pierre-joseph proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
(15 January 1809 – 19 January 1865)
was a French politician and the founder of mutualist philosophy. He was the ..
first person to declare himself an anarchist
and is widely regarded as one of the ideology’s most influential theorists. Proudhon is even considered by many to be the “father of anarchism”. He became a member of the French Parliament after the revolution of 1848, whereafter he referred to himself as a federalist.
Proudhon, who was born in Besançon, was a printer who taught himself Latin in order to better print books in the language. His best-known assertion is that Property is Theft!, contained in his first major work, What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government, published in 1840. The book’s publication attracted the attention of the French authorities. It also attracted the scrutiny of Karl Marx, who started a correspondence with its author. The two influenced each other: they met in Paris while Marx was exiled there.Their friendship finally ended when Marx responded to Proudhon’s The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty with the provocatively titled The Poverty of Philosophy. The dispute became one of the sources of the split between the anarchist and Marxist wings of the International Working Men’s Association. Some, such as Edmund Wilson, have contended that Marx’s attack on Proudhon had its origin in the latter’s defense of Karl Grün, whom Marx bitterly disliked, but who had been preparing translations of Proudhon’s work.
Proudhon favored workers’ associations or co-operatives, as well as individual worker/peasant possession, over private ownership or the nationalization of land and workplaces.
He considered social revolution to be achievable in a peaceful manner.
In The Confessions of a Revolutionary Proudhon asserted that, Anarchy is Order Without Power, the phrase which much later inspired, in the view of some, the anarchist circled-A symbol, today “one of the most common graffiti on the urban landscape.” He unsuccessfully tried to create a national bank, to be funded by what became an abortive attempt at an income tax on capitalists and shareholders. Similar in some respects to a credit union, it would have given interest-free loans.
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anarch\ism ness
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from kevin‘s communal property (2011): https://c4ss.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/02/Communal-Property.pdf
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2\ destruction of peasant commune by the state
It was only with the rise of the modern state, toward the end of the Middle Ages, that governments began to take an interest in regulating the lives of individuals. The modern centralized state was confronted with the problem of opacity, and became preoccupied with, in James Scott’s language, an “attempt to make society legible, to arrange the population in ways that simplified the classic state functions of taxation, conscription, and prevention of rebellion.
Legibility is a condition of manipulation. Any substantial state intervention in society—to vaccinate a population, produce goods, mobilize labor, tax people and their property, conduct literacy campaigns, conscript soldiers, enforce sanitation standards, catch criminals, start universal schooling—requires the
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invention of units that are visible…. Whatever the units being manipulated, they must be organized in a manner that permits them to be identified, observed, recorded, counted, aggregated, and monitored.
the demise of us.. the demise of land..
The degree of knowledge required would have to be roughly commensurate with the depth of the intervention. In other words, one might say that the greater the manipulation envisaged, the greater the legibility required to effect it.
It was precisely this phenomenon, which had reached full tide by the middle of the nineteenth century, that Proudhon had in mind when he declared, “To be ruled is to be kept an eye on, inspected, spied on, regulated, indoctrinated, sermonized, listed and checked off, estimated, appraised, censured, ordered about…. To be ruled is at every operation, transaction, movement, to be noted, registered, counted, priced, admonished, prevented, reformed, redressed, corrected.”
From another perspective, what Proudhon was deploring was in fact the great achievement of modern statecraft. How hard-won and tenuous this achievement was is worth emphasizing. Most states, to speak broadly, are “younger” than the societies that they purport to administer. States therefore confront patterns of settlement, social relations, and production, not to mention a natural environment, that have evolved largely independent of state plans. The result is typically a diversity, complexity, and unrepeatability of social forms that are relatively opaque to the state, often purposefully so…. If the state’s goals are minimal, it may not need to know much about the society…. If, however, the state is ambitious—if it wants to extract as much grain and manpower as it can, short of provoking a famine or a rebellion, if it wants to create a literate, skilled, and healthy population, if it wants everyone to speak the same language or worship the same god—then it will have to become both far more knowledgeable and far more intrusive.2
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from Robert Neuwirth (@RobertNeuwirth)’s shadow cities:
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my friend the squatters – who have had to live the nuances almost their entire lives – would find solace in the theory of pierre joseph proudhon.. 1840 – manifesto called what is property.. his answer – property is robbery.. probably sounds more scandalous today that it did when he wrote it . but proudhon’s argument is more refined that the three word sound bit.. he suggests there’s a diff between property and possession. property turns land into a commodity: people own land not to use it or because they need it for survival, but simply as an investment. possession guarantees personal use and control rather than profit. for proudhon, property, not money, is the root of all evil
hardt & negri property law.. wilde property law
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proudhon: ‘individual possession is the condition of social life. 5 000 years of property demos this. property is the suicide of society. possession is w/in right; property is against right. suppress property while maintaining possess and by this simple modification of the principle, you will revolutionize the law, govt, econ and institutions; you will drive evil from the face of the earth
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section/insight on proudhon in peter marshall’s demanding the impossible.. starting p 188
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from anarchy and democracy:
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It is under this condition that Proudhon proclaimed that community, too, is theft. Yet never, in any of his works, did he declare that community is liberty. Despite the fact that, just as he famously declared that property is theft, he also declared property to be liberty. Community was just much a problem, an enigma, as property itself…
because we don’t know how to commune like legit free people..
