Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule

Anselme Bellegarrigue

2012-02-01T22:55:00.000-08:00

I've posted a translation of a biographical account of Anselme Bellegarrigue, written in 1862 by Joseph Noulens, an old friend and collaborator of Bellegarrigue. It's absolutely jam-packed with entertaining stories and useful details of Bellegarrigue's life and career. But it's really just the tip of the iceberg. It's already led me to Bellegarrigue's contributions to La Mosaïque du Midi and Le Palais de Cristal, which were not political, but are certainly interesting, and it's given me enough clues to have substantially widened my search for texts and biographical material. Give it a read, and stay tuned for more information.

Open Letter on Libertarian Feminism

2012-01-31T22:32:00.000-08:00

Stephan Molyneux has recently graduated from shoddy to What is this I don't even..., with a pair of videos on feminism, which he describes as "socialism with panties." There is a hopeful part of me that would like to believe that nobody could take "Stef" seriously on his best days—and it is definitely not those we see in these videos—but the rest of me knows better. So I would like to draw attention to "An Open Letter to Stefan Molyneux and Other Anti-Feminists," written by a group of good folks, including Sharon Presley, Charles Johnson, Nathan Goodman, and Ross Kenyon—and with an increasingly long list of signatories—which does a nice job of actually isolating the arguments in Molyneux's meltdowns and responding. There are all sorts of curious notions about, and resistances to, feminism in anarchist and libertarian circles, most of which seem to involve shoe-horning a complex bundle of social and philosophical movements into one or another boxes small enough to discard, and the debate in "libertarian" circles isn't free from some peculiar reductions. But, within that context, this is a useful, and potentially important, response. Give it a look.

The trial of Joseph Déjacque

2012-01-31T21:30:00.000-08:00

An account of Joseph Déjacque's 1851 trial for inciting hatred and contempt between classes, and against the government, is now available in English translation, over on From the Libertarian Library. It's a lot of fun, and even the poetry translated relatively well.

Proudhon and intellectual property

2012-01-28T14:37:00.000-08:00

Apparently I missed a post on the C4SIF site last March, claiming that Proudhon was an advocate of intellectual property. Now, as I am a notorious softy on that question (or self-serving reactionary, depending on who you ask), I'm less inclined to "pistols at dawn" than some might be, but it doesn't sound much like the Proudhon I know. You can check the comments for some discussion with Stephan Kinsella about the question, which is rendered more difficult because the text at issue is from the half-translated and notoriously difficult System of Economic Contradictions.

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, "Explanations Presented to the Public Minister" (1842)

2012-01-23T12:16:00.000-08:00

Explanations Presented to the Public Minister
on the Right of Property

---

COURT OF ASSIZE OF THE DEPARTMENT OF DOUBS

(Session of February 3, 1842.)

Last February 3, there appeared before the jury of Besançon, the author of a brochure entitled Warning to the Proprietors, or Letter to M. Considerant, editor of la Phalange, on a defense of property, on the charge: 1) of attacking property; 2) of provoking various classes of citizens to hatred; 3) of the excitation of hatred and contempt of the government and king; 4) of offense against the catholic religion.

It is not our intention to give a detailed relation of that trial, which had in common with so many others of the same type only the form of the proceedings and the jurisdiction. The public minister invoked the written law, the accused spoke in the name of a science, and, by the form and content of his responses, seemed less to await a verdict of acquittal than a declaration of the court’s incompetence. Thus, let one not accuse us of unfaithfulness, if we limit our account to that part of the defense which, purely explanatory, was intended by the accused as merely a sort of program of his researches on political and industrial organization, and the constitution of equality.

The advocate general, M. Jobard, defended the charges with all with all the skill of a consummate jurist, but was obliged to limit himself to the text of the law. After him, the accused read a written defense, from which we extract the following passages:

I have in my life written only one thing, gentlemen jurors, and I am going to tell you that thing right away, so there is no longer any question. Property is robbery. And do you know what I have concluded from that? It is that in order to abolish that species of robbery, it is necessary to universalize it. I am, you see, gentlemen jurors, as conservative as you; and whoever would say to you the contrary, would prove by that alone that they have understood nothing of my books, and, I would say, nothing of the things of this world.

It is for the legislator, according to Justinian, to interpret the law; it is also up to the writer to explain his writings. Now, although I do not wish to make my defense a lesson in political economy, it is important to my justification that I explain in how that universalization of property must be understood: that will be the best response to the thesis of the advocate general. For if I prove that in order to render properties equal, it is necessary to preserve the existing rights, it follows that the thought of expropriation would be a contradiction in my own doctrine, consequently, that it is logically impossible that I have rendered myself guilty of the act of which I am accused, and which is imputed to me only because the idea of dispossession, which I reject, has been confused with that of the abolition of the domain of property, which I proclaim.

Let us speak of labor. Labor, gentlemen, is after God and religion doubtless what you love most, what you esteem more, what you recommend every day to your children. It is by labor that you have become what you are; and whoever would try to prove to you, to you who have labored all your life, who have inherited legitimately from your fathers, who feel you have clean hands and pure conscience; who would try, I say, to prove to you that your possession could be, without your knowledge, vicious and founded on an illegitimate title, would not be heard by you. You would disdain him as a sophist.

Let us leave then the metaphysics of right; it is not within the competence of the court of assize.

Nothing, according to you yourselves, gentlemen jurors, is more justly acquired than that which you have gained by the sweat of your brow; nothing is more formally condemned by the catechism than holding back the wages of the workers.

Religion has made that crime one of the four sins which cry vengeance against heaven. That posited, I asked myself one day how many ways one can retain the wages of the worker; and that examination showed me some very curious things, things that you, gentlemen, do not suspect.

If a laborer made three francs worth of products in a day, he is right to ask three francs for it. All deduction is a crime which cries vengeance, do not forget it. Now, the world is full of people from which one retains every day a quarter, a third, or a half of their day's work, and that without the Code Napoleon, which certain people admire as the equal of the Decalogue, even anticipating the case.

A pair of shoes is worth, I suppose, five francs. Estimating at two francs and fifty centimes the supplies which enter into the fabrication of a pair of shoes, the rest makes up the wage of the worker, the price of his day of labor. And allowing that the worker is free, that he receives his wage entirely, and that every day he would make a pair of shoes, we would say of his that he gains two francs and fifty centimes per day. But it occurs frequently that a worker is not known in the business, or else that he has not the means to form an establishment; besides, it is with a clientele as with a piece of land; it is attached to individuals, transmitted from father to son, and not obtained by just anyone. The public has its habits, it gives itself to a boutique, to a sign; nothing is more capricious than its favor. In this case, the worker who is without work offers his services to a other worker who is established, and who is called bourgeois.

The bourgeois sells, like the other, his shoes for five francs; for competition is there, on one side, which prevents the indefinite increase of the price of merchandise; from the other, the value of supplies and the necessity to live, which prevents the lowering of prices below a certain level. If then, then bourgeois has work, it is probable that he will make his fellow labor, but on the condition that that fellow renounce a part of his wage, for it is necessary that the master gain from the worker. And so the worker will not receive all that is coming to him, every day he will see with his own eyes his product selling at a price higher than he has received, and all this without any right to reclaim the deduction.

Soon, gentlemen jurors, I will show that this bourgeois, one whom you perhaps believe that I call all the fury of the populace, is in general a very honest man, who cannot do otherwise, and who is often more to be pitied than the one that he despoils.

But let us see what results from the deduction made from the daily labor of the workers.

When you buy a pair of shoes, you buy the day of a shoemaker: when a cobbler buy shoes, he buys back his own day. Thus if his day is worth fifty sous on the market, and he gains only forty at the workshop, how do you want him to pay his own goods? Then, you say, he must make his shoes himself: thus he will have them at cost price, and escape to the deduction.

The observation is fair, but we are not finished. The shoemaker cannot procure by himself all the things he needs, since he has only one profession; it is necessary, in order to survive, that he buy, by turns, the day of a tailor, the day of a baker, the day of a vintner, etc. And as he can buy all these days only by offering his own in return; as on the other hand, assuming equal pay for all the trades, and the deduction also equal, the price of all these days surpasses what the purchaser can offer for them, it follows that a worker who needs in order to live to buy three hundred sixty-five days of others’ labor at three francs, and who receives only two francs and fifty centimes per day, finds himself at the end of the year damaged a sum of one hundred eighty-two francs and fifty centimes according to Barrême.

One will perhaps say that wages not being everywhere the same the worker at two francs fifty centimes makes up for the worker at two francs and below. But, gentlemen jurors, it is precisely that which makes the inequality of conditions; it because of this that there are poor states, as one says, although the ancient wisdom had declared that there were no foolish trades, there are only foolish people. Society is like a pyramid: the lower courses support the upper, and sink under the weight. In addition, it suffices for a rule of proportion in order to find the mean of the deductions, and consequently the raison arithmetic of the impoverishment of certain classes of laborers. That is calculated absolutely like the tables of mortality.

