First, a new selection from Property is Theft! have been posted:
Second, a new, full translation of the chapter on property from volume 2 of System of Economic Contradictions:
Extracts from this chapter appeared in Property is Theft!, translated by Shawn Wilbur (his translation of this chapter can be found here).
In terms of Confessions of a Revolutionary, it is an interesting account of Proudhon's activities in, and views upon, the Revolution of 1848 in France. The 1848 Revolution is not as well-known as the Russian and Spanish Revolution, in spite of Bakunin, Proudhon and Marx taking an active part in it. Proudhon’s Confessions of a Revolutionary was the first of four books writing during this time, while in prison. First published in 1849, it was revised in 1851 in light of the ideas raised in General Idea of the Revolution (1851) – although this did not stop Proudhon later proclaiming he did not re-read his books.
It was during this period that Proudhon was his most anti-statist, undoubtedly due to the failures of the Second Republic and his experiences as an elected representative. The later made him reiterate his analysis from System of Economic Contradictions (1846) that the State was inevitably enchained to capital and no reform could change that, so necessitating the creation of a body within the working classes to tame it. He indicates what such a body could be in Confessions of a Revolutionary – in which he also contrasts change “from below” and “from above”, placing himself in the former.
I’ve discussed the 1848 Revolution elsewhere so will leave it there.
In addition to these extracts from Property is Theft!, another chapter from Volume 2 of System of Economic Contradictions has been translated:
This is a completely new translation. As noted, Shawn Wilbur produced a translation previously, extracts of which were included in Property is Theft!. I must admit that when I read Shawn’s translation I was disappointed as the chapter was not as good as I had hoped it would be. Yes, some parts of it are definitely of interest but overall it is an example of it being fair to say that many of Proudhon’s books are better read in an edited or abridged form.
So here are a few interesting passages:
Property, in fact and in right, is essentially contradictory and it is for this very reason that it is anything at all. In fact,
Property is the right of occupancy; and at the same time the right of exclusion.
Property is the reward of labour; and the negation of labour.
Property is the spontaneous product of society; and the dissolution of society.
Property is an institution of justice; and property IS THEFT.
From all this it follows that one day property transformed will be a positive idea, complete, social and true; a property that will abolish the former property, and will become equally effective and beneficent for everyone. And what proves this is once again that property is a contradiction.
And:
Work, the economists repeat ceaselessly to the people; work, save, capitalise, become proprietors in your turn. As if they were saying: Workers, you are the recruits of property. Each of you carries in his sack the rod which serves to correct you, and which may one day serve to correct others. Raise yourself by labour to property; and when you have the taste for human flesh, you will no longer want any other meat, and you will make up for your long abstinences.
To fall from the proletariat into property! from slavery into tyranny, which is to say, following Plato, always into slavery! what a prospect! And yet it is inevitable, the condition of the slave is no longer tenable. You must advance, free yourself from wage-labour, become a capitalist, become a tyrant! You must, do you understand, proletarians? Property is not an optional thing for humanity, it is the absolute order of destiny. You will only be free after you redeem yourselves, by subjugation to your masters, from the servitude that they impose upon you.
[…]
Thus property, which was supposed to make us free, makes us prisoners. What am I saying? It degrades us, by making us servants and tyrants to one another.
Do we really know what wage-labour is? To work under a master, watchful of his prejudices as much and more than of his bidding; whose dignity consists above all in demanding, sic volo, sic jubeo, and never explaining; that we often scorn and mock! having no thoughts of your own, constantly considering the thought of others, knowing no stimulant but [your] daily bread, and the fear of losing a job?
The wage-worker is a man to whom the proprietor who hires his services makes this speech: What you have to do does not concern you in any way: you do not control it, you do not answer for it. Every observation is forbidden to you; there is no profit for you to hope for save from your wage, no risk to run, no blame to fear.
