ANTHONY BREWER PROUDHON, PIERRE-JOSEPH (1809– 65)

ANTHONY BREWER PROUDHON, PIERRE-JOSEPH (1809– 65)

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, who became an anarchist hero, was often reviled by other early socialists as a conservative. Unlike most early socialists, he came from a poor background. His mother’s family were peasants, while his father was a cooper in the

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Franche-Comté. However, education was important to the family and his father’s cousin was Professor of Law at the University of Besançon, a Jacobin leader and a freemason. Proudhon’s mother encouraged him to attend the collège in Besançon, which he did until

he was 17, although the family never had the money to buy the necessary textbooks. He was apprenticed to a printer and typeset FOURIER’S Le Nouveau Monde industriel et sociétaire, met the author and was influenced by his ideas. In 1839 Proudhon was awarded the Suard prize by the Besançon Academy, 1,500 francs a year for 3 years, which gave him the economic opportunity to move to Paris. He wrote first on grammar, then on the economy and politics. In 1840 he brought out Qu’est-ce que lapropriété?, the first and best-known of a large number of publications. The Academicians were appalled. Proudhon was charged with undermining private property, but the jury in Besançon threw out the charge.

Qu’est-ce que la propriété is easy to read, but even on first glance the reader is aware of gross and perhaps deliberate contradictions. Proudhon liked to shock by his manipulation of language; the phrase ‘property is theft’ guaranteed him an audience. The ‘property’ of the title was ‘private’ property. It is never entirely clear what degree of private ownership he found tolerable. His criticisms were aimed at those who owned an excessive amount and used their wealth to exploit others. ‘Surplus’ property was, in his view, the enemy of equality and social harmony. But he was critical of communists who attacked the actual notion of private property. He claimed to believe in liberty, but he was not a democrat. He was an anarchist, but did not believe in chaos. For him, anarchy was simply the absence of a sovereign; society should be based on co-operation, not coercion. His ideal society was one of small landowners. Whenever he spoke of industry, it was always small-scale and artisanal.

Proudhon’s prime objective in this, as in most of his works, was to define a just society and persuade his reader of its equity. He was opposed to privilege and slavery, and stood for, he claimed, equality of rights, the rule of law and justice. All would agree,

he asserted, that equality of conditions and equality of rights were identical and that therefore property rights were synonymous with robbery. Presumably the author was aware that almost none of his readers would agree! He claimed that developments in modern times exacerbated this situation. The revolutions of 1789 and 1830 grounded modern society on three principles: the sovereignty of human will, which he equated with despotism; inequalities of wealth and rank; rights of private ownership of property. Are these, he asks, in harmony with justice? The first self-evidently was not. Neither was the second; but it could easily be changed by eliminating the third. The Declaration of Rights stipulated that the right to property was inalienable, but Proudhon asserted that property and society were utterly irreconcilable institutions. Property was incompatible with civil and political equality. He unequivocally stated ‘the right of property was the origin of evil on the earth’. If, he argued, the right of property was based on labour, then permanent ownership could not follow. It was a delusion, he claimed, to talk about the organization of labour while private property existed. Proudhon took issue with Fourier who argued that everyone should be rewarded according to their capital, labour and skill on the grounds that such a division was essentially unequal. Inequality of talent should not, he claimed, mean inequality of reward. Society could survive without its great artists, but not without its food producers.

Encyclopedia of nineteenth-century thought 528 Private property and communism were habitually depicted as the only choices for

society. Proudhon disliked both. While denying the right of an individual to have exclusive control over a piece of property, Proudhon was convinced that communism was as unfair and as riddled with inequalities. It was mere oppression and slavery. Society should be based on equality, law, independence and proportionality; this would be liberty. What did Proudhon mean by proportionality? So far, he had roundly condemned exclusive rights of personal ownership, but had been equally critical of communism. It appears that what he was proposing was an equalizing process, but not egalitarianism. He then drew a distinction between property and possession. Law, Government, the economy and all institutions could be revolutionized if the right of possession was preserved and property rights abolished. He was not opposed to moderate levels of private use of the land. Did this seal of approval stop short of outright ownership? Or is the difference between property and possession quantitative rather than qualitative? What Proudhon said was ambiguous, although his conclusion seemed to lead towards the former definition.

