___________
I’m aware that readers who have followed the
argument this far are likely to be resistant to the interpretation I’m
presenting, and for a number of reasons. I’m entirely sympathetic, since the
most likely resistances are likely to be ones which I faced myself as I worked
through Proudhon’s thought.
1) Anti-statism is generally considered an
essential part of anarchism—so essential, in fact, that some anarchists
consider anti-statism nearly the entirety of anarchism. This is particularly
the case among market anarchists, but social anarchists generally have some
investment in the Bakunin-style opposition to the state. At the same time, a
perception of Proudhon’s thought on the subject has been established on the
basis of the portion of “Resistance to the Revolution” that was translated
(multiple times, by William B. Greene and Benjamin R. Tucker) as “The State.” To
suggest that anarchist theory ought to find a place for a state in its schemes,
even “after the revolution,” certainly goes against much of the grain of
anarchist thought—so there should presumably be very good reasons for pursuing
this other analysis.
2) The whole question emerges in the context of a
mutualist renaissance which doesn’t just come with a few potentially
topsy-turvy new ideas, but with a radical rereading of anarchism’s early
history, which has arguably been neglected by the tradition. As a movement, we’ve
tended to boil Proudhon’s thought down to some slogans, a few dubious
generalizations, and a selection of his worst missteps—more than fifty volumes
of works reduced down to something that could be scrawled on a cocktail napkin.
Now, however, we’ve seen a lot of new translation and analysis, not just of
Proudhon but of a number of early figures who complicate the origin story of
anarchism. Even if all this new material does not threaten any of our
closely-held notions about what anarchism is all about, it’s still a lot of
new, challenging material.
3) And it is not easy material to take in. There’s
not much doubt that one of the reasons that some of the early forms of
anarchism did not have more impact was that they were more closely connected in
their forms and assumptions to the “utopian” socialisms that predated them than
to the forms which survived the battles in the First International and the
major cultural transitions of the mid-19th century. But the “utopian” label was
ultimately a weapon wielded by Marx’s faction in the battle to define what
would count as “social science” and could be recognized as revolutionary
theory, and some of those old socialists may now look quite a bit more
contemporary. There is, for example, a great deal of Fourier in Deleuze, and we
might be inclined to summarize a lot of Derrida’s work with the phrase “property
is theft.” But the fact that there are presentist reasons to take a good look
at anarchist theory which has been neglected, doesn’t make that theory any
simpler—and the need to address the debts to “utopian” socialist thought only
increases the amount of material we need to deal with.
Ultimately, though, my own experience is that none
of these reasons to proceed carefully comes anywhere close to being a reason
not to proceed. On the contrary, a careful reading of Proudhon’s theory seems
to lead us towards a radical sociology that is not only more consistent than
the napkin’s-worth of Proudhon we’ve inherited, but is also arguably both more
powerful than virtually any of the theory provided by the “classical”
anarchists and more consistently anarchistic.
Let’s return to the similarities between the
development of Proudhon’s thought on property and that of his theory of the
state. The general trajectory of Proudhon’s property theory is as follows:
1839—Proudhon makes a few statements about the true
meaning of the commandment against theft, which suggest that any system of “private”
property might be built on theft (“putting aside”), rather than theft being an
abuse of property.
1840—He makes the bold claims that “property is
theft” and “property is impossible” in What
is Property? But he also proposes an anarchist form of liberty which he
defines in terms of a “synthesis of community and property.” He makes a
distinction between “simple possession” (a “matter of fact”) and “simple
property” (a right of “use and abuse”), but is not entirely consistent in his
definitions. Then, an introduction to the second edition of the book, he
defines “property” in terms of “the sum of its abuses,” threatening the
strength of his critique. Two more memoirs on property follow.
1842—In a response given in court, where he was
defending the publication of his memoirs, he proposes to eliminate or
neutralize property by universalizing the “theft” that it represents.
1846—In his System
of Economic Contradictions, property is given an antinomic character,
within which both positive and negative characteristics battle, and he
describes property as a problem second only to “human destiny” in importance,
and one not likely to be solved soon.
This is the point at which Proudhon declared the
problem of religion solved, and it’s worth noting here what Proudhon thought that
solution was—particularly because it bears a close resemblance to his analysis
of the state.
