Anarchism Proudhon was the first person known to refer to himself as an "
anarchist". Proudhon's
anarchist mutualism is considered as a middle way or synthesis between
individualist anarchism and
social anarchism. According to Larry Gambone, Proudhon was a "social individualist anarchist". Both anarcho-communist
Peter Kropotkin and individualist anarchist
Benjamin Tucker defined anarchism as "the no-government form of socialism" and "the abolition of the State and the abolition of usury", respectively. In this, Kropotkin and Tucker were following the definition of Proudhon, who stated that "[w]e do not admit the government of man by man any more than the exploitation of man by man." In
What Is Property?, published in 1840, Proudhon defined
anarchy as "the absence of a master, of a sovereign" and wrote that "[a]s man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy". In 1849, Proudhon declared in
Confessions of a Revolutionary that "[w]hoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy". Proudhon was critical of state authority and supported freedom of religion, speech, and assembly. In
The General Idea of the Revolution (1851), Proudhon urged a "society without authority". In a subchapter called "What is Government?", Proudhon wrote: Towards the end of his life, Proudhon modified some of his earlier views. In
The Principle of Federation (1863), Proudhon modified his earlier anti-state position, arguing for "the balancing of authority by liberty" and put forward a decentralized "theory of federal government". Proudhon also defined anarchy differently as "the government of each by himself" which meant "that political functions have been reduced to industrial functions, and that social order arises from nothing but transactions and exchanges". This work also saw Proudhon call his economic system an "agro-industrial federation", arguing that it would provide "specific federal arrangements [...] to protect the citizens of the federated states from capitalist and financial feudalism, both within them and from the outside" and so stop the re-introduction of "wage labour". This was because "political right requires to be buttressed by economic right". In the posthumously published
Theory of Property, Proudhon argued that "property is the only power that can act as a counterweight to the State". Hence, "Proudhon could retain the idea of property as theft, and at the same time offer a new definition of it as liberty. There is the constant possibility of abuse, exploitation, which spells theft. At the same time property is a spontaneous creation of society and a bulwark against the ever-encroaching power of the State."
Daniel Guérin criticized Proudhon's later life by stating that "many of these masters were not anarchists throughout their lives and their complete works include passages which have nothing to do with anarchism. To take an example: in the second part of his career Proudhon's thinking took a conservative turn. His verbose and monumental ''De la Justice dans la Revolution et dans l'Eglise'' (1858) was mainly concerned with the problem of religion and its conclusion was far from libertarian."
Dialectics In
What Is Property?, Proudhon moved on from the rejection of communism and private property in a dialectical manner, looking for a "third form of society. [...] This third form of society, the synthesis of communism and property, we will call liberty." In his
System of Economic Contradiction, Proudhon described mutuality as "the synthesis of the notions of private property and collective ownership." Proudhon's rejection of compulsory communism and privileged property led him towards a synthesis of libertarian communism and possession, just as the apparent contradiction between his theories of property represents an antithesis which still needs synthesizing. Proudhon stated that in presenting the "property is liberty" theory, he is not changing his mind about the earlier "property is theft" definition. Proudhon did not only rely on "synthesis", but also emphasized "balance" between approaches such as communism and property that apparently cannot be fully reconciled.
Free association For Proudhon,
mutualism involved
free association by creating
industrial democracy, a system where workplaces would be "handed over to democratically organised workers' associations. [...] We want these associations to be models for agriculture, industry and trade, the pioneering core of that vast federation of companies and societies woven into the common cloth of the democratic social Republic." As
Robert Graham notes, "Proudhon's market socialism is indissolubly linked to his notions of industrial democracy and workers' self-management". K. Steven Vincent notes in his in-depth analysis of this aspect of Proudhon's ideas that "Proudhon consistently advanced a program of industrial democracy which would return control and direction of the economy to the workers". For Proudhon, "strong workers' associations [...] would enable the workers to determine jointly by election how the enterprise was to be directed and operated on a day-to-day basis".