And that is what explains to us the hopeless profundity of the popular proverb: The cobblers are always the most poorly shod; that is also why the masons find themselves the most poorly housed, why the vintners often drink only water, and rarely of the best sort; why the bakers cry famine in the very heart of abundance. It is because there are some bourgeois, some masters, placed over the workers, who make a deduction from their wages, because they are themselves robbed by others, until finally we come to a privileged few who, raised above all the others, profit from all the deductions do not suffer any, for the excellent reason that they work for no one.

Now, gentlemen jurors, political economy, a science of recent date, but which already promises marvels, gives the means of escaping that impasse, without hurting any existence, without detracting from any interest, without taking anything from the rich, sans asking of them anything but the permission to work more and better than one has done up to this day.

Like geometry, political economy has its axioms, its definitions, its laws and its formulas; like geometry it proceeds methodically from the known to the unknown, and starting from the most trivial truths, it raises itself to the intelligence of divine and human laws.

What say the geometers?

The straight line is the shortest route between one point and another.

All the radii of the circle are equal.

Every straight line which falls on another straight line, forms with it two adjacent angles, which are equivalent to two right angles.

It is with this that the geometers measure the circumference of the globe and the height of mountains, calculate the course of the celestial bodies, predict eclipses, weigh the moon and planets, and find the distance and diameter of the sun.

The economists, in another order of ideas, proceed in absolutely the same way. Here are what principles they rely on.

Man produces nothing except by labor.

Wages must be equal to product.

The productive force of labor is in direct relation to its division.

With the aide of these so-simple principles, and of some others which follow from them, the economists propose to abolish robbery and property without dispossessing anyone; to organize labor, to explain the causes and the accidents of revolutions; to plumb the secrets of God and to calculate the future. And they will come to the end of it, do not doubt it, gentlemen of the jury, for every question that the human mind can address, it can also resolve.

According to these levelers of a new species, to which I credit myself to belong, and who hardly resemble those who terrified la France fifty years ago, according to these reformists so slandered so little understood, it is absurd to give six thousand francs to a rector and fifteen hundred francs to a judge, and we know why; according to them, property is a monopole the temporary existence of which entered into the views of Providence, and we explain what those views have been. But according to them as well, it is necessary to always increase the income of the proprietors, in order to make possible the equality of conditions. I will, gentlemen of the jury, give you an idea of their theories in this regard, theories that the government, soon as egalitarian as me, has already begun to put into practice.

Let us speak of finance.

We call a rentier every capitalist who loans to the State, in perpetuity, a sum of money, at 3, 4, or 5 percent interest. Now, the smallest sum the State accepts in loan being, I believe, 100 francs, and the share of the loan limiting to a small number of persons the advantage of the rent, it follows that the constitution of that rent, always much sought after, creates a true privilege. That creation dates from the National Convention.

But all the French, according to the Charter, are equal before the law; as a consequence, the government, not being able to abolish the privilege of the rent, has occupied itself in these last years with making all the French privileged on the same basis, but how much better it is to interest them in order and public peace. Hence the savings banks, where one receives from 1 franc up to 200, and where interest is paid from 2 up to 4 percent.

Now, gentlemen of the jury, let the worker who does not receive from his bourgeois all the wages from his labor, come in the end, by dint of economies, to create a little income, even if it is only 50 percent[?] per day, and you will understand, on the one hand, that this income will form the supplement of the wages that he was expecting to gain, and that he had not received completely; on the other hand, that this rent paid by the State to the thrifty workers being taken from the revenues of the State, and these revenues being deducted in the form of a tax on the proprietors, the State would have to make a part of the revenues pass from the latter into the pockets of the former, an operation which, in the long run and with a bit of consistency, would lead to the equality of all the revenues.

Thus the whole secret consists in making the deduction take place in a circular manner from the one to the others and come back to its point de departure, that is to say that the citizens all work for one another, and, by turns robbed and reimbursed, receive a profit equal to the loss they suffer. At first glance, it seems much simpler that each wage be equal to each individual product; but things could not happen in this way at first, and the organic reason for this rotation of profit, if I dare put it that way, is perhaps the most admirable secret of political economy.

Thus, profit, interest, the right of increase, property or suzerainty, is a usurpation, a theft, as Diderot said, more than a century ago, and yet society could live only with the aid of that theft, which will no longer be one, as soon as by the irresistible force of institutions it will become general, and which will cease completely when an integral education has rendered all the citizens equal in merit and in dignity.

In order not to prolong this audience, I will spare you, gentlemen of the jury, some detailed means and processes by the aid of which the egalitarian economists propose to accelerate the realization of that future. Nothing is more curious than to see them transform by circulating money houses, lands, furniture and even tools; to constantly increase everyone’s income, by decreasing the fatigues of labor, and gradually enriching the workers, by making greater and greater deductions from their wages.

Those are some trade secrets that I do no have to teach you.

You see, gentlemen, why the true egalitarian is necessarily a conservative; it remains for me to show you how the adversaries of property are necessarily friends of order and government.

The Code Civil, article 556, states:

“The deposits and increases which form successively and imperceptibly on the banks of a river or a stream are called alluvium. Alluvium profits the riparian proprietors.

Art. 557. “It is the same with the relays formed by the current, which insensibly remove material from one of its banks and carry it to the other: the proprietor of the increasing bank profits from the alluvium, without the resident on the opposite side being able to come to demand the land that he has lost.

Art. 559. “If a river or a stream, navigable or not, carries away by sudden violence a considerable and identifiable part of a field on its banks, and bears it to a lower field, or on its opposite bank, the owner of the part carried away may reclaim his property, etc.”

It is useless to add that on this point there exist as many customs as countries, as many opinions as doctors; this much jurisprudence has known how to work in matters of economy!

Such is the spirit of the Code: if the water takes from me a block of the field that I possess, I can reclaim it, provided that I make my demand within a year; if it takes it from me grain of sand after grain of sand, then I lose my property. Too bad for me if my field is found too close to the stream: the legislator will do nothing for me. We see that the spirit of conquest has passed that way.

The economist, on the contrary, maintains that the property must be regained; he demonstrates, by a mathematics of his own, that all the riparian proprietors are connected with one another; that none of them can ever be dispossessed; that all are responsible for the property of each, and each interested in the property of all; that it falls to the municipal authorities ensure the maintenance of the possessions, and to their perfect development. Now which of these two appears the better friend of order and society, gentlemen of the jury, the conquering legislator or the egalitarian economist?

The economist also proves, by analogous principles, that the worker without clientele is like the proprietor dispossessed by a flood; that the homeless proletarian falls under the charge of those housed; that it is among the duties of the administrative authorities to see to it that the laborers are housed according to their nature and the demands of their position in life; that a mayor, a prefect, can and should in some cases require, in return for rent, the rich citizen to house the poor one; to order the restoration of a property, at the expense of the selfish proprietor who has let it degrade and become ugly, as well as the demolition of a shack that disrupts the alignment of a road; to ensure finally that each uses his goods as prescribed and for the greatest advantage of industry, architecture, commerce, morals and hygiene.

That is what the egalitarian economists call disciplining possession, or, in other words, abolishing property. What is so frightening about that abolition?

But they add, these economists, that to succeed in that enterprise, it is necessary above all to abstain from dividing good and making an agrarian law; it is necessary to teach, with the national spirit, the spirit of family, and instead of changing the systems of institutions, to develop all the institutions.

The economists, gentlemen, can be wrong, and I doubt that you will give the least bit of faith to the things that I announce. But in the end, their errors re at least very innocent, since instead of tending to destroy, they tends to preserve.

And what I say here is not a subterfuge devised to support my cause; nor is it a tactic of opposition; might it please God that the radicals had pursued a similar tactic! It would have long been the case that we no longer dispute, the government would be tranquil, and the royals secure. What I have just said in my defense, for two years I have not ceased to repeat it: I will, among other proofs, read a letter addressed by myself to the Minister of the Interior, a few days before the seizure of the work which is remanded to you. You will see how, after having destroyed the right of property by critique, I propose to transform it by means of organic and industrial development, and you will ask yourself if the author of such a program is a despoiler and anarchist.[1]

To M. Duchâtel, Minister of the Interior.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

“If we want to spare society new upheavals, we must shake up the jurisprudence; e must reconstitute it with the help of a new administrative right, and by penetrating it with the economic element.

“Such is the opinion today of the most learned jurists. According to the Attorney General of the Court of Cassation, our Civil Code needs to be rewritten from one end to the other. We can say as much for the other codes, and for the Charter itself. But, in order to accomplish that great work, we must associate three powers, until this time lamentably enemies, civil jurisprudence, the administration, and political economy: that is the aim of the memoirs that I have published.

