The
Republic is the organization by which, all opinions and all activities
remaining free, the People, by the very divergence of opinions and will, think
and act as a single man. In the Republic, every citizen, by doing what they
want and nothing but what they want, participates directly in the legislation
and in the government, as they participate in the production and circulation of
wealth. There, every citizen is king; for he has the fullness of power; he
reigns and governs. The Republic is a positive anarchy. It is neither liberty
subjected to order, as in the constitutional monarchy, nor liberty imprisoned
in order, as the Provisional Government intends. It is liberty delivered from
all its shackles: superstition, prejudice, sophistry, stock-jobbing, authority.
It is reciprocal liberty, and not the liberty which restricts; liberty, not the
daughter of order, but the mother
of order.—P.-J. Proudhon, Solution of the Social Problem
I think that a couple of things should be fairly
clear from the sketch I’ve given of Proudhon’s development:
1) It took a while for Proudhon to make a
consistent social theory out of the insights of his earliest work.
2) The revolutionary period of 1848-1851, when
Proudhon mixed his writing with periods in government, in exile and in prison,
was a period when his ideas were in a considerable amount of flux, and his
statements, while they were frequently as penetrating as they were bold, were
not necessarily definitive—and were sometimes mixed with the sort of interpersonal
tension we might expect among reluctant politicians.
3) The theory of collective force—so key to the
critique of property—was a driving force in making Proudhon reconsider the
necessary connection between “the state” and governmentalism.
Let’s step away from Proudhon for a moment and see
if this sort of uncoupling of an institution and the despotic elements which
seem to dominate it is really alien to our thought (however strange it may seem
in the context of “the state.”) What Proudhon ultimately says about “the state”
is very similar to at least part of
what market anarchists say about “the market:” There is an emergent order, with
logics different from those of the individual economic actors, which is
captured or distorted by privilege—and which can be freed by disconnecting the
market from the structures and relations of privilege (“government” chief among
them) which distort its function. Of course, market anarchists tend to be among
the strongest opponents of “the state,” tending to reduce anarchism towards
mere anti-statism. For market-oriented mutualists, the project seems to be the
one Proudhon laid out near the beginning of The General Idea of the Revolution
in the Nineteenth Century (1851):
“To
dissolve, submerge, and cause to disappear the political or governmental system
in the economic system, by reducing, simplifying, decentralizing and
suppressing, one after another, all the wheels of this great machine, which is
called the Government or the State.”
But
the question remains whether this simple identification of “the Government or
the State” is adequate to the analysis of the real manifestations of collective
force. My strong suspicion is that many market-mutualists simply define “the
market” in terms of those institutions which would remain after the
governmental principle had been taken out of the equation, including some that
revolve around the cash nexus, but others which do not. There would thus be “unregulated
markets” in a particular sense, since governmental
regulation would be eliminated more or less by definition, but also “unmarketed
regulation” by other means, in the sense that economic customs and norms would
not only be suspect to that cash nexus. I suspect that many market anarchists
have accepted Proudhon’s non-governmental state without accepting his argument,
and while clinging to an anti-statism which might well benefit from a little
unpacking and clarifying along Proudhonian lines. What is uncertain is whether
or not at least some market anarchists have actually transferred that “external constitution of the social
power,” and the governmental principle, from “the state” (or “the gods”) to “the
market.” This is a question of considerable importance, which hinges on the
relationship between “individual” and “collective” reason (using those terms
with the individual human being as a reference), and the way we imagine
mutualistic justice—which is always essentially a question of “balance”—playing
out.
So let’s get right down to it.
______
We have the elements of our social science pretty
well identified:
1) We have a level “field of play” where the beings
we are accustomed to consider “individual” and a range of organized
collectivities can actually only claim “individual” status by the same title,
their status as groups organized according to an internal law which gives them
unity. People, families, workshops, cities, nations and “humanity”—as well,
perhaps as animals, natural systems, and even individual human capacities—occupy
non-hierarchical relationship with one another, despite differences in scale
and complexity, and despite the participation of individuals at one scale in
collective-individualities at another. This is key, I think. Without a
governmental principle to elevate any of these individuals “above the fray” in
any way, mutuality becomes absolutely vital—and dizzyingly tough to come to
terms with.