Mutualism Proudhon adopted the term
mutualism for his brand of anarchism and socialism which involved control of the means of production by the workers. In his vision, self-employed artisans, peasants and cooperatives would trade their products on the market. For Proudhon, factories and other large workplaces would be run by "labor associations" operating on directly democratic principles. The state would be abolished and instead society would be organized by a federation of "free communes" (a
commune is a local municipality in French). In 1863, Proudhon wrote: "All my economic ideas as developed over twenty-five years can be summed up in the words: agricultural-industrial federation. All my political ideas boil down to a similar formula: political federation or decentralization". Proudhon called this use-ownership possession (
possession) and this economic system mutualism (
mutualisme), having many arguments against entitlement to land and capital, including reasons based on morality, economics, politics and individual liberty. One such argument was that it enabled profit which in turn led to social instability and war by creating cycles of debt that eventually overcame the capacity of labor to pay them off. Another was that it produced despotism and turned workers into wage workers subject to the authority of a boss. In
What Is Property?, Proudhon described the liberty he pursued as "the synthesis of
communism and
property", At the same time, Proudhon continued to oppose concentrations of wealth and property, arguing for small-scale property ownership associated with peasants and artisans. Proudhon also still opposed private property in land, writing: "What I cannot accept, regarding land, is that the work put in gives a right to ownership of what has been worked on." In addition, Proudhon still believed that property should be more equally distributed and limited in size to that actually used by individuals, families and workers associations. Proudhon supported the right of inheritance and defended it "as one of the foundations of the family and society", but he refused to extend this beyond personal possessions, arguing that "[u]nder the law of association, transmission of wealth does not apply to the instruments of labour". As a consequence of his opposition to profit, wage labour, worker exploitation, ownership of land and capital as well as to state property, Proudhon rejected both
capitalism and
state socialism, including
authoritarian socialism and other
authoritarian and compulsory forms of communism which advocated state property. The authors of
An Anarchist FAQ argue that his opposition to "communism" was because "
libertarian communism", while having some forerunners such as
François-Noël Babeuf, would not be as widespread until after his death and so, like
Max Stirner, "he was directing his critique against the various forms of state communism which did [exist]". While opposed to the charging of interest and rent, Proudhon did not seek to abolish them by law, writing: "I protest that when I criticized the complex of institutions of which property is the foundation stone, I never meant to forbid or suppress, by sovereign decree, ground rent and interest on capital. I think that all these manifestations of human activity should remain free and voluntary for all: I ask for them no modifications, restrictions or suppressions, other than those which result naturally and of necessity from the universalization of the principle of reciprocity which I propose."
Nationalism Proudhon opposed
dictatorship,
militarism,
nationalism and
war, arguing that the "end of militarism is the mission of the nineteenth century, under pain of indefinite decadence" and that the "workers alone are capable of putting an end to war by creating economic equilibrium. This presupposes a radical revolution in ideas and morals." As Robert L. Hoffman notes,
War and Peace "ends by condemning war without reservation" and its "conclusion [is] that war is obsolete". Marxist philosopher John Ehrenberg summarized Proudhon's position that "[i]f injustice was the cause of war, it followed that conflict could not be eliminated until society was reorganised along egalitarian lines. Proudhon had wanted to prove that the reign of political economy would be the reign of peace, finding it difficult to believe that people really thought he was defending militarism." Proudhon argued that under mutualism "[t]here will no longer be nationality, no longer fatherland, in the political sense of the words: they will mean only places of birth. Man, of whatever race or colour he may be, is an inhabitant of the universe; citizenship is everywhere an acquired right." Proudhon also rejected dictatorship, stating in the 1860s that "what I will always be [...] a republican, a democrat even, and a socialist into the bargain".
Henri-Marie de Lubac argued that in terms of Proudhon's critique of democracy "we must not allow all this to hoodwink us. His invectives against democracy were not those of a counter-revolutionary. They were aimed at what he himself called 'the false democracy'. [...] They attacked an apparently liberal 'pseudo-democracy' which 'was not economic and social', [...] 'a Jacobinical democracy. Proudhon "did not want to destroy, but complete, the work of 1789" and while "he had a grudge against the 'old democracy', the democracy of Robespierre and Marat", he repeatedly contrasted it "with a 'young democracy', which was a 'social democracy. According to historian of anarchism
George Woodcock, some positions Proudhon took "sorted oddly with his avowed anarchism". Woodcock cited as an example Proudhon's proposition that each citizen perform one or two years militia service. The proposal appeared in the
Programme Revolutionaire, an electoral manifesto issued by Proudhon after he was asked to run for a position in the provisional government. The text reads: "7° 'L'armée. – Abolition immédiate de la conscription et des remplacements; obligation pour tout citoyen de faire, pendant un ou deux ans, le service militaire; application de l'armée aux services administratifs et travaux d'utilité publique" ("Military service by all citizens is proposed as an alternative to conscription and the practice of 'replacement', by which those who could avoided such service"). In the same document, Proudhon also described the "form of government" he was proposing as "a centralization analogous with that of the State, but in which no one obeys, no one is dependent, and everyone is free and sovereign".