“Property, basis of our social order, is also, by the transformation of its principle into that of sovereignty, the basis of our government. But what is that property? it is quiritaire property, jealous, invasive and antisocial property; property which gives all to the citizen to the detriment of the State, which consecrates individual monopole to the detriment of the general interest. Now, that property, as it was established by Roman law and preserved by the Code Napoleon, is no longer sufficient, in its ancient form and determination, to the needs of civilization: all persons, finally—philosophers, jurists, economists, and men of State—and all doctrines—theories about centralization, industrial solidarity, the organization of labor, the systematization of rights, mortgage reform, the progressive abolition of commercial duties, the allocation of taxes, etc., etc.—conspire to restrain, modify, and transform the ancient right of property.

It is in consideration of that movement of the public spirit that I have dared to describe property as theft, expressing in this way a sort of anticipation of future views, and not with the aim of formulating an accusation against the proprietors. And allow me to say, Monsieur Minister, that the rest of the nation, the strength of its powers, the grandeur of France, will only date from the day when that proposition has become an article of faith and principle of government.

In the past victories and conquests were the sole source of the legitimacy of the sovereign; Voltaire, hardly more than a century ago, still celebrated that barbarous right. Today the king holds his as a result of elections and the law: that is certainly progress; but the constitutional royalty is not the end of the political symbol, the last expression of sovereignty. As for the sovereignty of the people, constantly alleged by those who know nothing more, I regard it as simply an abstraction of words, an ideological generality, but not at all as a principle, much less as a formula.

Now, just as the royalty constituted by the Charter is a middle term between divine right, or conquest, and the ideal of government, just so, between brutal force and association there is, in relation to civil right and similarly to the political order, a legal intermediary that all existing institutions, all tendencies of opinion, and all the acts of the government work to make disappear; that middle term between barbarity and civilization is property.

But, Monsieur Minister, it is with the political elements as with simple bodies: combined in certain proportions, these give some chemical compounds with properties totally different from those of the principle components. Thirty-three parts oxygen and sixty-seven of hydrogen give water, a liquid body, stifling, and anti-phlogistic, formed from the combination of two gases, the one breathable by itself, the other highly combustible.

Thus, in the political order, the institutions change by the accession of new elements; sadly society is not always conscious of the metamorphosis happens to it. Hence, an extraordinary effervescence, and sometimes dangerous resistances in the heart of the nations. If the new idea comes from an individual, it raises general disapproval against it; if on the part of the reigning powers, it excites the trembling of the people and long agitations among the masses. The minister has proven it quite recently in the matter of the census.

Mixed with pure democracy, the absolute monarchy has produced, according to the differences in the doses, the varieties of constitutional government that we have seen in England and France; granted by turns to the prince or the nation, the election of a Senate, a body aristocratic by its nature, gives either a house of peers or a house of deputies, assembled sovereigns in which will no longer be found anything oligarchic or feudal. Similarly, introduce into diplomacy and the parliamentary cabals the elements and methods of science, and you will soon arrive at a system of true government, rid of all the wars of parties, all the intrigues of opposition.

Property, according to Mr. Rossi, is a monopoly, but a necessary monopoly. Now, this is the gloss that I have made on that definition of the learned author. Mix the general interest, up to the point of saturation, into the monopoly property, and you will have a new principle, analogous, but not identical, to the right of possession and use, known to the old jurists.

Then phenomenon of political composition is precisely that which has passed before our eyes and which, stopped by various obstacles, causes all the anxieties of society and all the confusions of government. There, monsieur, is the fact of social progress that I have labored to record for eighteen months, and of which I hope to determine the laws and calculate the consequences. Society advances, without hardly sensing it, to a political organization that is absolutely and divinely true, legitimate, perfect, and eternal. It is no longer a question here of ontological aphorism on equality, fraternity, the rights of man and the citizen, the sovereignty of the people, etc. The metaphysics of the Social Contract and The Spirit of the Laws is worn out; in the place of these hollow theories rises a new science, exact and mathematical, before which the uncertainties of journalism and the tempests of the tribune must cease forever. Already the people begin to reason and reflect; now, when the people reflect and reason, we no longer need to fear that they will revolt. For it is in the nature of science to stop the enthusiasm of the mind by the contemplation of its problems and mysteries; the difficulties show themselves more formidable as the intellectual develops, the imagination disciplines itself to the extent that the reason is enlightened, and consequently the furor of revolutions fades before the conditions of reform.

But what are these conditions? Do they exist apart from active society and the power that directs it? Must we, finally, destroy in order to build?

Here, Monsieur Minister, is my thought in that regard, a thought expressed more and more energetically in the series of my publications, and that I am about to demonstrate by the deepest and most certain proofs that economic science can offer.

Society, like every organized and living being, develops continuously, without leaps or jolts, without interruption or substitution. Interruption, I said somewhere, for society as for men, is death. Thus we must not think to replace the present government and the institutions which serve as its cortège, for others; but we must make it produce, by natural means, the government and the institutions that it encloses virtually, as the animal and plant are enclosed in the germ. After that, a revolution would only be a grievous upheaval and a time of suffering for society, that the prudence of the men of state must seek to forestall.

You sense now, Monsieur Minister, without me needing to press the argument further with a man as perceptive as you, how vain are all these theories of equality, abolition of property, community, phalanstery, if the authors do not prove that the reforms they propose and the systems of which they demand the application arise necessarily from accomplished facts and existing institutions; and, on the contrary, how advantageous they are to society if that correlation is true; finally, how easy it will be to turn them to the profit of the government, of, taking the radicals at their own principles, we knew how to make precious to them the form of government under which they live, and lead them to forcefully declare themselves conservatives,—I mean conservatives in the progressive sense. Indeed, break the egg before the day fixed by nature for the hatching of the animal, and you will obtain only a miscarriage; kill the bird before the eggs are laid, and you will have no clutch; give the child ideas and tastes which are not for its age, and you will make it a depraved subject. Thus every social doctrine which cannot prove its direct and legitimate descent from the system in force, is by that fact alone a false doctrine, condemned in advance; every premature attempt at reform is an assassination. It was according to this principle, implicitly or explicitly accepted by all reformist opinions, that I propose to develop soon this thesis, which seems so eminently paradoxical today: The interest of the people, like the duty of every radical writer, is to attach themselves to the charter, and provisionally to the government of July. That will be one of the most curious articles and, I hope, the most conclusive of my next work.

What I have just outlined for Your Excellence, Monsieur Minister, explains sufficiently, it seems to me, the occasionally somewhat heated critiques that I have made of men and things, and the always increasing fear that I have contributed to, perhaps more than any other, spreading among the proprietors. Starting from an essentially different principle of property, since property is only one of its elements, and reasoning with an inexorable rigor, I should appear, and have been called, demolisher. All critique, by itself, is alarming, especially in matters of society; but also, in matters of society, it is far from critique to destruction. Moreover, how do we correct and heal, how do we know ourselves, without critique? On the other hand, the more the insights increase and spread, the more the disorder becomes apparent and grows in the imagination; the more the sentiment du malaise penetrates us, the more the vices of power seem to increase with the years: the more, consequently, the complaints and invectives become vehement. I have followed, like every other, the universal practice: am I less excusable?

I said on page 7 of my last book: Is the government the most hypocritical, the most perverse, the most voracious, and the most anti-national that has ever been?

I must make more intelligible to you, or if you like, monsieur, more tolerable each of these epithets.

The present government, with regard to its tendency (what in the individual we call intention), is better than those that came before; as to its present effects, it is still all that I just described. The uncertainty and the fear of the future; the shouts and the bad faith of the factions; the ambition, venality, and flagrant corruption of several of those who hold the tiller of affairs; a mass of general and particular causes make the government what it is today, and justify all the charges I make against it. if there is one that I regret, though, and in which I have only just perceived the ambiguity, it is that of perverse, which marks the depravity of the reason, reflected in crime: I meant to say perverted.

In short, I regard the vices of the government as engendered by its precarious and false position, not as the result of an abominable calculation.

Yes, the government is hypocrite, because he is forced to use deception and cunning every day; to respect certain prejudices as aristocratic as popular; to yield before the errors of opinion, and transform itself by means of intrigues; it is as much more hypocritical, as those who climb in it are more dishonest and more clever.

The government is voracious: you know better than me, Monsieur Minister, what certain accessions cost it, and all the shameful necessities to which the need to exist forces it to submit.

The government is perverted by the bad passions of its adversaries, by the incomplete knowledge and the false prudence of its partisans, by the concessions that one rips from it, by its own distrusts, by the overwrought stubbornness inspired in it by the injustices and calumnies of the press, etc.

The government is anti-national, because nothing suits the French character less than that rigamarole of ambition and cupidity, but especially because the present parliamentary form is the silliest, I mean the least French of all.[2]

The government, finally, does not know itself, because it does not know where it comes from, nor where it is going, nor what it should do, nor how it should defend itself.

From all that results a system of uncertain legislation, a hesitant and confused administration; an antagonistic magistracy and endless pains which make the poor patients cry and swear.

