63 Œuvres Complètes (Lacroix edition) 19: 197, 219.
64 The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (London: MacMillan Press, 1974), 376.
65 An endogenous money supply analysis recognises that money arises from within the economy in response to its needs rather than being determined from outside by the state or gold. So the emergence of bank notes, fractional reserve banking and credit was a spontaneous process, not planned or imposed by the state, but rather came from the profit needs of banks which, in turn, reflected the real needs of the economy. This analysis is championed by the post-Keynesian school today.
66 Œuvres Complètes 6: 90.
67 Keynes, 376.
68 Gesell produced “an anti-Marxian socialism” which the “future will learn more from” than Marx (Keynes, 355).
69 The Journal of Economic History 2: 1 (1942).
70 Libertarian Marxist Paul Mattick noted in passing that Keynes shared the Frenchman’s “attack upon the payment of interest” and wished to see the end of the rentier. Mattick, however, acknowledged that Keynes did not subscribe to Proudhon’s desire to use free credit to fund “independent producers and workers’ syndicates” as a means create an economic system “without exploitation” (Marx and Keynes: The Limits of the Mixed Economy [London: Merlin Press, 1971], 5–6).
71 “Proudhon viewed monetary reforms in the context of the institution of producers’ associations” and so he “was not promoting a simple ‘bankism’, but rather advancing this as one element in a larger social transformation” (Vincent, 172–73). As such it was misleading for Marx to suggest in 1865 that “to consider interest-bearing capital as the principal form of capital, and to wish to make of a particular application of credit—the pretended abolition of the rate of interest—to think to make that the basis of the social transformation—that was indeed a petty chandler’s fantasy.” Proudhon’s perspective was wider than this. It is ironic, though, to read Marx admit that there was “no doubt, there is indeed evidence to show, that the development of credit... might... serve, in certain political and economic conditions, to accelerate the emancipation of the working class” (Poverty of Philosophy, 200–01).
72 Doug Henwood, Wall Street: How It Works and for Whom (London: Verso, 1998), 292, 174–5.
73 See section C.8.3 of An Anarchist FAQ.
74 In a capitalist economy, with banks seeking profits, there is a systemic pressure on them to get caught up in waves of lending euphoria during upswings. This leads to periodic episodes of financial fragility which, in turn, lead to crisis (see section C.8 of An Anarchist FAQ). Similarly, loans are generally made to capitalist firms and their need for profits adds an extra level of uncertainty and fragility, also provoking crisis. Such forces would be lacking in a mutualist system based on labour-income.
75 “Since money as well as other merchandise is subject to the law of proportionality, if its quantity increases and if at the same time other products do not increase in proportion, money loses it value, and nothing, in the last analysis, is added to the social wealth” (Œuvres Completès 5: 89).
76 To explain how the state printing money ended up in people’s pockets and so caused inflation Milton Friedman, founder of Monetarism, imagined government helicopters dropping money from the skies.
77 See section G.3.6 of An Anarchist FAQ. A useful post-Keynesian introduction and analysis of banking and interest can be found in Hugh Stretton’s Economics: A New Introduction (London: Pluto Press, 2000).
78 Ehrenberg, 88.
79 Correspondance 2: 307, 308.
80 Correspondance 6: 372.
81 No Gods, No Masters, 75.
82 Correspondance 14: 295.
83 Œuvres Completès 21: 121.
84 General Idea of the Revolution, 286.
85 System of Economical Contradictions, 399. Which makes a mockery of Engels’ claims that Proudhon had, in 1851, appropriated, without acknowledgement, Marx’s ideas as his own. In a letter to Marx, Engels proclaimed that he was “convinced” that the Frenchman had read The Communist Manifesto and Marx’s The Class Struggles in France as “our premises on the decisive historical initiative of material production, class struggle, etc., largely adopted”: “A number of points were indubitably lifted from them—e.g., that a gouvernement is nothing but the power of one class to repress the other, and will disappear with the disappearance of the contradictions between classes” (Marx-Engels Collected Works 38: 434–5). In reality, Proudhon had concluded that the state was an instrument of class power long before Marxism was invented.
86 Œuvres Completès 19: 11, 12, 15.
87 Quoted in Vincent, 211.
88 No Gods, No Masters, 57.
89 Quoted in George Woodcock, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A Biography (Montréal: Black Rose, 1987), 129.
90 General Idea of the Revolution, 45–6.
91 Quoted in Woodcock, Proudhon, 75.
92 Quoted in Vincent, 208.
93 Cf. Marx in “Political Indifferentism” (Marx-Engels Collected Works 23: 392–7).
94 A History of the French Anarchist Movement, 1917–1945 (Westport: Greenwood Press, 2002), 16.
95 Vincent, 141. Proudhon usually termed such systems community (la communauté) or communism and had in mind such socialists as Henri de Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, Robert Owen, Louis Blanc and Pierre Leroux. These are usually termed, following Marx, Utopian Socialists and generally thought of socialism as being organised around (usually highly regulated and hierarchical) communities or implemented by means of the state.