Proudhon’s claim is that what humans have sought in
the form of gods is, in fact, their own collective capacities, which they did
not recognize in the collective being which they confronted, and that this
failure to understand the nature of their own powers allowed those powers to be
harnessed against them by individuals claiming divine right and inspiration. As
in the critique of the state, it is a question of the external manifestation of
social power being understood as necessarily performing a governmental
function, and thus existing above individual human beings.
1848—Pursuing his theory of property through the
revolutionary period and into his brief involvement with the Provisional
Government, Proudhon wrote a series of analyses of property and its relations
to labor and credit, and his conclusions, often tied to particular occasions
and arguments, cover a tremendous amount of ground. In “The Revolutionary
Program,” for example, he made a series of rather startling declarations:
I am, as
you are well aware, citizens, the man who wrote these words: Property is theft!
I do not
come to retract them, heaven forbid! I persist in regarding this provocative
definition as the greatest truth of the century. I have no desire to insult
your convictions either: all that I ask, is to say to you how, partisan of the
family and of the household, adversary of communism, I understand that the
negation of property is necessary for the abolition of misery, for the
emancipation of the proletariat. It is by its fruits that one must judge a
doctrine: judge then my theory by my practice.
When I
say, Property is theft! I do not propose a principle; I do nothing but express
one conclusion. You will understand the enormous difference presently.
However,
if the definition of property which I state is only the conclusion, or rather
the general formula of the economic system, what is the principle of that
system, what is its practice, and what are its forms?
My
principle, which will appear astonishing to you, citizens, my principle is
yours; it is property itself.
I have no
other symbol, no other principle than those of the Declaration of the Rights of
Man and of the Citizen: Liberty, equality, security, property.
Like the
Declaration of Rights, I define liberty as the right to do anything that does
not harm others.
Again,
like the Declaration of Rights, I define property, provisionally, as the right
to dispose freely of one's income, the fruits of one's labor and industry.
Here is
the entirety of my system: liberty of conscience, liberty of the press, liberty
of labor, free trade, liberty in education, free competition, free disposition
of the fruits of labor and industry, liberty ad infinitum, absolute liberty, liberty for all and always?
It is the
system of '89 and '93; the system of Quesnay, of Turgot, of J.-B. Say; the
system that is always professed, with more or less intelligence and good faith,
by the various organs of the political parties, the system of the Débats, of the Presse, of the Constitutionnel,
of the Siècle, of the Nationale, of the Rèforme, of the Gazette;
in the end it is your system, voters.
Simple as
unity, vast as infinity, this system serves for itself and for others as a
criterion. In a word it is understood and compels adhesion; nobody wants a
system in which liberty is the least bit undermined. One word identifies and
wards off all errors: what could be easier than to say what is or is not
liberty? Liberty then, nothing more, nothing less. Laissez faire, laissez
passer, in the broadest and most literal sense; consequently property, as it
rises legitimately from this freedom, is my principle. No other solidarity
between the citizens than that accidents resulting from chance. . .
Then he proceeded to claim that this sort of laissez faire will lead to a sort of
anarchic “centralization:”
Who does
not see that the mutualist organization of exchange, of circulation, of credit,
of buying and selling, the abolition of taxes and tolls of every nature which
place burdens on production and bans on goods, irresistibly push the producers,
each following his specialty, towards a centralization analogous with that of
the State, but in which no one obeys, no one is dependent, and everyone is free
and sovereign?
And we can see that this idea of a state
unconnected to the governmental principle was already part of his theoretical
repertoire, well before the major shifts in his approach, and that his ideas on
both property and the state seem to have gone through significant oscillations
during the revolutionary period. It is in this period that he finally describes
property as “liberty,” while still maintaining that it is also “theft.”
1853—This year marked his decision to allow
concepts like “religion, government, and property” their “patronymic names.” In
practice, he did not often use the terms “property” and “government” in ways
that differ too dramatically from his earlier uses. In the case of property, it
was enough to begin to talk about it both in terms of its logics and its social
aims. He doesn’t seem to have had much interest in making a similar argument
about government, although there are a few nods in that direction, but he did
once and for all detach the notion of the state from any necessary connection
to the governmental principle.