For why, I ask, a town hall, an institution from the Middle Ages, rival of a prefecture, a creation of the empire? Why a double parliament? Why one administrative jurisprudence and one civil; one procedure for the criminal, another for the civil, a third for commerce, a fourth, which will soon come, for the administration? Why these institutions placed side by side as enemies, these jurisdictions and these great bodies which have no common principle and do not understand one another, these incoherent, inharmonic judiciary formalities, when they should be unified, centralized, coordinated?” . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

There, gentlemen of the jury, is the series of my ideas on property.

Metaphysics, right, economy, concluding with the equality of fortunes.

Then comes history, which shows us society subject to the metaphysical, jurisprudential and economic laws, even when it has neither metaphysics, nor jurisprudence, nor economy, and advancing instinctively for centuries towards the realization of that equality.

Finally the constitutional charter itself implies equality; equality is at the base of the representative system, it is the consequence and result of all our institutions.

So it must be said with certainty:

Those who do not want the charter do not want equality.

Those who want more or less than the charter, want more or less than equality

Those who want something other than the charter do not want equality with the shortest delay. The charter! There are people who believe that the charter is the work of one Abbe Montesquieu, reviewed and corrected by a Mr. Bérard: this is to attribute large effects to very small causes.

The charter is the ensemble of the principles elaborated n French society since the establishment of the communes under Louis the Fat, and successively brought to light by the transient forms of feudalism, despotism, the republic and the empire..

The charter is the symbol of the spirit of liberty and equality which has tormented us for twelve centuries.

Doubtless the charter is incomplete and unfortunate in its expression, in its composition, and it is the work of Bérard et Montesquieu; but the core of the ideas belongs to the nation, and it is that core that I am interpreting.

And because it seems to me that the men of power brushed aside the charter, I have, as an egalitarian and friend of the charter, opposed those ignorant governors. Will they dare to claim that he who does not love them does not love the charter? I await that aphorism from them.

How then can the attorney general reproach me for having appealed to the passions? I have criticized violence, murder, riots, secret societies, and revolutions in twenty places in my brochure, in the very passages which serve as the basis for the accusation, so that I at first believed that it was a recording error on the part of the clerk. So much for the proletarians. As for those who, having the mission to instruct the people and see to their interests, only know how to insult, corrupt, cry against the socialists and the theoreticians, I have not been able to stop myself from making reprisals towards them, and I boast of it. I would never hear a French say in cold blood that all those who possess nothing are the enemies of the government; a president of parliament declare that the chambers do not have a mission to organize labor and to provide bread to the workers, but to make law; some deputies, some journalists, maintain that whoever only pays two hundred francs in taxes is stupid and unfit.

But what am I saying? Yes, gentlemen jurors, I have appealed to the passions; I have excited the passion for liberty against the passion for privilege; the passion for science against the passion for obscurantism; the passion for labor against the passion for idleness. I have done like the preachers, who excite the love of penitence against the love of pleasure; but they are hardly heard.

You will soon judge, gentlemen, if, in arousing all these passions against one another, I have acted like a good citizen, or if I have given in to an evil inspiration, to a detestable instinct for disparagement.

The accused then discussed the last three charges. We omit all that part of his defense, which keenly interested the audience, but which only connected in a distant manner to the great economic and social questions, alone worthy, in our opinion, of the honors of publicity.

The floor was turned over to the defender of the accused.

M. Tripard begins by recalling that Franche-Comté is the region which, in our time, has produced the boldest thinkers and most innovative minds. This, in the order of the sciences, Cuvier; thus, in the realm of letters, Victor Hugo; thus, in the social sciences, Fourier; it is to that family of free thinkers that Proudhon seems to belong. The defense attorney recalls the first two booklets on property, so energetic in form, so bold in content, and remarks that in each of them we see a maxim established: Property is theft. However, no proceedings had been directed against them, and the Minister of Justice himself, M. Vivien, had decided that there was no cause for proceedings. Thus, M. Proudhon had reason to hope for the same freedom for this last booklet as for the first two. M. Tripard recalls the movements that, in 1834 and 1835, soaked Paris et Lyon in blood: the workers, armed and in the street, demanded labor or death. In that era, all the dynastic journals called serious minds toward that great question, which so strongly interested the proletarians, the organization of labor. Mr. Proudhon felt obliged to respond to this call, and today when he announced the results of his painstaking research, he is conveyed to the assizes! The lawyer shows Proudhon researching in history the principle of property and discovering beside quiritary domain a world of slaves; beside fief, serfdom; beside the cens or quitrent, the censitaire or sharecropper and the trades; and free people nowhere. It is only in 1789, when a transformation takes place in property, and notably in the property in money, the loan at interest, that liberty, and human equality are consecrated. Since that time, the laboring classes have fallen again into the malaise, ands M. Proudhon attributes this malaise to property. Property is robbery, Mr. Proudhon has said: but that is not the first time that property was attacked by men of the highest merit. The lawyer cites Vattel and Burlamaqui, who only considered property as temporary and incidental; Beccaria, who called it a terrible right, though that right is necessary; Pascal, who called it usurpation, but usurpation that should be hidden from the people, if one does not want it to end soon; finally Considérant, who calls it a fundamental spoliation. Usurpation, spoliation, these words have a great affinity with robbery, and M. Proudhon has not even the credit of the invention. M. Proudhon could be mistaken, but there are some eminent men to cover his responsibility. In addition, what does Mr. Proudhon mean by property? He distinguishes domain from possession, the right of use from the right of abuse. Property is distinguished then from possession by the domain of the man over the thing. And, he says, possession is according to right, but property is against right. Possession, it is the right to use; but the right to abuse, that privilege of the right of property, he wants to destroy it by making of property a vicegerency whose source is in the government. According to this theory, property, it is robbery, because property is the sum of the abuses or the right to abuse. If the proprietor of a field which conceals ore does not want to exploit it, or to sell it, says Mr. Tripard, the law considers that this proprietor abuses his right to the detriment of the public good, and constrains him to allow the exploitation of the mine in exchange for an indemnity. Well! This principle of the law, Mr. Proudhon wants to generalize it and make property an administrative matter; thus will disappear the abuses of selfishness to the profit of public utility. The lawyer strives to point out that, seen in that sense, the expression, Property is robbery, loses its aggravating character and returns within the conditions of the discussion permitted by the law. He shows that the author always himself distinguishes between property and the proprietor; that he is without hatred against the proprietors, and, in support, he cites this passage from the author: Me, hate anyone, Good God! You might as well say that the doctor hates the illness, because he describes it! As to the means of realizing his theory, the advocate demonstrates, by numerous passages from the brochure, that he wants neither riots, nor revolutions; that everywhere, on the contrary, he considers time, progress and the government itself as the necessary agents of his reform.

The advocate recalled that in his brochure Mr. Proudhon has created a large overview, and that one could not split or divide it up, and grasp its true character. He set out to respond to the offending passages with others passages from the same brochure, in order to restore them to their true sense. He then discussed successively the four offenses of which the author is accused. In closing, he said that in a similar time, ten years ago, a young man, a Saint-Simonian, appeared in the Assizes of Paris, accused of attacks against property and the family; he was acquitted by the jury, and today he renders eminent services to the country as a professor at the College de France, as a member of the Council of State and editor of the Journal des Débats.[3]

The president, Mr. Béchet summarized the debates, and discharged this difficult task with a concision and an impartiality that everyone admires.

After an hour of deliberation, the jury pronounced a verdict of “not guilty.”

CONCLUSION

From this judgment and from the explanations that have just been read, and which seem to have motivated it, we can infer the following theoretical and practical consequences, which we will summarily express:

1° Every scientifically demonstrated proposition is outside the jurisdiction of the tribunals, and arises only for science itself. If the office of the magistrate is to watch over the novelties that threaten the established order, and to seek their authors, the duty of the jury, when the offending doctrine takes on a scientific character, is to abstain.

2° Every political reform, intended or unintended, being an inevitable result of the law of progress, and for that very reason always based on the system in force, taking from it its principle and it point of departure, the critique of institutions is a right, and their conservation with an eye to the future a duty.

3° The equality of conditions and of fortunes, final end of progress, resulting from the organic movement of institutions, as well as from the economic theories and the evidence of history, from now on radical writers must place themselves on legal terrain, taking hold of the charter, strengthening themselves within the representative system, and, from that unassailable position, putting outside the bounds of legality and conventional right the adversaries of progress, however highly placed they may be found to be.

Let us hope that the author of the Memoirs on Property, understanding all the extent of his work, will not be slow to give it to you, with the formula of organization, that "official" (so to speak) demonstration of his doctrine. Misfortune then, three times misfortune to the mad fools who want to stop the revolutionary car by lying down across the rail!...

[1] The public minister, in response to these words of the accused, has cited a passage fro the First Memoir, in which the author declares himself anarchist. The public minister has not understood that the word anarchy was meant in this place in the sense of the negation of sovereignty, that is, a substitution of pure reason for caprice in the government. In a word, the author believed in science and recognized the sovereignty of no one. But, in his defense, conforming to received language, he declares himself non-anarchist, which means “a friend of order.”

[2] And what government in France was never called a foreign government?