And:
Thus, according to grammar, as according to fable and according to analysis, property, religion of force, is at the same time the religion of servitude. Depending on whether it is seized by force of arms, or whether it proceeds by exclusion and monopoly, it engenders two kinds of servitude: one, the ancient proletariat, the result of the primitive fact of conquest or of the violent division of Adam, humanity, into Cain and Abel, patricians and plebeians; the other, the modern proletariat, the working class of the economists, caused by the development of the economic phases, which are all summed up, as we have seen, in the key fact of the consecration of monopoly by domain, inheritance and rent.
And:
There is theft, in commerce and industry, whenever the entrepreneur withholds something from the worker’s wages, or receives a bonus in addition to what is due him.
I have proven, in dealing with value, that all labour must leave a surplus; so that assuming the consumption of the worker to be always the same, his labour should create, in addition to his subsistence, an ever greater capital. Under the regime of property, the surplus of labour, essentially collective, passes entirely, like rent, to the proprietor: now, between this disguised appropriation and the fraudulent usurpation of a communal good, where is the difference?
The consequence of this usurpation is that the worker, whose share in the collective product is constantly confiscated by the entrepreneur, is always in poverty, while the capitalist is always in profit; that commerce, the exchange of essentially equal values, is no more than the art of buying for 3 francs what is worth 6, and of selling for 6 francs that which is worth 3; and that political economy, that upholds and advocates that regime, is the theory of theft, as property, the respect for which maintains such a state of things, is the religion of force. It is just, M. Blanqui said recently to the Academy of Moral Sciences in a speech on coalitions, that labour participates in the wealth that it produces. If then it does not participate, it is unjust; and if it is unjust, it is thief, and the proprietors are thieves. Speak plainly then, economists!...
While he does not explicitly quote him (presumably because he considered it so well-known that he did not have to), this is based on Adam Smith’s statement that “[t]he produce of labour constitutes the natural recompense or wages of labour” (An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of The Wealth of Nations, Book 1, Chapter VIII [“On the Wages of Labour”]). Proudhon also quotes Smith extensively in the Conclusion of the book along similar lines.
Sadly, Proudhon spends too much time on his patriarchal bigotries than developing these insights. Still, this analysis – building upon Volume 1 – shows clearly that, for Proudhon, exploitation occurring within production. The capitalist exploited the worker as a consequence of the latter becoming the wage-worker of the former, so allowing the former to control the latter’s labour and appropriate their product and monopolise any surplus produced, the benefits of the collective force as well as the economic rent. He was also well-aware of the hierarchical nature of wage-labour and that the boss is the master and the worker is the servant.
All of that is unsurprising for Proudhon – unlike almost all socialist theoreticians – was working class and was employed in a printing establishment (he was forced to leave school to do so as his family needed the money). In short, he actually experienced wage-labour rather than just writing about from afar.
That individualist anarchist Benjamin Tucker could envision some-kind of non-exploitative wage-labour suggests he did not completely grasp Proudhon’s theory of exploitation. Still, to be fair, System of Economic Contradictions is not the best organised work and its theory of exploitation is scattered across many chapters. He notes capitalist firms with their “hierarchical organisation” (Chapter IV: section II) in which wage-workers toil “under a master” (Chapter XI: section III) after they “parted with their liberty” and “have sold their arms” to a boss who appropriates both the “collective power” (Chapter VI: section II) and the “surplus of labour” they create (Chapter XI: section IV). The boss then appropriates these along with the economic rent (Chapter XI).
Just to compare to Marx, the “two characteristic phenomena” of capitalism are that the worker “works under the control of the capitalist to whom his labour belongs” and “the product is the property of the capitalist and not that of the worker, its immediate producer” (Capital I: 291-2). So Proudhon clearly recognises these two phenomena and has an analysis of capitalism which recognises that wage-labour is the source of exploitation and so exploitation occurs within production rather than in exchange. This does not mean that this is the only form of exploitation, of course, but it is fundamental to Proudhon’s ideas – and feeds directly into his alternative, namely associative socialism in which wage-labour is replaced by association and workers’ control of both labour and product. In short, market socialism: “a solution based upon equality – in other words, the organisation of labour, which involves the negation of political economy and the end of property.”