2) We have “rights” manifested by nothing more than
the manifestation of capacities—which means we have rights that are going to
conflict and clash, and which are to be balanced by some sort of (broadly
defined) commutative justice.
3) We also have a theory of freedom (although I’ve
neglected to introduce it directly, along with at least one other key elements,
in these notes so far) which is not primarily concerned with permissions and
prohibitions, but with the strength and activity (the play) of the elements that make up the individual, and the
complexity of their relations. Again, this is key, giving us another important
justification for the kinds of moves Proudhon made with regard to the question
of the state. In all of these elements so far, we see a move away from a legal
understanding of individuals and society towards a much more material one
(despite all the charges from our more Marxian comrades.)
4) Bound up with these other notions, we have the
idea of the human being as a “free absolute,” which is essentially the
completion and redemption of the notion that “property is theft.” When Proudhon
did get around to talking about what I’ve been calling “ownness” (which is
something close to “property in person” or the material material aspect of “self-ownership”) it is in 1858, in the work on Justice, in the context of an
explanation of the origins of legal property. Allow me one more long quotation:
"Let
us consider what occurs in the human multitude, placed under the empire of
absolutist reason, so long as the struggle of interests and the controversy of
opinions does not bring out the social reason.
"In
his capacity as absolute and free absolute, man not only imagines the absolute
in things and names it, which first creates for him, in the exactitude of his
thoughts, grave embarrassment. He does more: by the usurpation of things that
he believes he has a right to make, that objective absolute becomes internalized;
he assimilates it, becomes interdependent (solidaire) with it, and pretends to
respect it as himself in the use that he makes of it and in the interpretations
that it pleases him to make of it. Each, in
petto, reasoning the same, it results, in the first moment, that the public
reason, formed from the sum of particular reasons, differs from those in
nothing, neither in basis nor in form; so that the world of nature and of
society is nothing more than a deduction of the individual self (moi), a belonging of his absolutism.
"All
the constitutions and beliefs of humanity are formed thus; at the very hour
that I write, the collective reason hardly exists except in potential, and the
absolute holds the high ground.
"Thus,
by virtue of his absolute moi, secretly
posed as center and universal principle, man affirms his domain over things;
all the members of the State making the same affirmation, the principle of
societary absolutism becomes, by unanimity, the law of the State, and all the
theories of the jurists on the possession, acquisition, transmission, and
exploitation of goods, are deduced from it. In vain logic demonstrates that
this doctrine is incompatible with the data of the social order; in vain, in
its turn, experience proves that it is a cause of extermination for persons and
ruin for States: nothing knows how to change a practice established on the
similarity of egoisms. The concept remains; it is in all minds: every
intelligence, every interest, conspires to defend it. The collective reason is
dismissed, Justice vanquished, and economic science declared impossible."
(Justice, Tome III, pp 99-100)
This is another side of the claim that all
individuals claim their individuality by the same title. In order to claim any
sort of property—to claim that
anything is proper to themselves as
individuals, that anything is their own—there
is a necessary resource to absolutism, a bowing to the continuous demands of an
evolving force, a demand for a separation that can only come through a denial
of material interconnection. Property is necessarily despotic, and Proudhon
finally made it clear how his early bon
mot reached far beyond the mere critique of existing property relations.
But, in the process, he posed some very significant problems for the constitution
of a free society. Not the least of these is that, while all beings seem to
manifest themselves to some extent as absolutes, not all of those absolutes are
“free,” in the sense of being able to reflect on their natural absolutism or to
modify their behavior accordingly.