[3] Did Mr. Chevalier become conservative only in order to better serve equality? When we recall the old opinions of this famous publicist, opinions that he has never retracted; when we read the recent discourse of the College de France, and we think of the terrors he inspires, on the one hand, the retrograde movement of the men of power, on the other, the rapid disclosure of certain economic truths, we cannot help regarding Mr. Chevalier, egalitarian conservative, as a secret martyr to the reformist cause. Instead of listening foolishly, as we do, to these itinerant politickers who cry: Democracy! democracy! we would do better de inquire after the men who, among the auxiliaries of power, work, without encouragement or witness, to make the true principles of order and liberty penetrate into the highest social regions.

[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]

Déjacque's "Authority—Dictatorship," revised translation

2012-01-22T11:46:00.000-08:00

I've posted a revised translation of Joseph Déjacque's essay, "Authority—Dictatorship," also known by the title "Down with the Bosses!" My original working translation was not the most elegant of attempts, and it's nice to have a substantially improved version available to readers. Slight revisions of "The Universal Circulus" and "The Theory of Infinitesimal Humanities" are on their way as well, as I start to work seriously on an anthology of Déjacque's work.

I've combed through library catalogs and the pages Le Libertaire for important and representative material, and it looks like these texts are key:

Down with the Bosses!
The Revolutionary Question
The Human Being, Male and Female
Beranger at the Pillory
The Humanisphere
The Universal Circulus
Direct and Universal Legislation
The Organization of Labor
The Decadent Civilizées (one-act drama)
Letter to Pierre Vésinier
various essays from Le Libertaire, including the material on chattel slavery in the United States

That amounts to slightly over 250 pages worth of material, and leaves the long book of poetry, Les Lazaréennes, to be dealt with, but the serial nature of that publication means that there will be at least a bit of work to do just to assemble the various sections. I'll try to include a few of the shorter poems, which do not lose too much in translation, in the anthology. Some of Déjacque's poetry was really lovely.

It's always hard to judge how long translation projects will take, but my hope is to have this one together early in 2013.

Proudhonian consistency—II

2012-01-22T01:49:00.000-08:00

One of the stumbling blocks to accepting Proudhon's post-1861 "New Theory" of property seems to be the fact that it is hard to image that "monopoly," "absolutism," even "despotism" (all words Proudhon used to describe the allodial property that never stopped being "theft" for him) could be a key ingredient in the creation of society, association, etc. Even when we become accustomed to the "economic contradictions," this particular move may seem like a bit of a stretch. The isolation of interests that goes with exclusive domain seems to work against the more social elements in Proudhon's thought.

But if we look carefully at the 1839 Celebration of Sunday, we find a curious thing. Right at the beginning of the section on the moral utility of the Sabbath, Proudhon makes a point of emphasizing the solitude, the isolation, faced by individuals during their weekly rest—and then goes on to explain how that interruption of work, but also of the normal rounds of society, is vital to the growth of the individual and to the development of society.

Several of the elements of the "New Theory" were not clear to Proudhon until much later, but if we want to understand the early elements that went into his embrace of the isolation involved in property, it would make sense to start with this section of The Celebration of Sunday, then move on to passages in What is Property? where Proudhon tells us that individual "learn because they err." Then on to the discussion of the "abuse" of property in the Economic Contradictions where he says, using language familiar from 1840:

By abuse, the legislator has meant that the proprietor has the right to be mistaken in the use of his goods, without ever being subject to investigation for that poor use, without being responsible to anyone for his error.

And so on...

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, "The Celebration of Sunday" (1839)

2012-01-16T18:51:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to finally be able to present the full text of Proudhon's The Celebration of Sunday, available as rich text at From the Libertarian Library and in pdf form as well.

When I started this project, I really had no idea if it would be worth completing, but I'm happy to say that this early work is every bit as interesting as Proudhon's later productions.

The Celebration continues

2012-01-15T00:55:00.000-08:00

I've posted another section from my translation of Proudhon's The Celebration of Sunday, and I have revised the sections previously posted. I finished a rough translation of the whole book a couple of days ago, and am now roughly half-way through revising and editing the full translation. The section I just posted includes the material on "theft" that I started to discuss in December.

UPDATE: Section III is now also available.

Proudhonian consistency

2012-01-14T15:22:00.000-08:00

I was amused to find that Proudhon's first published article in 1839 begins with the following:

"Is a universal alphabet possible?

"If it is possible, is it practicable in the study and common usage of language?

"Yes, a universal alphabet is possible, and I believe that possibility is demonstrated by the work that I am about to analyze.

"No, that universal alphabet is not practicable and never will be, outside of some phonological comparisons and some literal connections. As the last proposition is a sort of negation of the preceding one, I must engage in some clarifications on the subject, before passing to the appreciation of the Methodical Alphabet proposed by Mr. Ackermann."

It looks like he had an appreciation of contradiction as a rhetorical tool, right from the very start.

More Molinari, etc.

2012-01-11T10:31:00.000-08:00

Roderick Long has translated another pair of texts, both relating to Gustave de Molinari's Soirées on the Rue Saint-Lazare: Charles Coquelin's review of the work, and "Question of the Limits of State Action and Individual Action Discussed at the Society of Political Economy," a summary of a related discussion, published in the Journal des Économistes. Roderick's blog posts give useful context.

The Theory of Property, Chapter VIII

2012-01-11T01:13:00.000-08:00

Of the chapters from Proudhon's The Theory of Property which have not yet appeared in translation, the first is the Introduction compiled by Proudhon's friends, which surveyed his previous works; the third, fourth and fifth chapters amount to a summing up of Proudhon's scattered thoughts on the varieties of property, legal opinions on the subject, and the history of property. All of these contain interesting material, including the data on which the New Theory was constructed. But arguably the most interesting of the remaining chapters are the seventh, which explains in some detail the "equilibration" of property, and the eighth, "The Author's Critique Vindicated," in which Proudhon reflected on the development of his thought and responded to criticisms. I'm happy to be able to provide a working translation of Chapter VIII. It is perhaps especially worth noting Proudhon's list of positive projects, which ought to provide a little context for the debates about what constitutes a comprehensive account of Proudhon's thought.

Chapter VIII

The Author’s Critique Vindicated.

As a complement to this theory, I don’t believe I could do better than to recall here my previous studies, the summary of which forms the introduction of this book, and to recount my own history. The critique that I once made of property has had enough impact, it has earned me enough disappointments and insults that one will allow me to claim its profits today; for it is by that critique, and by it alone, that we can arrive at the understanding of property, and, thus, at its definitive constitution.

In 1840, more than twenty-two years ago, I made my debut in economic science by the publication of a brochure of 250 pages, entitled: What is Property? I do not need to recall what scandal was cause by my response, a scandal which did not cease growing for twelve years, even after the coup d’état. Today let imaginations be calmed, especially as I myself publish a theory of the property which, I dare say, can defy all attacks,—one could say with interest,—especially if one better understands my explanations.

It had been hardly three months since I had commenced my studies of political economy when I realized two things: first, that there existed an intimate connection, though I did not know of what sort, between the constitution of the State and property; second, that the whole economic and social edifice rested on that connection, and yet its institution was given neither in political economy nor in natural right. Non datur dominium, in oeconomiâ, I said to myself, paraphrasing the aphorism of ancient physics concerning the void; property is not an economic element; it is not essential to the science, and nothing justifies it. Where does it come from? What is its nature? What does it want? That was the subject of what I called my first Memoir. I predicted that from then on material would be abundant, and that the subject was far from exhausted.

Now there is no longer any reason to tremble for property. Since we have made an emperor to defend it, and since I myself have take its part, there is not, I flatter myself, a reader suspected of even a bit of good sense, having the least glimmer of logic, who will not recognize how right I am. Is the principle of property the right of the first occupant? That is absurd. Does it come from conquest? That would be immoral. Perhaps we must attribute it to labor? Labor gives rights only to its fruits, at most an indemnity for the improvement of the soil, perhaps even a preference of possession—of possession, let’s be clear, never, never to sovereignty over the land itself, to what the Roman law called the eminent domain of property. Otherwise it would be necessary to say that every tenant is, ipso facto, a proprietor, and that he who leases his land relinquishes it. All that is reeled off in our days about the struggles and merits of the cultivator is sentimental verbiage: it neither a matter of philosophy, nor of right. The work published by Mr. Thiers, in 1848, for the defense of Property, is a pure bucolic. Is it the legislature that created property? But for what motives? By virtue of what authority? We know nothing of it. If it is the legislature which, by an act of its own good pleasure, has instituted property, the same legislature can repeal it and dislocate inheritances, as Mr. Laboulaye said, then from that point property is only a legal fiction, a caprice, and a caprice that much more odious, because it excludes the majority of the people. Must we say, with some who pretend to metaphysics, that property is the expression of individuality, of the personality, of the self? But possession largely suffices for that expression, and, once again, if it is enough to say this field is mine, in order to have property, all are proprietors by the same title; there is civil war ignited, with servitude as the conclusion. Now, when you have passed in review first-occupation, conquest, labor, the authority of the legislature and the metaphysics of the self, you have exhausted all the hypotheses of the jurists on the origin and principle of property. You can close the libraries; there is nothing more. What then! Must we believe, with Mr. Laboulaye, that property is an article of faith, of which the discussion should be banned, because to do otherwise would be to put society in danger? But justice is a friend of the light; only crime seeks the darkness. Cur non palam si decenter? Is property, then, robbery? ...