Proudhon repeatedly advocated the need to relace wage-labour with associations (although he rejected other versions of association, like Louis Blanc’s). It was a feature of all his major works from What is Property? onwards. This follows naturally from his understanding of how exploitation occurs within production and the hierarchical relationship wage-labour creates between the boss and workers – the latter sell their labour and liberty to the former in return for a wage and who keeps their product, surplus as well as the economic rent.
Tucker translated Volume 1 of the book (well enough but “Capital and Wages” should have been “Capital and Wage-Labour”) but Volume 2 never appeared. I cannot help thinking that may be because Proudhon advocated notions very much at odds with Tucker’s ideas. For example, Tucker rejected the Georgist “Single Tax” – the conversion of economic rent into a public fund – but Proudhon in Chapter XI advocated precisely that. This can be seen in Volume 1 in which Proudhon advocates “the organisation of labour” (workers’ association), something Tucker rarely mentioned. However, that is speculation on my part and the actual reason for its non-appearance may be different.
It should be noted that this chapter starts with an extended discussion of the history of philosophy. In this it reflects the introduction (“The hypothesis of a God”) and Chapter VIII (“Chapter VIII. Of the Responsibility of Man and Of God, Under the Law of Contradiction, Or a Solution of the Problem of Providence.”) both of which seem somewhat strange inclusions in a work dedicated to critiquing the current economic regime.
Still, I should note that Chapter VIII contains the passing remark that “[b]y virtue of the principle of collective force, laborers are the equals and associates of their leaders” which reflects his comments on “the organisation of labour” in earlier chapters. It should not be forgotten that – regardless of what Marx claimed – Proudhon’s work is fundamentally a critique and positive alternatives are only presented in passing, although most do advocate workers’ control of production and associationism. I would recommend K. Steven Vincent’s Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the Rise of French Republican Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984) on this aspect of Proudhon’s ideas.
This chapter starts with a history of philosophy and in this account we get to Hegel:
And we saw this Titan of philosophy undertake to overthrow eternal dualism by dualism itself; to establish identity on contradiction; to draw being from nothingness, and, with the help of his logic alone, to explain, to prophesise, what can I say?, to create nature and man! No one before him had penetrated so deeply the innermost laws of being; none had illuminated with so lively a light the mysteries of reason. He succeeds in giving a formula which, if it is not all science, nor even all logic, is at least the key to science and logic. But it soon became clear that even its author could only have constructed that logic by constantly mixing in experience and using its materials; that all his formulas followed observation, but never preceded it. And since, according to the system of the identity of thought and being, there was nothing more to expect from philosophy, that the circle was closed, it was demonstrated once and for all that science without experience is impossible; that if the self and the non-self are correlative, necessary to each other, inconceivable without each other, they are not identical; that their identity, as well as their reduction in an elusive absolute, is only a view of our intelligence, a postulate of reason, useful in certain cases for reasoning, but without the slightest reality; finally that the theory of contraries, of an incomparable power in order to control our opinions, to discover our errors and to determine the essential character of truth, is not however, the sole form of nature, the only revelation of experience, and consequently the only law of the mind.
This is of note as Marx sought to portray Proudhon as an idealist who, Marx suggested in all seriousness, thought that ideas somehow existed before humanity appeared. As this passage suggests, Proudhon clearly based his model of capitalism on empirical evidence and built it based on “experience”. As he put it in his Marginal Notes on The Poverty of Philosophy:
Have I ever claimed that principles are anything other than the intellectual representation, not the generating cause, of facts?
As with other aspects of the book, there are passages which can confuse and puzzle the reader. For example:
In following in our exposition this method of the parallel development of the reality and the idea, we find a double advantage: first, that of escaping the reproach of materialism, so often applied to economists, to whom facts are truth simply because they are facts, and material facts. To us, on the contrary, facts are not matter, — for we do not know what the word matter means, — but visible manifestations of invisible ideas. So viewed, the value of facts is measured by the idea which they represent; and that is why we have rejected as illegitimate and non-conclusive useful value and value in exchange, and later the division of labour itself, although to the economists all these have an absolute authority.