96 Revolution from 1789 to 1906 (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1962), P.W. Postgate (ed.), 186–7.
97 System of Economical Contradictions, 313, 269.
98 System of Economical Contradictions, 397.
99 General Idea of the Revolution, 96–7.
100 “How much does [a product] sold by the [state] administration cost? How much is it worth? You can answer the first of these questions: you need only call at the first... shop you see. But you can tell me nothing about the second, because you have no standard of comparison and are forbidden to verify by experiment ... business, made into a monopoly, necessarily costs society more than it brings in” (System of Economical Contradictions, 232–3).
101 System of Economical Contradictions, 263.
102 Œuvres Completès 6: 12.
103 No Gods, No Masters, 77–8.
104 No Gods, No Masters, 125.
105 “As critic, having sought social laws through the negation of property, I belong to socialist protest... In seeking to achieve practical improvements, I repudiate socialism with all my strength” (Quoted in Hayward, 183).
106 “I am a socialist” (Selected Writings, 195). He also considered his critique of property as a “socialist polemic” (Œuvres Completès 20: 50).
107 Œuvres Completès 6: 20–1.
108 Carnets (Paris: Marcel Riviere, 1968) 3: 289.
109 Quoted in Vincent, 189.
110 Quoted in Henri de Lubac, The Un-Marxian Socialist: A Study of Proudhon (New York: Octagon Books, 1978), 29–30.
111 Selected Writings, 177.
112 Selected Writings, 151.
113 System of Economical Contradictions, 398, 397.
114 Œuvres Completès 17: 25.
115 Gemie, 129.
116 Revolution and Mass Democracy: The Paris Club Movement in 1848 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1975), 200–1.
117 No Gods, No Masters, 63.
118 Anarchism: From Theory to Practice (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 152–3. Proudhon “demanded that a network of proletarian committees—Soviets, we might say—should be constituted to fight” the National Assembly (Postgate, 205).
119 Œuvres Completès 17: 28. Interestingly, given Proudhon’s opposition to economic strikes, during his discussion of “legal resistance” to oppressive governments in Chapter XVIII of Confessions of a Revolutionary he pointed to when the plebs walked out of Rome during their struggle with th
e aristocratic patricians in 494 B.C. In effect a general strike, it left the patricians rulers of an empty city. He was sure that if this were repeated centralisation would soon be replaced by federalism.
120 Paul Thomas, Karl Marx and the Anarchists (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul plc, 1985), 177–8.
121 Quoted in Hayward, 201.
122 The Principle of Federation (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1980), 46.
123 General Idea of the Revolution, 151, 276–7.
124 Carnets 3: 293.
125 General Idea of the Revolution, 286.
126 Letter to Villiaumé, 24th January 1856 (Correspondance 7: 8–21).
127 Vincent, 220.
128 Vincent, 157.
129 No Gods, No Masters, 67.
130 Quoted in Woodcock, Proudhon, 143.
131 Quoted in Alan Ritter, The Political Thought Of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1969), 163.
132 See, for example, “Résumé de la Question Sociale” (Œuvres Completès 17: 29–30)
133 Quoted in Woodcock, Proudhon, 64.
134 Quoted in Hayward, 186.
135 George Woodcock, Anarchism and Anarchists: Essays (Kingston, Ontario: Quarry Press, 1992), 150.
136 Proudhon’s arguments for electoral abstention can be found in his lengthy 1864 “Letter to Workers” (No Gods, No Masters, 110–122).
137 “Proudhon always wished to separate the haute bourgeoisie from the petite bourgeoisie , and to reconcile the latter with salaried workers... all the works have the same fundamental message: cooperation between the proletariat and the petite bourgeoisie (or ‘middle-class’), exclusion of the haute bourgeoisie of propriétaires-capitalistes-entrepreneurs” (Vincent, 293).
138 Vincent, 222.
139 “If political right is inherent in man and citizen, consequently if suffrage ought to be direct, the same right is inherent as well, so much the more so, for each corporation [see note 52], for each commune or city, and the suffrage in each of these groups, ought to be equally direct” (Quoted in Vincent, 219).
140 Œuvres Completès 6: 58. “My opinion is that the mandate should be imperative and at any moment revocable” (Carnets 3: 45).
141 Œuvres Completès 22: 125.
142 Quoted in Vincent, 211, 219.
143 De La Justice dans La Révolution et dans L’Église, 4th Study.
144 Selected Writings, 123.
145 Selected Writings, 116–7.
146 Vincent, 210. Specifically: “it is when the representative of the people will be the expression of organised labour that the people will have a true representation... Outside of that, one had nothing but deception, impotence, waste, corruption, despotism.” Moreover: “The State, in a well organised society, must be reduced... to nothing” (Œuvres Completès 17: 73).