Thus, after 300 pages of invective and some of the most quotable phrases on the iniquity of private property, Proudhon’s conclusion was a damp squib.

After one of the most uncompromisingly radical statements made by any of the early socialists, Proudhon seemed to take fright from the logical conclusion of his criticisms. All he asked for was the reduction and eventual elimination of interest rates and a tax on profit. Having slated the Orleanist regime, he declared that he would retain the monarchy, asking only for less elitist attitudes from the King and more efficient Government. Why? He realized that there were few democrats in France and those who went by that name had themselves ambitions to become kings. He wanted change, but did not believe that the existing regime had to be overturned to achieve it. His delightful conclusion summarized his actual approach. ‘Property is like the dragon which Hercules killed: to destroy it, it must be taken, not by the head, but by the tail,—that is, by profit and interest.’

In Paris Proudhon met MARX, BAKUNIN and HERZEN, the start oflasting friendships with the last two. Marx liked Proudhon’s first book, but subsequently they could not agree. Proudhon thought Marx too doctrinaire. Marx dismissed him as a ‘petit bourgeois’ thinker. Proudhon did not become a full-time writer; when his scholarship ran out he went to work for a shipping company in Lyon; his employers were friends and left him time to write.

Proudhon had set the tone of his philosophy, which he continued to develop while working for the Gauthier brothers in Lyon. In 1846 came Système des contradictions économiques ou philosophie de la misère, to which Marx replied with Misère de la philosophie . Proudhon criticized communists like CABET, who dreamt of the disappearance of individual ownership. Proudhon was convinced that neither revolution nor the centralized state would solve the social problems of the day. He opposed Louis Blanc’s socialism from above; socialism had to come from the people. His ideal was a community in which as many people as possible owned modest quantities of land, enough to sustain a family, in which industry was small-scale and artisanal, and in which economic competition and profit were absent. On the eve of the 1848 revolution, Proudhon was planning the launch of a newspaper, Le Peuple. He was convinced that he was one of the few who understood ‘the people’ and in return expressed faith in the

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collective wisdom of the same. Proudhon began to define his solution to economic problems as mutualism, or a harmonizing equilibrium. The term must have been suggested to him by the name of the Lyon silk workers’ mutual aid association, the Society of Mutual Duty .

After the February revolution in which he had no role, other than to help Flocon his printer employer produce posters and placards, Proudhon became a vigorous publicist. He used his new paper, Le Représentant du peuple to offer practical advice on the economic crisis of the day. He was convinced that the economy would recover if interest rates were substantially reduced, if not actually eliminated. Investors were less than charmed. Because the provisional Government did not seem to be doing too well sorting out the economy, Proudhon’s solutions quickly became well known and popular. Up to 40,000 copies of his paper were sold on days when Proudhon had written the leading article. Many were reprinted as short, cheap pamphlets with a particular emphasis on unemployment and poverty, including ‘The Solution to the Social Problem’ and ‘The Malthusians’, in which he attacked laissez-faire capitalism.

Proudhon was so rude about the ambitious republicans who grabbed control that they left him off their list of candidates for the National Assembly and he was only elected in the June by-elections. He had long since dismissed BLANC’S plans for state intervention as a fraud on artisans and now he unfairly blamed Blanc for the creation of the national workshops. Blanc returned the compliment and ignored Proudhon’s project for reorganizing credit. Proudhon was also at odds with CONSIDÉRANT and Leroux. Subsequently Leroux commented that in 1848 Proudhon, Cabet and Louis Blanc were a revolutionary triad, Proudhon representing liberty, Cabet fraternity and Blanc equality. If so, they were a very divided trio.