Private property and the state Proudhon advocated the destruction of the centralized state, thus enunciating a central tenet of anarchism. He wrote: "When the mass of the People becomes the State, the State has no longer any reason to exist [...]." Proudhon saw the privileged
property as a form of government that was necessarily backed by and interlinked with the state, writing that "[t]he private property of privilege called forth and commanded the State" and arguing that "since the first related to the landowner and capitalist whose ownership derived from conquest or exploitation and was only maintained through the state, its property laws, police and army". Unlike
capitalist property supporters, Proudhon stressed equality and thought that all workers should own property and have access to capital, stressing that in every cooperative "every worker employed in the association [must have] an undivided share in the property of the company". In his later works, Proudhon used
property to mean possession. This resulted in some
individualist anarchists such as
Benjamin Tucker calling possession as
property or
private property, causing confusion within the anarchist movement and among other socialists. In his earliest works, Proudhon analyzed the nature and problems of the
capitalist economy. While deeply
critical of capitalism, Proudhon also objected to those contemporary in the
socialist movement who advocated centralized hierarchical forms of association or state control of the economy. In a sequence of commentaries from
What Is Property? (1840), posthumously published in the
Théorie de la propriété (
Theory of Property, 1863–1864), Proudhon declared in turn that "property is theft", "property is impossible", "property is despotism" and "property is freedom". When saying that "property is theft", Proudhon was referring to the landowner or capitalist who he believed "stole" the profits from laborers. For Proudhon, as he wrote in the sixth study of his
General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, the capitalist's employee was "subordinated, exploited: his permanent condition is one of obedience". In
What Is Property?, Proudhon also wrote: Property is physically and mathematically impossible. Property is impossible, because it demands something for nothing. Property is impossible because wherever it exists production costs more than it is worth. Property is impossible, because, with a given capital, production is proportional to labor, not to property. Property is impossible, because it is homicide. Yes, I have attacked property, and shall attack it again. Property is robbery. The people finally legalized property. God forgive them, for they knew not what they did! Proudhon believed that illegitimate property was based on dominion (i.e. entitlement) and that this was backed by force. While this force can take the form of police in the employ of a state, it is the fact of its enforcement, not its form, that makes it what it is. Proudhon rejected entitlement regardless of the source and accepted possession based on occupancy. According to Proudhon, "[t]here are different kinds of property: 1. Property pure and simple, the dominant and seigniorial power over a thing; or, as they term it, naked property. 2. Possession. 'Possession,' says Duranton, 'is a matter of fact, not of right.' Toullier: 'Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact.' The tenant, the farmer, the commandité, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors." The underlying cause of this oppression, Proudhon argues, is the existence of state-backed property rights. Property, in his view, is both theft and freedom. It is theft when one person owns the property that others need to survive. Property is theft when the person who owns it can own it without occupying it and can derive rent, income, and profit simply because they hold legal title. It is this form of property that allows a minority of property owners to control a majority of citizens, who are forever in debt simply because they don't hold "title." In this sense, property enabled a form of enslavement of the propertyless by the propertied minority. It is this enslavement that Proudhon's anarchism seeks to challenge. [...] What is needed is a property regime that enables freedom for all. The best way of guaranteeing freedom for all, Proudhon argues, is for each person or small group to own their own means of production. Property is legitimate when it is co-extensive with possession. Proudhon objects not to property per se, but to large accumulations. Therefore, Proudhon acknowledged the forms of ownership that individuals directly use (e.g. the house they live in, the tools they use, etc.), but he viewed negatively productive ownership (propriété) that is formed in a way that subordinates others. What Proudhon was criticizing was that if a few people have exclusive ownership of these resources, the owners can exert power over the non-owners and exercise control over what they own over the many simply by virtue of their ownership, and the many must pay their own costs (
rent,
interest,
wage labor, etc.) in order to use the resources according to the rules set by the owners. That is, it points out the structure of
unearned income such as rent, interest, and capitalist profit, which allows the owner to make money by having power simply because he or she has legal ownership without directly working and without occupying the property. arguing: The purchaser draws boundaries, fences himself in, and says, 'This is mine; each one by himself, each one for himself.' Here, then, is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no one has right to step, save the proprietor and his friends; which can benefit nobody, save the proprietor and his servants. Let these multiply, and soon the people [...] will have nowhere to rest, no place of shelter, no ground to till. They will die of hunger at the proprietor's door, on the edge of that property which was their birth-right; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, 'So perish idlers and vagrants.'
