it; it interests neither our sensibility nor our intelligence, and it does not even have anything in it to excite our curiosity.

  Well, now. In what way is all that outside the range of the common people? Just as we are, do we not incessantly, and without knowing it, make philosophy, as the good M. Jourdain made prose? Who is the man who, in the affairs of the world, concerns himself with anything but that which interests his mind, his heart or his senses? To make ourselves consummate philosophers, it is only a question of making ourselves more sensitive to what we do, feel and say: is that so difficult? As for the contemplative, those who wanted to see beyond the reason of things and to philosophise on their very nature, they have ended by putting themselves outside nature and reason; they are the lunatics of philosophy.

  §III: ON THE QUALITY OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL MIND

  But here is a rather different affair! It is a question of knowing if philosophy, of which it was first said that the people were incapable, will not, by its very practice, create inequality among men. What can we conclude from our definition?

  Since philosophy is the search for, and, so far as it is possible, the discovery of the reason of things, it is clear that, in order to philosophise well, the first and most necessary condition is to is to observe things carefully; to consider them successively in all their parts and all their aspects, without permitting oneself a notion of the ensemble before being certain of the details. This is the precept of Bacon and Descartes, the two fathers of modern philosophy. Couldn’t one say that in expounding it, they thought especially of the people? Philosophy is all in the observation, internal and external: there is no exception to that rule.

  The philosopher, the man who seeks, who still does not know, can be compared to a navigator charged with making a map of an island, and who, in order to carry out his mission, being unable to take a photograph of the country from high in the atmosphere, is obliged to follow with attention, and to record one
after another on paper, with exactitude, all the sinuosities and crevices of the coast. The circumnavigation completed, and the summary of observations finished, the geographer would have obtained as faithful a representation as possible of the island, in its parts and in the ensemble, which he never could have done, if, holding himself at a distance, he had been limited to drawing perspectives and landscapes.

  The philosopher can also be compared to a traveller who, after having traversed in all directions a vast plain, having recognised and visited the woods, the fields, the meadows, the vineyards, the habitations, etc., would then climb a mountain. As he made his ascent, the objects would pass again before his eyes in a general panorama, which would make him understand that of which the inspection of the details had only given him an incomplete idea.

  Thus, he must stick close to the facts and constantly refer to them, divide his material, make complete counts and exact description. He must go from simple notions to the most comprehensive formulas, testing his views of the ensemble and the glimpsed details against one another. Finally, where immediate observation becomes impossible, to show himself sober in his conjectures, circumspect with regard to probabilities, to challenge analogies, and to judge only self-consciously, and always with reserve, distant things by those near, the invisible by the visible.—Under these conditions, would it be too much to say that the practical man is closer to the truth, less subject to illusion and to error than the speculative one? Regular contact with things preserves him from fantasy and vain systems: if the practitioner shines little from invention, he also courts less risk of making a mistake, and rarely loses by waiting. He who works, prays, says an old proverb. Can we not also say: He who works, in so far as he pays attention to his work, philosophises?