Proudhon’s main mission was to promote financial reform, but his proposals were greeted by his fellow deputies as a one-man attack on private property. On 8 July he proposed to the Assembly’s Finance Committee, of which he was a member, a 33 per cent reduction of all rents for 3 years to alleviate the impact of the economic crisis on the poor. Most deputies were property owners and, scandalized, passed a motion of censure on him. Only the Lyon silk-worker, Greppo, voted for him, the remaining 691 voting against. The Assembly condemned his proposal as ‘an affront to the moral order, an attack on private property’.

Disillusioned with Parliament, Proudhon focused his attention on his bank project and his journalism. He promoted a People’s Bank as a solution to constant economic crises and unemployment. It was to be a producer and consumer co-operative, resembling Flora Tristan’s plan for a union of all workers and Cabet’s Icarie. Unlike Blanc’s social workshops, Proudhon’s co-operative would consist of individual, one-off agreements between autonomous workers. Like Tristan, Proudhon realized that the strength of the poor lay in numbers. He calculated that 250,000 workers in the capital alone, earning 2 francs a day each for about 300 days a year, meant a total earning power of 150 million francs a year. This potential power could be released and workers emancipated from uncertainty and poverty by the creation of a system of direct exchange of the goods they produced. In his bank workers would combine to get orders and to make goods and cooperate in the exchange of the items produced. The bank would offer cheap or even interest-free credit. There would be warehouses in which finished goods could be stored preparatory to being traded for goods of equal value or in exchange for notes issued by

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the bank. Thus the bank would consist of two sections, one for production and a syndicate to organize distribution. In September a committee for the bank in the Seine department was set up, consisting of twenty-two artisans, including masons, metal workers and a doctor. The scheme attracted 27,000 subscribers. Proudhon frequently referred to the unimpeachable merits of the bank in his new paper, Le Peuple, but it never left the drawing board. Despite its practical failure Proudhon was regarded as an inspiration for the numerous producer and retail co-operatives and mutual-aid societies that were set up during the republic.

When he wrote Idée générale de la révolution (1851), which sold 3,000 copies and was instantly reprinted, he still hoped that a democratic, self-governing Bank of Exchange could be created to replace the Bank of France. He remained convinced that if his bank were established, the fairness and harmony of the new, equitable economic structures would eliminate the need for legal and political systems and armies.

Proudhon wanted an economic, not a political, revolution, which he explained in Confessions d’un révolutionnaire pour servir à l’histoire de la révolution de février (Brussels, 1849). His was no class war to bring the proletariat to political power, but a new equilibrium, a just society, in which no one would suffer from extremes of deprivation and no one indulge in excess wealth. He assumed that the basis of this change would be moral and that man, a fairly rational being, would see its benefits. The state had no role to play. When prince Napoleon, son of Jérôme Bonaparte, asked Proudhon what would be his ideal society, he answered, ‘I dream of a society in which I would be guillotined as a conservative.’

During the early decades of the Third Republic Proudhon was seen as an example for anarchist, federalist and trade union groups. He is often excluded from accounts of socialism, but he had a substantial impact on its development. He condemned socialists as unrealistic utopians, yet his solutions were as idealistic as those of Fourier and Cabet. He rejected state-led socialism; socialism had to come from the people. Like many early socialists, Proudhon thought political institutions far less important than economic to the reform of society. His views were sometimes conflicting, ambivalent or unpopular. He proclaimed himself both a republican and an anarchist, the former signifying no specific system, the latter simply meaning an opponent of a centralized regime dominated by one man or a small group. He was, like all early socialists, primarily a moralist. He rejected violent revolution. He had little faith in the embryonic democratic system introduced in 1848 and changed his mind several times about Louis Napoleon. Early socialists were sometimes suspicious of him because his views on politics sounded similar to those of conservatives and his hostility to women’s rights exceeded anything a conservative would have dared to say.