Property George Crowder writes that the property anarchists including Proudhon oppose "is basically that which is unearned", i.e. "such things as interest on loans and income from rent. This is contrasted with ownership rights in those goods either produced by the work of the owner or necessary for that work, for example his dwelling-house, land and tools. Proudhon initially refers to legitimate rights of ownership of these goods as 'possession,' and although in his latter work he calls this 'property,' the conceptual distinction remains the same." Late in his life, Proudhon argued for increasing the powers of government while also strengthening property, by making it more
egalitarian and widespread, in order to counter-balance it. Iain McKay points out that "Proudhon's 'emphasis on the genuine antagonism between state power and property rights' came from his later writings, in which he argued that property rights were required to control state power. In other words, this 'heterodoxy' came from a period in which Proudhon did not think that state could be abolished and so 'property is the only power that can act as a counterweight to the State.' Of course, this 'later' Proudhon also acknowledged that property was 'an absolutism within an absolutism,' 'by nature autocratic' and that its 'politics could be summed up in a single word,' namely 'exploitation. McKay further writes how "Proudhon argues that 'spread[ing] it more equally and establish[ing] it more firmly in society' is the means by which 'property' 'becomes a guarantee of liberty and keeps the State on an even keel.' In other words, rather than 'property' as such limiting the state, it is 'property' divided equally through society which is the key, without concentrations of economic power and inequality which would result in exploitation and oppression. Therefore, '[s]imple justice... requires that equal division of land shall not only operate at the outset. If there is to be no abuse, it must be maintained from generation to generation. Nonetheless,
communists ranging from
Peter Kropotkin to
Karl Marx and
Friedrich Engels agreed with Proudhon's distinction and were not opposed to
personal property, or what Proudhon called "possession", nor did they wish to abolish it. has been described as part of the
liberal socialist tradition which is for
egalitarianism and
free markets, with Proudhon, among other anarchists, taking "a commitment to narrow down the sphere of activity of the state". James Boyle quotes Proudhon as stating that
socialism is "every aspiration towards the amelioration of society" and then admitting that "we are all socialists" under this definition. On the
1848 French Revolution and the
Second French Republic, Proudhon took a radical stance regarding the
National Workshops, criticized for being charity whilst criticizing the
June Days Uprising for using violence. Proudhon's criticism of the February Revolution was that it was "without an idea" and considered some parts of the revolution too moderate and others too radical. According to Shawn Wilbur, those contradictions were caused by his dialectical phase with the
System of Economic Contradictions and was prone to viewing nearly all his key concepts as being worked out in terms of irreducible contradictions.