On the other hand, it is as impossible to accuse us of spiritualism, idealism, or mysticism: for, admitting as a point of departure only the external manifestation of the idea, — the idea which we do not know, which does not exist, as long as it is not reflected, like light, which would be nothing if the sun existed by itself in an infinite void, — and brushing aside all à prori reasoning upon theogony and cosmogony, all inquiry into substance, cause, the me and the not-me, we confine ourselves to searching for the laws of being and to following the order of their appearance as far as reason can reach.
Doubtless all knowledge brings up at last against a mystery: such, for instance, as matter and mind, both of which we admit as two unknown essences, upon which all phenomena rest. But this is not to say that mystery is the point of departure of knowledge, or that mysticism is the necessary condition of logic: quite the contrary, the spontaneity of our reason tends to the perpetual rejection of mysticism; it makes an à priori protest against all mystery, because it has no use for mystery except to deny it, and because the negation of mysticism is the only thing for which reason has no need of experience.
In short, human facts are the incarnation of human ideas: therefore, to study the laws of social economy is to constitute the theory of the laws of reason and create philosophy. We may now pursue the course of our investigation.
This is difficult to make sense of. The notion that facts “are the incarnation of human ideas” sounds like idealism but Proudhon rejects idealism, noting that the idea “does not exist” unless it is “reflected” by facts. Yet the solution is simple enough – Proudhon is stressing the role of human mental activity in evaluating and organising facts, in drawing out “laws” from the facts.
Rejecting simply the accumulation of facts (“materialism”), Proudhon uses these facts as the basis of generating abstract “laws” which explain and make sense of these facts – thus facts are “visible manifestations of invisible ideas”. Facts and the laws based upon them are not identical – so the “law of value” reflects that, in general, prices are regulated by the labour used to create them but this does not mean that every movement of prices will completely match changes in labour. As he put in it The Philosophy of Progress (1853):
The idea of value is elementary in economics: everyone knows what is meant by it. Nothing is less arbitrary than this idea; it is the comparative relation of products that, at each moment of social life, make up wealth. Value, in a word, indicates a proportion.
Now, a proportion is something mathematical, exact, ideal, something which, by its high intelligibility, excludes caprice and fortune. There is then, on top of supply and demand, a law for comparison of values, therefore a rule of the evaluation of products.
But that law or rule is a pure idea, of which it is impossible, at any moment, and for any object, to apply precisely, to have the exact and true standard. Products vary constantly in quantity and in quality; the capital in the production and its cost vary equally. The proportion does not remain the same for two instants in a row: a criterion or standard of values is thus impossible. The piece of money, five grams in weight, that we call the franc, is not a fixed unity of values: it is only a product like others, which with its weight of five grams at nine-tenths silver and one-tenth alloy, is worth sometimes more, sometimes less than the franc, without us ever being able to know exactly what is its difference from the standard franc.
On what then does commerce rest, since it is proven that, lacking a standard of value, exchange is never equal, although the law of proportionality is rigorous? It is here that liberty comes to the rescue of reason, and compensates for the failures of certainty. Commerce rests on a convention, the principle of which is that the parties, after having sought fruitlessly the exact relations of the objects exchanged, come to an agreement to give an expression reputed to be exact, provided that it does not exceed the limits of a certain tolerance. That conventional expression is what we call the price.
Thus, in the order of economic ideas, the truth is in the law, and not in the transactions. There is a certainty for the theory, but there is no criterion for practice. There would not even have been practice, and society would be impossible, if, in the absence of a criterion prior and superior to it, human liberty had not found a means to supply it by contract.