That dialectic,—let us admit it, since we can do it without peril,—was as invincible as it was inexorable; and the testimony I delivered to the legislature itself was not meant to diminish it. What are we to say, for example, of that Roman definition: Dominium est jus utendi et abutendi re sua, quatenùs juris ratio patitur! Or of that French definition, still more shameful: “Property is the right to enjoy and to dispose of thing in the most absolute manner, provided that one does not make a usage prohibited by the laws and regulations.” Isn’t it worse to say yes and no about the same thing, to give and to hold back, to posit a principle and to deny it immediately by the exception? So be it, I said: property will be all that you want, within the limits of public right and the regulations. Now, let us see the public right; let us see the regulations!...

Absolute property! But, as a disciple of Kant and Comte, I rejected the absolute as much as the supernatural; I recognized only intelligible, positive laws, as astronomy, physics, zoology, right, political economy itself offer us so many examples.—Republican by principles, partisan of constitutional guaranties in the mean time, I fought with all my might against the absolutism that the French people had sacrificed in the person of Louis XVI and that they wanted me to worship in property.

Property, abusive! Doubtless, it could not be otherwise, since as soon as abuse ceases to be its prerogative, it is no more. Now, it is exactly for that reason that I reject property. If you said that marriage is a ma’s right to use and abuse, not only his wife, which would already be an infamy, but his daughter, his mother, his female servants, etc., would you pretend that marriage is a respectable institution? Absolutism raised as an idol, abuse taken for an ideal; property, declared everywhere an in everything eccentric, unconditional, without limits, without restraint, without rules, without laws, prior and superior to right, even to society: it was exorbitant, inadmissible, and unfortunately one could say that all that was not invented. The facts—the facts abound in history and in modern times, and cry vengeance against property.

Penetrating deeper still into the psychology of the proprietor, following the most profound moralists and even of the Gospel, what would I discover? That property, that is praised to us as the remuneration of labor, the sign of human dignity, the pivot of society and monument of legislative wisdom, was nothing else, at base, than the sovereign act of our egoism, the solemn manifestation of our concupiscence, the dream of a perverse, avaricious, anti-social nature, which wants everything for itself, appropriates that which it has not produced, demands that one return to it more than it lends, makes itself the center of the world, scorning God and men provided it enjoys! Oh! Christianity, which one will doubtless not put in the dock, has judged property well; it has excluded it from the kingdom of heaven: Those alone, it says, among the proprietors will be saved, who practice the detachment of the heart, and are guardians and dispensers of their fortune rather than its consumers. Beati pauperes spiritu, quoniam ipsorium est regnum cœlorum.

Let the reader here allow me to interrupt myself. Was that critique justified, or not? Do I have anything to regret and recant? And will, by chance, the theory of property that I publish at this time be considered a retraction? ... We will see that it is nothing of the sort.

The critique made, it was necessary to conclude. At the same time that I pronounced, by virtue of my analysis, the condemnation of property, as it has been produced, in the Roman and French law, in political economy, and in history, I rejected, in no less energetic terms, the opposite hypothesis, community. That exclusion of communism is recorded in my first Memoir of 1840, chapter V, and reproduced with more depth and force in the System of Economic Contradictions, 1846, chapter XII.

What has my thought been since then? It is that property being an absolute, a notion which implies two contraries—yes, as I said with Kant and Hegel, an antinomy—must be synthesized in a higher formula which, giving satisfaction equally to the collective interest and to individual initiative, must, I said, bring together all the advantages of property and those of association without any of their drawbacks. I gave to that higher formula, anticipated and maintained by me, from 1840, in virtue of the Hegelian dialectic, but still not explained or defined, the provisional name of possession, an equivocal term, which recalled a form of institution that I could not want and that I have abandoned.

Things remained this way for several years. Against all the attacks that I had to bear up against from right and left, I maintained my critique in all its terms, announcing a new conception of property, with the same certainty with which I had denied the old one, although I could not say of what that conception consisted. My hope, with regard to its merits, should be unmistakable, as one sees today; but the truth that I sought could be grasped only after a rectification of method.

Thus I pursued, without letting myself be rattled by the noise that was made around me, my studies on the most difficult questions of political economy, credit, population, taxation, etc., when, around 1854, I noticed that the dialectic of Hegel, that I had followed in my System of Economic Contradictions as trustworthy, was faulty in one point and served to confuse my ideas rather than clarifying them. Thus I have recognized that if the antinomy is a law of nature and intelligence, a phenomenon of the understanding, like all the notions that it affects, it does not resolve itself; it remains eternally what it is, the first cause of all movement, principle of all life and evolution, by the contradiction of its terms; it can only be balanced, either by the equilibration of opposites, or by its opposition to other antinomies.

I ask pardon for this detail, without which one could perhaps not explain how, having begun the critique of property in 1840, I only produced its theory in 1862. Without speaking of the powerful distractions that 1848 and 1852 have hurled through lives, each will understand that, in studies so arduous, where the philosopher works, not on bodies, but on ideas, the least inexactitude of method, leading to false results, lead to incalculable delays. We no longer think of intuition today, and our impulsive reason long since said its last word. The experiment must be made for everyone: good sense all alone, assisted by a stronger dose of erudition and of all the arts of speech, no longer suffices for the solution of the serious problems that assail us.

In order to follow truth in the more and more elevated regions where it calls us, the thinker, like the physician and the astronomer, requires the supplement of an instrumentation which the vulgar do not doubt.

The theory of LIBERTY (Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, 8th study) had also taught me that the absolute, with regard to which I had declared all direct research banned, absurd even (Ibid., 7th study), nonetheless intervenes as an actor in human affairs, as well as in logic and metaphysics. Finally, I had on many occasions remarked that the maxims of General Reason, which end by imposing themselves on Individual Reason, are often the opposite of those given us by the latter: so that it could very well happen that society was governed by entirely different rules than those indicated by what we are in the habit of calling common sense. From that moment property, which had first appeared to me only in a sort of half-light, was completely clarified; I understood that it should be transported, as I had critiqued it, with that absolutist, abusive, anarchic, rapacious, libidinous nature, which it all times has been the scandal of the moralists, into the social system, where a transfiguration awaited it.

These explanations were indispensable in order to make well understood how the theoretical negation of property was the essential preliminary for its confirmation and practical development. Property, if one grasps it at its origin, is a principle vicious in itself and anti-social, but destined to become, by its very generalization and with the assistance of other institutions, the pivot and the mainspring of the whole social system. The first part of that proposition has been demonstrated by the critique of 1840-48; it is up to the reader to judge now if the second is proven in a satisfactory manner.

Is it true that the State, after having been constituted on the principle of the separation of powers, requires a counter-weight which prevents it from swinging and from becoming hostile to liberty; that counter-weight cannot be found either in the exploitation-in-common of the soil, nor in possession or conditional, limited, dependant and feudal property, since that would be to place the counter-weight in the same power that it is a question of counter-balancing, which is absurd; while we find it in absolute property, which is to say independent, equal in authority and sovereignty to the State? Is it true, as a consequence, that by the essentially political function conferred upon it, property, precisely because its absolutism must oppose itself to the absolutism of the State, and present itself in the social system as liberal, federative, decentralizing, republican, egalitarian, progressive, and in the service of justice? Is it true that these attributes, none of which are found in the principle of property, comes to it as it goes along from its generalization, to the degree that a greater number of citizens acquire property; and that to bring about that generalization, to insure its leveling, it is enough to organize around property, and in its service, a certain number of institutions and services, neglected thus far, abandoned to monopole and anarchy? That is what the reader is invited to pronounce upon, after careful consideration and serious reflection.

The political and social goal of property recognized, I will call the attention of the reader one last time to the sort of incompatibility which exists here between the principle and the aims, and makes property a truly extraordinary creation. Is it true, I ask, that this property, now without reproach, is yet the same as to its nature, its origins, its psychological definition, and its passional virtuality, as that of which the exact and impartial critique has so greatly surprised opinion; that nothing has been modified, added, subtracted, or sweetened in the first potion; that if property is humanized, if from a villain it becomes a saint, it is not because we have changed its essence, that we have on the contrary respected it religiously; it is simply that we have enlarged its sphere and generalized its development? Is it true that in this selfish, satanic and stubborn nature that we have found the most energetic means of resisting despotism without bringing down the State, and also of equalizing fortunes without organizing plunder and muzzling liberty? Is it true, I ask, for I cannot insist too much on that truth to which the school logic has not accustomed us, that to change the effects of an institution which, in its beginnings, was the height of iniquity, to transform the angel of darkness into the angel of light, we have only needed to oppose it to itself, and to [governmental] power at the same time, to surround it with guarantees and increase its means tenfold, as if we had wanted to constantly exalt, in property, absolutism and abuse?