5) That’s where mutualism comes in, with its
complex mix of individualistic and socialistic elements, and its notion that
each ethical actor—each free absolute—could carry with them a basic principle
for encountering, recognizing and engaging with others, our beefed-up and
extremely demanding version of the Golden Rule. However complex our social
interaction may be, the mutual principle suggests that the first thing to do is
to identify the other as an individual, and then to address them as such,
specifically. Perhaps it’s not immediately clear how one practices an anarchic
encounter with a non-human manifestation of collective force, but I think
Proudhon gives us some very useful clues—not the least of which is proposing a
basis on which we can at least begin to relate to any individual. That theory
of the individual’s “title” is at least a common structure on which to build
more substantive common ground. The identification of human beings as “free
absolutes” at least makes it clear to us that if there is to be change in
accordance with a conscious mutualistic ethic, it’s going to have to come from
beings like us.
6) And we only underline that special
responsibility, and the difficulties faced by human ethical actors, when we
remind ourselves that, according to Proudhon—and we can probably point to
confirmations in our own experience—the collective reason of the collective
beings is not necessarily that of individual human beings, nor are the
interests of those beings our own, or even necessarily in harmony with our own.
Just as it would be a failure of mutuality to simply project our desires onto
other human beings, we’ll have to go very carefully in any engagement with
these collective beings, which are not themselves “free” in the sense we are.
And it is unlikely that anything is made any easier by the fact that part of
what we encounter in collective beings is our own force arranged in some larger
assemblage according to a new law.
It’s the sort of stuff to make you head spin, and
it flies in the face of an awful lot of conventional anarchist and
philosophical terminology and theory. That doesn’t mean it isn’t a powerful
body of analytic tools for anarchists. The radical leveling of the analysis
encourages us to find other means to talk about whatever is not simply
governmental rule or systematic privilege in the realm of “hierarchy” and “authority.”
What the plumber, or the educator, or the workplace logistics expert, brings to
a given interaction is an organization of resources and a quantity of force
usefully applicable in particular contexts—and perhaps that’s the best way to
talk about that stuff in an anarchist context. The head-on confrontation with
the fact that we appear to be hardwired in a way which creates both potentially
antagonistic separation the possibility of reflective change in our social
relations, and the identification of increasing freedom with increasing
intensity in our attempts to work out those evolving balances, strikes me as a
very promising direction—and one which provides one more rationale for the sort
of complex, decentralizing, federative societies mutualists tend to lean
towards. The possibility of demystifying the state, as we have worked to
demystify religion and economics, is appealing.
But his business of encountering the state, or the
market, or any number of other collective individuals on that radically leveled
playing field isn’t likely to lose its more daunting aspects any time soon.
The best indications that Proudhon gave us of how
this might play out are probably in War
and Peace, a two-volume study as difficult as anything Proudhon wrote, and
already subject to many misunderstandings. Rather than attempt to do justice to
that analysis, perhaps, for now at least, we can tackle things a bit more
simply.
If we set aside all the hot-button terminology,
what are we talking about? In the case we have been examining most closely, it
is a question of an encounter between a human individual and a collectivity
emerging from the actions of human individuals, so that in that encounter we
come face to face with the effects of the force we have exerted, organized
together with the effects of the actions of others. We encounter ourselves, but
not just ourselves, and the encounter is mediated by processes which are more
or less “social.” We also encounter some manifestation of persistence (and
probably complex, evolving persistence), with the result that, among other
things, we probably don’t have any means of simply reducing this encounter to a
mass of encounters with specific individuals.
These social
persistences, not having bodies of their own, persist—or don’t persist—through
us, through physical structures that we build or tear down, through practices
and norms that we do or do not honor, maintain and modify. But their
persistence means that often the building, maintaining and shaping is not a
one-way street. Through customs, norms, languages, etc., they shape us as well—sometimes
in ways that increase our health and freedom, and sometimes in quite opposite
ways. The possibility that our actions contribute to persistent influences on
other human beings, and perhaps on those not yet born, is something that
anarchists—and particularly mutualists—probably ought to take into account.