Socialism Proudhon self-identified as a
socialist, and remains widely recognized as such. As one of the first theorists of
libertarian socialism, Proudhon opposed state ownership of capital goods in favour of ownership by workers themselves in associations. Proudhon was one of the main influences on the theory of workers' self-management (
autogestion) in the late 19th and 20th century. Proudhon strenuously rejected the ownership of the products of labor by capitalists or the state, arguing in
What Is Property? that while "property in product [...] does not carry with it property in the means of production", "[t]he right to product is exclusive" and "the right to means is common". Proudhon applied this to the land ("the land is [...] a common thing") and workplaces ("all accumulated capital being social property, no one can be its exclusive proprietor"). Proudhon argued that while society owned the means of production or land, users would control and run them (under supervision from society) with the "organising of regulating societies" in order to "regulate the market". By the 1840s and 1850s, socialism came to cover a broad range. Proudhon's writings from the years following the
French Revolution of 1848 are full of passages in which he associated himself with socialism, but he distanced from any particular system of
socialist economics or
type of socialism. As a broad concept, socialism is one or more of various theories aimed at solving the
labor problem through radical changes in the capitalist economy. Descriptions of the problem, explanations of its causes and proposed solutions such as abolition of
private property and support of either
cooperatives,
collective property,
common property,
public property or
social property varied among socialist philosophies. Proudhon made no public criticism of
Karl Marx or
Marxism because in Proudhon's lifetime Marx was relatively unknown. It was only after Proudhon's death that Marxism became a large movement. However, he criticized
authoritarian and
state socialists of his period. This included the French socialist
Louis Blanc, of whom Proudhon said that "you desire neither Catholicism nor monarchy nor nobility, but you must have a God, a religion, a dictatorship, a censorship, a hierarchy, distinctions, and ranks. For my part, I deny your God, your authority, your sovereignty, your judicial State, and all your representative mystifications." It was Proudhon's book
What Is Property? that convinced the young Marx that
private property should be abolished. In
The Holy Family, one of his first works, Marx stated: "Not only does Proudhon write in the interest of the
proletarians, he is himself a proletarian, an ouvrier. His work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat." However, Marx disagreed with Proudhon's anarchism and later published a vicious criticism of Proudhon. Marx wrote
The Poverty of Philosophy as a refutation of Proudhon's
The Philosophy of Poverty. In their letters, Proudhon expressed disagreement with Marx's views on revolution, stating: "I believe we have no need of it in order to succeed; and that consequently we should not put forward revolutionary action as a means of social reform, because that pretended means would simply be an appeal to force, to arbitrariness, in brief, a contradiction." More than Proudhon's anarchism, Marx did take issue with what he saw as Proudhon's misunderstanding of the relationship between labor, value and price as well as believing that Proudhon's attack on bourgeois property was framed in terms of bourgeois ethics rather than transcending these ethics altogether. Anarchists, among others, have since criticized Marx and Marxists for having distorted Proudhon's views.
Iain McKay argues that Marx took many concepts such as his
criticism of private property,
scientific socialism and
surplus value from Proudhon. Similarly,
Rudolf Rocker argued that "we find 'the theory of surplus value, that grand 'scientific discovery' of which our Marxists are so proud of, in the writings of Proudhon.
Edward Hyams summarized that "since [
The Poverty of Philosophy] no good Marxists have had to think about Proudhon. They have what is mother's milk to them, an ex cathedra judgement."
Social ownership While favoring individual ownership for small-property holdings, Proudhon advocated
social ownership and
worker cooperatives or similar workers' associations and
workers' councils. Proudhon advocated
industrial democracy and repeatedly argued for the socialization of the
means of production and of
land. In
What Is Property?, Proudhon wrote that "land is indispensable to our existence, consequently a common thing, consequently insusceptible of appropriation". In a letter to
Louis Blanqui in 1841, Proudhon wrote that "all capital, whether material or mental, being the result of collective labour, is, in consequence, collective property". In his election manifesto for the
1848 French Constituent Assembly election, Proudhon wrote: For this value or wealth, produced by the activity of all, is by the very fact of its creation collective wealth, the use of which, like that of the land, may be divided, but which as property remains undivided. [...] In short, property in capital is indivisible, and consequently inalienable, not necessarily when the capital is uncreated, but when it is common or collective. [...] [T]his non-appropriation of the instruments of production [...] I, in accordance with all precedent, call [...] a destruction of property. In fact, without the appropriation of instruments, property is nothing. In a letter to
Pierre Leroux in 1849, Proudhon wrote: Under the law of association, transmission of wealth does not apply to the instruments of labour, so cannot become a cause of inequality. [...] We are socialists [...] under universal association, ownership of the land and of the instruments of labour is social ownership. [...] You have me saying, and I really do not know where you could have found this, that ownership of the instruments of labour must forever stay vested in the individual and remain unorganised. These words are set in italics, as if you had lifted them from somewhere in my books. [...] But 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. [...] I deny all kinds of proprietary domain. I deny it, precisely because I believe in an order wherein the instruments of labour will cease to be appropriated and instead become shared; where the whole earth will be depersonalised. ==Controversial positions==