Thus, it is on the condition of remaining what nature has made it, on the condition of preserving its entire personality, its untamed self, its spirit of revolution and of debauchery, that property can become an instrument of guarantee, of liberty, of justice and of order. It is not its inclinations that must be changed, it is its works; it is no longer by combating, in the manner of the ancient moralists, the principle of concupiscence, that it is necessary from now on to think of purifying the human conscience; like the tree whose fruit, bitter and green in the beginning, turns golden in the sun and becomes sweeter than honey; it is by lavishing on property light, fresh breezes and the dew that we will draw from its seeds of sin some fruits of virtue. Thus, our previous critique remains: the theory of liberal, egalitarian, and moralistic property will fall if we pretend to distinguish it from the property that is absolutist, monopolistic and abusive; and we have obtained that transformation that I had sought under the name of synthesis, without any alteration of principle, by a simple balance.

I have been accused of being only, in that critique the importance of which each can appreciated today, a plagiarist of Brissot. It will soon be said, I expect, that for the theory of which I have just given the sketch, I am also only the plagiarist of some stillborn author, lost in the dust of the libraries for two or three hundred years. So much the better if one finds predecessors; I would only have more confidence in myself and more bold. Until then, I knew the work of Brissot only by the extracts from it published, in 1850, by a Mr. Sudre, in a work crowned by the French Academy. That was the time when one called the young men of letters to the rescue against socialism, where one lavished encouragements to those who burned the most incense before la property. It appears from the extracts published by Mr. Sudre that Brissot had said before me, but only in the form of hyperbole and in the heat of declamation, property, it is theft! If it is the priority of expression that is claimed for the young publicist who later became the head of the Gironde, I cede it willingly. But Brissot has not understood the sense of his own worlds, and his critique is erroneous on all points. First, in saying that property is a theft, he did not intend to attack the principle of concupiscence condemned by the Gospel and from which arise these two economic equivalents, theft and property: yet it was only on that condition that Brissot’s invective could have a philosophical value and be considered as a definition. Far from that, what Brissot blamed and condemned in property and what he called theft, is precisely what gave it energy, without which property is no longer anything, and gives way to tyranny, absolutism and abuse. What he asked, is that we return to natural property, as he calls it, to that conditional, restricted, lifelong, and subordinate possession, the formation of which we have described at the end of primitive community, and that we have then had to reject as a lower form of civilization, proper only to consolidate, under some appearances of equity, despotism and servitude. Brissot, in a word, after having seen very well the excesses of every sort which have at all times dishonored property, has not understood that property as, by nature and destination, absolutist, invasive and abusive, jus utendi et abutendi, that it should be maintained so, if one wanted to make it a political element, a social function; he wanted, on the contrary, to render it reasonable, moderate, to make a Pythagorean of it: what made it only just fall back in the state of subversion to which it was a question of putting an end.

Others have claimed that in 1840 and 1846, as in 1848, I had aimed for celebrity through scandal. This time they will say, already they right it, that I seek to restore to myself the attention of the public, which abandons me, by a new contradiction, still more impudent than the first. What would you like me to say to these one-eyed intelligences—Fourier would have called them simplist— fanatical for unity in logic and metaphysics as much as in politics, incapable of seizing that very simple proposition that the moral world, like the physical world, rests on a plurality of irreducible and antagonistic elements, and that it is from the contradiction of these elements that the life and movement of the universe result? They, on the contrary, explain nature, society and history like a syllogism. They derive everything from the one, like the ancient mythologists; and when we spread before them that multitude of inconsistent, undefined and uncontrollable [elements] that wreak havoc on their unitary cosmogonies, they accuse you of polytheism and maintain that it is you who are in contradiction. These men, in whom the loquacity equals the ineptitude, have acquired a certain respect in the world of onlookers, delighted to hear it said, by these fine babblers, that there is nothing true apart from what they have learned from their nannies, and that the supreme wisdom consists what their fathers thought. The reign of these charlatans will only end with the bankruptcy of the last prejudice: that is why, while scorning them, we should arm ourselves with patience.

I have outlined the sentiments which have dictated my conduct for twenty-five years. I have not been animated, whatever has been said, by a thought fundamentally hostile to the institution of property, of which I sought the key, or for the class of beneficiaries. I have demanded a better justification for the established right, in the aim of consolidation,—as also, as a matter of course, where appropriate,—of reform.

And thus I say today that, in this last regard, I am not deceived in my hopes. The theory of property, that I finally produced, not only satisfies a logical need of which few people have been aware; it opens tremendous prospects; it casts a bright glare on the basis of the social system; it reveals to us one of the most profound laws of our nature, namely that the selfish faculty, which ancient and Christian morals, and the instinct of all the first societies had rejected, was precisely designed by nature to be the first representative, the agent of Right.

Perhaps I would have done better to keep silent than to shake up the public with a frightening controversy, which could have its dangers.

To this I reply that my intention was to appeal to scholars and lawyers;— that I posed the question in a time of perfect calm, 1840, in the midst of social peace, eight years before the Revolution of February, when Mr. Thiers was minister, Mr. Vivien and Mr. Dufaure, with him;—that in 1848 I held myself at a distance; that the cries of the conservative press alone obliged me to break the silence, and that it is only to defend myself that if have I have gone from being an isolated writer, to a journalist and publicist.

I do not believe that philosopher or scholar has ever pursued a truth so long, and surmounted so many obstacles: that called for more from me that the love of truth and justice: it required obstinacy against the opinion of my contemporaries. I count for nothing all my trials. Never had such anguish been experienced; never had a more dangerous skepticism emerged from a critique. If property is shown to be illegitimate, and we could not destroy or change it, what then is human morality? What is society? Seek the right, despairing of the cause, in the abuse, where it was never noticed!

As a result of the perseverance and sincerity that I have brought to my studies, I have the right to complain to the public and ask why injustice has constantly be done to me. Why? Is it because I preach right, all the right, nothing but right, and that 97 men in 100 want more or less than the right.

Of 100 individuals, there are 25 villains, convicted or not, notorious or concealed, 50 rogues, 15 shady characters, 7 passably good, who never do wrong, on their own, to anyone, but would not sacrifice a cent for truth, and 3 men of truth, virtue and integrity.

Some cry out that I am a demolisher. That name will stay with me to the end; it is the flat refusal that is opposed to all my labors: a demolition man, powerless to produce!... Yet I have already given some passable demonstrations of very positive things, such as:

1. A theory of the Collective Force: metaphysics of the Group (it will be especially demonstrated, along with the theory of Nationalities, in a book which will be published shortly);

2. A dialectical theory: Formation of genera and species by the serial method; expansion of the syllogism, which is good only when the premises are allowed;

3. A theory of Right and of Moral Law (doctrine of immanence);

4. A theory of the Liberty

5. A theory of the Fall, that is of the Origin of moral evil: Idealism;

6. A theory of the Right of Force: Right of war and right of peoples;

7. A theory of Contract: federation, public or constitutional Law;

8. A theory of Nationalities, deduced from the collective force: indigénat, autonomy;

9. A theory of the Division of Powers, correlative of collective force;

10. A theory of the Property;

11. A theory of Credit: Mutuality, correlative of federation;

12. A theory of the literary property,

13. A theory of taxation;

14. A theory of the balance of commerce;

15. A theory of population;

16. A theory of the family and of marriage;

Without considering a mass of incidental truths.

I first revealed the phenomenon of the antinomy in political economy. I have freed Justice from Religion, the moral element from the religious element.

As a philosopher, if I reject all metaphysical, absolutist hypotheses, which mean nothing, I have posited as fixed point, law of nature, mind and conscience, this universal fact: Justice, equality, equation, balance, accord, harmony.

I am a demolisher. But on the strength of what principle is it that I demolish? For there must be one here; on the basis of what idea, what fact or theory? For there must be one.—By virtue of Right and Justice. All of my critique of Property, all my theory of Love and Marriage, like that of War and Peace, rests on the notion of justice; my Economic Contradictions are a work of balance. I am a demolisher; but I show today the political and social system in a new light. Against the irreparable abuses of sovereignty, I demand then, and more than ever, the dismemberment of sovereignty;—against the fantasy of individual power, I demand the alliance proprietary selfishness with liberty;—against the excess of taxation and the extravagances of the tax officials, I demand a tax reform, established on the rent itself for pivot:—against the civil list, I demand, with the division of the landed estates, participation in the land-rent;—against the feudal opposition to change which takes hold of us, against the majorats, the corporations who pour in on us, I demand allodial property. That is, I think, every bit as many affirmations as negations. What of it? I am a demolisher, incapable of reconstructing! ...