The “how” is the more difficult question here,
since this “encounter” with collective beings is never literal. We act in
particular ways, and that adds force to particular organizational forms in
particular realms of society. Obviously, part of the problem is addressed by
simply taking our ethic of mutuality seriously, taking into account the “downstream
effects” of our actions and the sorts of collectivities that they seem likely
to strengthen. But then we are faced with all of the problems of planning and
prediction. Collective beings are interesting to us in large part because they
have their own reason and interest, whether we intend to celebrate that fact
(as market anarchists often do with the emergent logic of “the market” and
social anarchists sometimes do with “society”) or damn it (in which case you
can pretty much just switch the terms.)
There’s a lot here to be teased out—and it seems we
are still just posing the question in some ways—but if we take seriously the
arguments we find in Proudhon for recognizing these collective beings the first
consequence has to be to acknowledge that perhaps even our most rigorous
application of the principle of mutuality on a more narrowly interpersonal
basis will necessarily lead directly towards our goals of social justice. Given
that, there are certainly reasons to question whether we can count on any
institutions to guarantee justice if we fail
to apply that ethic to our individual actions.
I’m inclined to think of these collective beings as
some combination of social “collective tissue,” inherited resources, and
products of our collective production—and to think of the process of
incorporating them into the complex counterbalancing act of mutualist justice
as a matter of figuring out how to best balance careful stewardship of the resources,
care for our fellows being both directly and indirectly through those
connecting institutions, and care in what we produce and maintain. In order to
strike that balance we probably need to be practicing the sort of sociology
that Proudhon began to elaborate, incorporating its lessons into the
institutions it creates, and using all of that as a guide to extending existing
mutualist theory beyond it’s traditional bounds. The “cost principle,” for
example, may have a lot to teach us that has very little to do with “labor
notes,” as our opposition to any “right of increase” may strike more fertile
ground as we distance ourselves a bit from the traditional concerns with
specific forms of “usury.”
Lacking anything but just a sense that there is a
potentially useful sort of analysis here, it’s hard to pursue the details too
far. But perhaps there’s one more interesting indication we can make. Having
rejected the governmental principle, there is no question of respecting any
sort of manifestation of collective force which presents itself or is presented
as a ruler, judge or arbiter. The market-arbiter is probably as lost to us as
Louis Blanc’s state-policeman. Looking around for other ways to think about
these abstract beings which seem at once to shape and be shaped by us, and
acknowledging that perhaps this Proudhonian analysis will lead us to a
fundamentally antinomian “solution,” let me suggest two passages from Proudhon
as potential windows into the terms of one possible antinomy.
In the “Toast to the Revolution,” Proudhon argued
that The Revolution (which was, for him, a sort of ongoing process) was both
conservative and revolutionary. So, while we are committed to change in the
direction of ever-great justice, both in our individual interactions and our institutions,
we are probably also logically committed to a sort of stewardship role. If we
are to go so far as suppressing any of these collective beings, we certainly
need to do so with a clear understanding of the effects and their relation to
the ethics of mutuality. Embedded, as we are, in a context in which
governmentalism and destructive forms of absolutism are woven into the social
fabric on almost all sides, we are undoubtedly doomed to some very tough
choices—but that just means we need to bring our most powerful tools to bear on
those problematic choices.
The passage with which I opened this particular
section of the notes—the source of Liberty’s masthead slogan, “Liberty not the
daughter but the mother of order”—suggests another way to approach our
relationship with these collective beings. Arguably, one of the problems we
have with them is a confusion about who is the child and who is the parent in
the relationship—a natural confusion, given their evolving persistence. But
these collective beings are in part defined by the fact that they are not “free
absolutes,” that they cannot enter into relations with us except through the
mediation of individuals, and therefore are fairly poor candidates for the
parental role, even assuming that role was the relatively horizontal one of
guidance and stewardship that anti-authoritarians generally expect from
parents. In his early writings on the state, Proudhon explicitly associated the
state with the infancy of humanity, and anarchy with its maturity. Perhaps, to
the extent that the state will persist as an active actor in anarchist
societies, we should be treating it as a sort of powerful child. As we free
ourselves from governmental tutelage, perhaps it is precisely a parent’s role,
or a role of tutelage, that we ought to adopt towards these children of
liberty.
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