147 Vincent, 216.
148 System of Economical Contradictions, 253.
149 This should not be confused with nationalisation. See section I.3.3 of An Anarchist FAQ.
150 As Proudhon stressed in a letter to Pierre Leroux: “it does not follow at all... that I want to see individual ownership and non-organisation of the instruments of labour endure for all eternity. I have never penned nor uttered any such thing: and have argued the opposite a hundred times over” (Correspondance, 14: 293).
151 What Is Property?, 107, 153.
152 Œuvres Completès 17: 188–9.
153 What Is Property?, 167.
154 Quoted in Ehrenberg, 48–9.
155 Principle of Federation, 67, 70–1, 72.
156 One argument against co-operatives is that they do not allow the diversification of risk (all the worker’s eggs are placed in one basket). Ignoring the obvious point that most workers today do not own shares and are dependent on their job to survive, this objection can be addressed, as David Ellerman points out, by means of “the horizontal association or grouping of enterprises to pool their business risk. The Mondragon co-operatives are associated together in a number of regional groups that pool their profits in varying degrees. Instead of a worker diversifying his or her capital in six companies, six companies partially pool their profits in a group or federation and accomplish the same risk-reduction purpose without transferable equity capital.” Thus “risk-pooling in federations of co-operatives” ensure that “transferable equity capital is not necessary to obtain risk diversification in the flow of annual worker income” (The Democratic Worker-Owned Firm: A New Model for East and West [Boston, Mass.: Unwin Hyman, 1990], 104).
157 Leninist David McNally talks of the “anarcho-socialist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon” and how Marx combated “Proudhonian socialism” before concluding that it was “non-socialism” because it has “wage-labour and exploitation” (Against the Market: Political Economy, Market Socialism and the Marxist Critique [London: Verso, 1993], 139, 169). As Justin Schwartz correctly points out, “McNally is right that even in market socialism, market forces rule workers’ lives” and this is “a serious objection” however “it is not tantamount to capitalism or to wage labour” and it “does not have exploitation in Marx’s sense (i.e., wrongful expropriation of surplus by non-producers)” (The American Political Science Review 88: 4 [1994]: 982).
158 Gluckstein, 72. Interestingly, various Marxists have suggested, but never proven, that neo-classical economics was a response to Marx. This not only ignores the earlier socialists who utilised classical economics to attack capitalism, it also ignores the awkward fact that Léon Walras, one of the founders of that economic theology, wrote a book attacking Proudhon in 1860.
159 Engels stressed that the “object of production—to produce commodities—does not import to the instrument the character of capital” as the “production of commodities is one of the preconditions for the existence of capital... as long as the producer sells only what he himself produces, he is not a capitalist; he becomes so only from the moment he makes use of his instrument to exploit the wage labour of others” (Marx-Engels Collected Works 47: 179–80). In this he was merely echoing Marx (Capital: A Critique of Political Economy [London: Penguin Books, 1976] 1: 270–73, 875, 949–50).
160 As Ellerman explains, the democratic workplace “is a social community, a community of work rather than a community of residence. It is a republic, or res publica of the workplace. The ultimate governance rights are assigned as personal rights... to the people who work in the firm... This analysis shows how a firm can be socialised and yet remain ‘private’ in the sense of not being government-owned.” In such an economy “the labour market would not exist” as labour would “always be the residual claimant.” “There would be a job market in the sense of people looking for firms they could join but it would not be a labour market in the sense of the selling of labour in the employment contract” (76, 91).
161 Vincent, 230.
162 Quoted in Ritter, 121.
163 General Idea of the Revolution, 215–216.
164 Quoted in Dorothy W. Douglas, “Proudhon: A Prophet of 1848: Part II,” The American Journal of Sociology 35: 1 (1929): 45.
165 Selected Writings, 70.
166 As added to the banner of Le Représentant du Peuple in August 1848, joining “What is the Producer? Nothing. What should he be? Everything!” (Quoted in Woodcock, Proudhon, 136, 123).
167 Quoted in Hayward, 172.
168 “The school of Say,” Proudhon argued, was “the chief focus of counter-revolution” and “has for ten years past seemed to exist only to protect and applaud the execrable work of the monopolists of money and necessities, deepening more and more the obscurity of a science [economics] naturally difficult and full of complications” (General Idea of the Revolution, 225). All of which seems sadly too applicable today!
169 Quoted in de Lubac, 190. Not to mention their role as apologists for the system: “Capitalistic exploitation, despised by the ancients, who certainly were better informed on this subject than we, for they saw it in its origin, was thus established: it was reserved for our centu
ry to supply it with defenders and advocates” (Œuvres Completès 19: 236).
170 Carnets 3: 209. Proudhon would not have been surprised that neo-classical economics turned political economy into little more than a public relations exercise for the rentier classes he criticised: capitalists, landlords and bankers. It was largely to counter such telling criticisms of their unearned wealth that economics was limited to mathematically expounding on unrealistic assumptions that are so blatantly self-serving to the status quo.
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