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interesting life stuff about proudhon from don’t fear invoke anarchy:
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However, unlike them, Bray never called himself an anarchist. The first person to do so was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a year later, in his groundbreaking work, What is Property? An Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government.
Proudhon, like Bray and unlike Marx, came from the working class. His maternal grandfather had been a revolutionary during the French Revolution, and his family remained supporters of the republican cause. His father was a cooper and then an unsuccessful small businessman, running a cottage brewery and tavern for a time. After that, the family lived and worked on his maternal grandfather’s farm.
After his father lost a lawsuit, reducing the family to poverty, Proudhon had to quit school and find a trade. He became a printer and a compositor. By the age of twenty, he was working with Charles Fourier, reviewing with him the proofs for Fourier’s Le nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire. In this book, Fourier presented a summation of his critique of existing society and his proposed alternative, a society based on the principles of “mutual association” and “passionate attraction,” in which people would live and work in “phalansteries” or agro-industrial communes. People would rotate through a variety of jobs, on a daily basis, with each job providing an outlet for a particular talent or capacity
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In What is Property?, Proudhon criticized Fourier for advocating individual remuneration based on each worker’s contribution of capital, labor, and skill to production, because the source of economic value is not capital, or even superior skills, but the “collective force” of associated labor; in which case, according to Proudhon, there should be an “equality of wages” rather than wage differentials between workers.
For Proudhon, “capital can be exchanged, but cannot be a source of income.” Property, in the form of capital, was “theft” because the capitalists asserted complete control over, or exclusive ownership of, things that they had not produced by their own labor, and which naturally existed (such as land, air, and water) or were produced by others (the workers), but which the capitalists had appropriated for their own benefit. The workers’ access to the very means of production that they had created through their own collective labor was controlled by their capitalist employers, who then paid them only a portion of the economic value produced by the workers using those means of production, keeping the lion’s share for themselves.
During the 1830s, Proudhon’s life was typical of a skilled tradesman in France. He tramped around the country looking for work, survived a cholera outbreak in Paris, and had trouble supporting himself by his own labor. He saw firsthand, along with many other workers, how the 1830 July Revolution had failed to result in any benefit to the working class. When he asked the mayor of Toulon for help in finding work, the mayor’s advice to him was “to go away” and quit bothering him.
His initial involvement in socialist politics came when he was offered the editorship of a Fourierist paper, L’Impartial. Although he insisted that the paper should be unabashedly republican, he foreshadowed his subsequent anarchist views by suggesting that the paper “invite the population to make themselves capable of managing their own affairs,” dispensing “with all ministerial and constitutional hierarchy.” He resigned from the paper on his first day, after finding out that everything he wrote had to be reviewed and approved by the local prefect before it could be published.
His antipathy towards authority increased when his brother was called up for military service and ended up committing suicide when his commanding officer tried to embroil him in an embezzlement scheme. Proudhon’s family had already been financially ruined by lawsuits. He had seen the indifference of the government to the plight of workers like himself and its special concern to censor any criticisms of its role in maintaining their impoverished and subordinate status. No wonder that he later described the law as “spider webs for the rich and powerful, steel chains for the weak and poor, fishing nets in the hands of the Government.”
For Proudhon, government was “but the reflection of society.” In a society based on private property (“theft”), where “by the necessity of things, property, riches, comfort, all go on one side, poverty on the other,” the very function of government is nothing other than “the defence of the rich against the poor.” Abolish capitalism, and there will be “no further need of government.” Authority and capitalism go hand in hand, such that “the abolition of the exploitation of man by man and the abolition of the government of man by man are one and the same formula.”
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But, despite his emphasis on freedom and voluntary association, Proudhon had some affinity for the Saint-Simonian idea of replacing coercive government with “scientific” or rational administration. The rational organization of society requires a “search for the system of society… or the science of politics,” which “exists quite independently of the will of sovereigns, the opinion of majorities, and popular beliefs.” It will then be possible to create a “scientific socialism,” in which “the sovereignty of the will yields to the sovereignty of reason.” All “questions of legislation and politics” will then become “matters of science, not of opinion,” to be determined on the basis of statistical analysis. Since “the opinion of no one is of any value until its truth has been proven, no one can substitute his will for reason, — nobody is king.” Social science, just like socialism then, implied a positive kind of anarchy.
oi oi oi
But Proudhon could not accept the technocratic administrative hierarchies envisaged by the Saint-Simonians. Instead, he advocated workers’ self-management, with workers receiving a polytechnic education and rotating between jobs, in order to improve and combine their respective skills and to avoid a stupefying division of labor. Where an industry required specialized technical expertise, such experts “must be chosen from the workers by the workers themselves.” It is impossible to conceive of “a system which has all its pieces and details in place,” such that “all the rest of us have to do is implement it.” This is because “social science is infinite; no single human can ever understand it all.” Science, just as much as production, is a collective endeavor, over which no one individual can claim mastery.
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be you. 