Let’s stop again and think about the moves Proudhon
is making. Although he claimed in 1849 that the problems of property were
solved, but those of government were hardly touched, it appears that the
problem of government—the misrecognition of the collective force embodied in
the state as a kind of secular god—was really the problem for which he had at
least the solid beginnings of an answer, while property continued to pose significant
problems for him.
We can speculate on why these two analyses played
out differently. I’ve noted on a number of occasions that Proudhon did not
ground his theory of property particular well in a theory of the subject and
its ownness (of the sort that we might find in Locke or Stirner, who, despite
significant differences, both start from the self in order to talk about
appropriation.) Proudhon seems to have taken something of that sort for
granted, and even to have assumed some sorts of rights which were closely
connected to possession. By 1861, in War
and Peace, Proudhon had an interesting theory of rights elaborated:
Right, in
general, is the recognition of human dignity is all its faculties, attributes
and prerogatives. There are thus as many special rights as humans can raise
different claims, owing to the diversity of their faculties and of their
exercise. As a consequence, the genealogy of human rights will follow that of
the human faculties and their manifestations.
And
subsequent elaboration would suggest that we might, in justice, require
ourselves to recognize these rights at scale both larger and smaller than that
of the unified individual human being. We have at least hints that perhaps the
who range of scales, from the infinitesimal to the universal (so familiar from
the writings of Fourier and Dejacque), might come into play. Given this, and
the claim that rights are simply raised along with potential claims, some of
the apparent inconsistencies of the early writings (like the uncertainty
whether “possession” is a matter of mere fact or also one of possessory right) seem
to be provided with solutions (as Proudhon’s growing tendency to associate
property in all its forms with absolutism, and his rethinking of the “right of
abuse” salvage his 1840 arguments from the undercutting he gave them in the
preface.)
A key difference between the arguments regarding
property and those regarding the state is it probably never occurred to
Proudhon to question the reality of the human being or its possession of at
least some rights, while it is quite likely that he may have dreamt of simply
denying or eradicating the state. That, after all, has become the standard
anarchist position, to characterize the state as artificial or illegitimate or
even imaginary in some key aspects, and to proceed in terms of simply
suppressing any form of state.
1858—By the time Proudhon had published Justice in the Revolution and in the Church
he had committed himself to a theory of beings according to which all beings
recognizable as individuals were also recognizable as organized groups.
“[T]he beings to which we accord individuality do not
enjoy it by any title other than that of the collective beings: they are always
groups formed according to a law of relation and in which force, proportional
to the arrangement at least as much as to the mass, is the principle of unity.”
That
notion that human individuals and collectivities, including the state, are
accorded individuality by the same title makes it very hard simply sidestep the
question of the reality of the state as a manifestation of collective force—an
individual. Another great realization of 1858, that “the antinomy does not
resolve itself,” undoubtedly took the wind out of some of the bolder
proclamations of Proudhon’s earlier works—or represented the failure of those
claims to manifest themselves. And to these we should also add some elaboration
of the theory of federation which would become one of Proudhon’s primary
concerns in the final phase of his career: “this federation, where the city is
equal to the province, the province equal to the empire, the empire equal to
the continent, where all groups are politically equal…” The leveling of the
playing field is the consequence of denying the governmental principle, which, unlike
the manifestation of collective force in the state, seems to be primarily an
artefact of our inability to recognize our own strength when it confronts us in
collective form.
1861—We can stop our timeline here, not because
Proudhon was finished, but because his elaboration of the various forms of
rights in War and Peace, and the “New
Theory” of property which he had apparently completed by then, ultimately
brought the analyses of property and the state together, as countervailing
forces which would work together to create spaces within which liberty—and free
beings of various scales—could emerge and develop.
At this point, there has been a fairly radical
transformation of Proudhon’s analysis, but no great reversals in his thought—except
for his recognition of the non-governmental state as an individual actor which
must be accounted for. But what would it mean to account for the state in
relations of mutuality? What are the implications of this leveling of the
field? And what does adopting all of this rather peculiar theory gain us?
That’s still the work of one more section, where we
can look at the possible role of the state within anarchism—but also speculate
about other potential collective beings, such as “the market.”
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