This means that, for Proudhon, “value” was an abstraction which did not exist (which is why he talked of products changing for products and workers receiving the full product of the labour rather than the full value of their labour). This explains why he did not advocate labour notes (myths notwithstanding) but rather “bills of exchange”. So labour created products which had prices and value was an abstraction used to understand how prices moved. In this he followed Adam Smith. Marx, in contrast, seems to have thought value existed and that prices were somehow dependent upon it – hence the need to solve “the transformation problem.” Proudhon had no reason to try to explain how value become prices (and so the various aspects of labour and value in Marx – “concrete labour”, “abstract labour”, “exchange value”, “market value”, “value” and so on). Whether these are really needed to critique capitalism is another issue.
Proudhon keeps stressing the need to link ideas to facts as “every theory not having the sanction of experience – that is, of constancy and concatenation in its representations – thereby lacks a scientific character.” So a legitimate theory reflects and explains reality – but it is not reality, it is a creation of the mind.
In short, regardless of the obscurity of the language used, this is the method Proudhon uses – building an abstract model rooted in generalising from an analysis of reality but which – because it is a model and so the product of human mental activity – must never be confused with reality itself. We must do this otherwise we are just describing – as best we can – the history of the world and so presenting the facts the author is aware. Such a task, moreover, would be impossible – think about what would be involved in discussing everything, and their histories, all at once.
If in doubt that this was his methodology, there is the constant reference to the need to study facts. For example:
“It is important, then, that we should resume the study of economic facts and practices, discover their meaning, and formulate their philosophy. Until this is done, no knowledge of social progress can be acquired, no reform attempted. The error of socialism has consisted hitherto in perpetuating religious reverie by launching forward into a fantastic future instead of seizing the reality which is crushing it; as the wrong of the economists has been in regarding every accomplished fact as an injunction against any proposal of reform.”
He stressed that “philosophy is the agreement of reason and experience”, the need to base the theories (or “laws”) you develop upon facts but recognising that this process of abstraction is not just recounting facts. Rather, the facts are used to create a theory (“ideas”) which organises them and develops them into a coherent and explanatory whole. The ideas do not exist independently of the facts but are rather based upon them while not being identical to them (they cannot be as the ideas are generalisations and abstractions of the facts). In that sense, facts are the “visible manifestations of invisible ideas” but I would not phrase it that way for it allows the possibility of cherry-picking by those hostile to Proudhon or anarchism – or good-faith readers lacking patience – to misrepresent his position.
And note Proudhon’s awareness that socialism needs to understand capitalism rather than just denounce it and that it will be build upon tendencies within capitalism which point to something better, to tendencies within capitalism which point to its negation. Capitalism creates the pre-conditions for socialism by its development. Moreover, understanding how capitalism works (or fails to work as the ideologues suggest) always us to envision an alternative Thus the understanding how exploitation occurs within capitalism also suggests how it can be ended and so what comes next:
If, then, I demonstrate that political economy, with all its contradictory hypotheses and equivocal conclusions, is nothing but an organization of privilege and misery, I shall have proved thereby that it contains by implication the promise of an organization of labor and equality, since, as has been said, every systematic contradiction is the announcement of a composition; further, I shall have fixed the bases of this composition. Then, indeed, to unfold the system of economical contradictions is to lay the foundations of universal association; to show how the products of collective labor come out of society is to explain how it will be possible to make them return to it; to exhibit the genesis of the problems of production and distribution is to prepare the way for their solution. All these propositions are identical and equally evident.
How he expresses himself in this task can be, as noted, confusing and puzzling. However it should not be forgotten that Proudhon repeatedly indicates that he is building a model rather than describing capitalism (or its history) and so not just presenting a series of facts. He was well-aware – regardless of Marx’s comments – that his presentation of this model was based on presenting categories in turn and building upon each one in turn while being well-aware that the categories he discussed were all interwoven in reality:
Property is the postulate of credit, as credit had been the postulate of commerce, and monopoly the postulate of competition. In practice, all these things are inseparable and simultaneous; but in theory they are distinct and consecutive; and property is no more monopoly than the machine is the division of labour, although monopoly is almost always and almost necessarily accompanied by property, as division almost always and almost necessarily supposes the use of machines.
To understand what Proudhon aimed to in System, I would recommend Proudhon and German philosophy by René Berthier (2009). Suffice to say, I think that having to explain what Proudhon was trying to do suggests a failure in his work – it is one thing to show how others distort his ideas (wilfully, or by second-hand repetition), it is another to have to explain what is meant by drawing together and contextualising passages across a lengthy book. So while I consider Proudhon as an important anarchist thinker, I am well aware of his limitations and issues.
Two more points.
First, Marx liked to claim that he was the person who taught Proudhon dialectics, although he also suggested he failed (suggesting his abilities as a teacher were at fault). However, Proudhon had talked of the “Hegelian formula” of thesis, antithesis and synthesis in 1840’s What is Property?. Ultimately, it hardly matters whether Proudhon understood Hegel well or not as he was utilising what he considered useful in Hegel and so was not a Hegelian – just as he did with Smith and Ricardo. So whether his critique of capitalism was Hegelian or not misses the point.
I should note that Lenin suggested knowing Hegel was key to understanding Marx:
“Aphorism: It is impossible completely to understand Marx’s Capital, and especially its first chapter, without having thoroughly studied and understood the whole of Hegel’s Logic. Consequently, half a century later none of the Marxists understood Marx!!” (Collected Works 38, 180]
If that were true, it would mean that Marx was a terrible writer as he could not explain his ideas clearly to an audience without a grounding in German philosophy. It also safeguards Marxism for all actions done in its name – how many Marxist leaders (never mind activists) have read (or, more importantly, understood) Hegel? As libertarian Marxist Paul Mattick suggested it “was a good thing that Lenin opened Hegel’s Logic. If he had not, there would not have been a true Marxist for a whole century” and mocked that “[u]nfortunately . . . neither Stalin nor any of the other Bolshevik leaders opened Hegel’s Logic, and thus . . . Leninism became Stalinism and state-capitalism”. (“A Marxian Oddity”, A Libertarian Reader 3: 278). Suffice to say, I have my doubts that many Marxists were masters of Hegel even if they felt the need to use the terminology at times (usually to justify some authoritarian practice by the Bolsheviks).
Second, Marx, in 1847, is simply bemoaning the use of abstraction by Proudhon, arguing that it was idealism. By 1867 he had reversed himself: “In the analysis of economic forms neither microscopes nor chemical reagents are of assistance. The power of abstraction must replace them both” (Capital I: 90) Marxists like to claim that Marx was right in 1847 (abstraction is idealism) and in 1867 (abstraction is essential) when both cannot be right. As I note elsewhere, even the occasional Marxist notes this difference although none of the obvious conclusions are drawn,
There are other contradictions. For example, in 1847 it was a case of “slapping history in the face to want to begin by the division of labour in general, in order to get subsequently to a specific instrument of production, machinery.” In 1867 it was a case of “The Division of Labour and Manufacture” (chapter 14) being followed by “Machinery and Large-Scale Industry” (chapter 15). Bizarrely, in 1847, Marx quotes Baggage against Proudhon in spite of him actually confirming Proudhon’s argument:
“When, by the division of labour, each particular operation has been simplified to the use of a single instrument, the linking up of all these instruments, set in motion by a single engine, constitutes – a machine.” (Babbage, Traité sur l’économie des machines, p. 230, Paris, 1833)
To which Proudhon simply notes the obvious: “So the machine comes after division.”
Comparing what Marx said about Proudhon and what Proudhon actually wrote is a time consuming task, as is comparing what Marx wrote in 1847 and how it compares to his later writings. Still, we can be sure that regardless of the inaccuracies, the inventions, the changes, the contradictions, and so on found, we will be solemnly informed that Marx was always right and Proudhon was a petty-bourgeois waste of time…
Anyway, that is enough for now. As noted, Proudhon did himself few favours in how he expressed himself in System of Economic Contradictions at times and patience and a close reading are often needed to grasp what he was getting at. This can be seen by his methodology which is simply the creating an abstract model of capitalism based on analysing its economic categories, comparing theory to reality and building upon each in turn to enrich the model. It was an ambitious goal, and the resulting work is flawed but one full of vivid and lasting insights.