Another opinion that I dread, because it offers almost no opportunity for replies, is that of some people of good faith, who, intending to speak of these controversies, say: God! Is so much wit required to know that each must be master of that which belongs to him? That is what you say to us now that we are no longer robbers: we knew it before you; we have never doubted our right. What attraction is served by learning to doubt, since in the end the right is indubitable?

Well! Good friends, have you never heard of revolutions? Or rather are you like the hare, who always returns home by the same path, despite nearly being taken twenty times? Ask Mr. Laboulaye, a wise jurist, worthy of your confidence, who does not have too much wit: he will tell you that all revolutions are made for or against property, and that in one case as in the other, there is a great displacement of inheritances!... Do you think you feel safer today than in 1848, more reassured than the clergy and nobility were in 1789?—The government watches, you say.—Oh! You know well that revolutions do not await the permission of governments. Moreover, which it is not the agrarians who attack property, it is the government that restricts it. And it is always property that pays, unless it lacks the talent to make itself pay. Now, the theory that I propose to you aims to show you how, if you wish, nor revolution will happen again. It is simply a question, for the non-proprietors, of facilitating their means of acquiring property, and for the proprietors, of better fulfilling their duties to the government. Take care!

[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]

The Philosophy of Progress, revised translation

2012-01-08T01:33:00.000-08:00

It's coming up on three years since I completed my initial working translation of Proudhon's The Philosophy of Progress. In that time, I've subjected the text to three rather complete revisions, and various more minor adjustments. The result is a new edition of the New Proudhon Library volume, which I'll be releasing as Corvus Editions' first offset-printed release in the near future. Details of the release are coming together, but it looks like it will be something about midway between previous pamphlets and my hand-bound hardcover editions, with a heavy cover made from repurposed materials. In the meantime, the pdf is available online. Working closely with the text again over the last couple of months has just confirmed in my mind how absolutely key it is to understanding Proudhon's thought. I encourage those who haven't read it to give it a look, and those who have perhaps only seen my early revisions, or for whom it didn't make much of an impression the first time around, to give it another look.

Some of my thoughts on The Philosophy of Progress can be found in "The Heart of Proudhon's Thought."

"Theory of Property" controversies

2012-01-04T17:32:00.000-08:00

In the interest of covering as many of the bases as possible, relating to The Theory of Property, and Proudhon's posthumous works in general, I've spent some time this week exploring the debates within Proudhon's circle specifically concerning The Theory of Property. A key exchange appeared in La Presse, in November 1865, initially pitting J. A. Langlois and Georges Duchêne against Alfred Darimon, over the question of the style and extent of the editing in the posthumous works. Abraam Rolland and Gustave Chaudey expressed themselves in disagreement with Langlois and Duchêne on the most appropriate form for the posthumous works to take, suggesting that the manuscript alone could have interest, and criticism could come later. Langlois and Duchêne observed that the questions of authorship were at least as obscure in the works prepared by their opponents as in The Theory of Property. The debate between the factions of literary executors, empowered by nothing more than the note described in the "Notice" of The Principle of Art, and the assent of Proudhon's family, were complicated by the presence of Darimon, an old collaborator and friend of Proudhon, with whom the more anarchistic of Proudhon's circle already had deep political differences. There is a lot more personal heat than critical light in much of it, but it is a wonderful window in on just how much of a circle, and really multiple circles, there was around Proudhon, a glimpse at critical contexts.

There is a lot of fighting over who are the "true friends of Proudhon," a sectarian exercise of pretty dubious value, but one to which it will probably be useful to return sometime soon, when a bit more of the relevant debate is translated.

What there doesn't seem to be in the debate is any substantive charge of falsification. What Proudhon's rival friends seem to have been riled up about was whether or not the words of the master, and not, as far as I can tell, his intent, had been tampered with in a way unfaithful to his memory or to the charge laid on his literary executors. If there is really a problem with The Theory of Property as a posthumous, unpublished, and presumably unfinished work, the problem ought logically to be:

That Proudhon did not desire to finish the work, because it did not represent his thought at the time of his death;
That the work was not sufficiently coherent to present Proudhon's argument;
That the work presented some view other than Proudhon's, through any of a number of innocent causes; or
That the work represented a falsification of Proudhon's work by the compilers.

Perhaps there are other reasons to object to treating The Theory of Property, or others of the Proudhon's work, as representing Proudhon's thought, but this seems to cover the major cases. And, in fact:

The Theory of Property was featured high on Proudhon's list of works to be completed, suggesting that his failure to publish the work, presumably almost finished late in 1861, can probably be laid down to the causes reported by Proudhon himself (the demands of "living by the pen," and his enormous range of commitments) and the literary executors (Proudhon's desire to complete the introductory survey, in order to show his own consistency), and some considerations imposed by those causes, which might well have made completing a work like The Political Capacity of the Working Classes more pressing than clarifying a body of work which he had already given 25 years worth of attention.
The Theory of Property is not a simple book, but Proudhon didn't write many of those. It does, however seem to be a coherent one.
It also seems to be consistent with the works that preceded it. The opposition to The Theory of Property seems to come from some concern that Proudhon changed his mind about the essential nature of property, or that his definitions changed in some way that suggests to the unwary an essential change of mind. Unfortunately for these critics, there doesn't seem to be much evidence that Proudhon substantially changed his mind or his opinions, with regard to the nature of property. He certainly denied the charge, and the delay of the publication of The Theory of Property seems to have been linked to his strong desire to make his consistency clear to all. He did change his mind about the consequences of property's absolutist character, and to revise his sense of "possession" as a tool for liberty. This is apparently the think that was crystallized for him in 1861, reading Grandclément's manuscript, in which alleu and fief were presented as the essential, antinomic aspects of property. But there are elements of the New Theory in virtually every work touching on property, from What is Property?, with its community-property synthesis, on.
If The Theory of Property shows the infection, conscious or intentional, of Proudhon's theory with those of his literary executors, I have yet to see the evidence. Both Langlois and Duchêne went on to write major treatises on the same general terrain as Proudhon's. But their concerns seem to have been rather different. Duchêne had worked very closely with Proudhon on the Manual of the Stock-Market Speculator, and there is some evidence that the notes for the proposed second manual influenced his own work, but there is nothing I can find in The Theory of Property that particularly suggests Duchêne's hand. Langlois seems to have already been at work on his two-volume Man and the Revolution, in which he dared to correct and complete elements of Proudhon's theory, but, again, I don't see evidence of any particular influence by Langlois on the content of The Theory of Property.

There are some interesting points in the debate among Proudhon's friends, about the differences between faithfulness and idolatry, when it comes to the thought of another. The change in Proudhon's thought about the consequences of "property" and "possession" means that those of us who consider ourselves friends of Proudhon's thought are forced to pick and choose which elements of it we will inherit, and which we will not accept. In the current debate on the status of The Theory of Property, Iain McKay and I agree in rejecting the New Theory, in the sense that neither of us will embrace it as our own theory, and in this we can both claim the personal sympathy of Proudhon, who posed the New Theory, but "did not need it." But the question of what we accept and reject is a separate question from whether or not the various posthumous works were genuine expressions of the thought of Proudhon. I continue to think that to deny The Theory of Property a place in the proudhonian canon requires a demonstration that it fails in some one of the regards I have suggested above, and I have yet to see anything that looks like that demonstration.

The Posthumous Works of Proudhon

2012-01-04T02:02:00.000-08:00

The previous post, "What is certain is that property is to be regenerated among us," has spurred some further research on the relation of The Theory of Property to Proudhon's works of the early 1860s. Check the comment thread for a number of of interesting items from Proudhon's correspondence, and the Libertarian Library blog for the "Notice to the Reader" from The Principle of Art, the first of the Posthumous Works.

"What is certain is that property is to be regenerated among us"

2012-01-01T23:13:00.000-08:00

I was asked to clarify Proudhon's position on property, by someone reading the AK Press anthology, Property is Theft! I had been under the impression that, although Iain McKay's introductory material consistently claims that Proudhon did not "change his mind" about property, the concluding chapter of The Theory of Property was included—and there is nothing ambiguous about that material. Unfortunately, besides placing the material from The Theory of Property in an Appendix, and suggesting that Proudhon had considered it of less importance than The Political Capacity of the Working Classes, which he was working on up to his death, and perhaps of a suspect nature because of its posthumous publication, that material was rather severely edited, cutting out much of the very heart of Proudhon's presentation of his "New Theory."

I've tried to walk relatively gently around the question of the treatment of property in Property is Theft!, figuring most readers could make up their own minds about that key issue. Unfortunately, without the key passages, there isn't a whole lot of incentive to do so, particularly with so many editorial indications that the work is not important. I guess it's time to deal with the question in a rather more head-on fashion.

All of the posthumous works required some assembly and ordering. The Political Capacity was indeed among the most complete of the bunch, but Gustave Chaudey provided the conclusion, based on instructions from Proudhon. The Theory of Property did not get Proudhon's customary final editing, but the bulk of the work—including all of the description of the "New Theory" and the conclusion—were completed in 1862. The four executors responsible for preparing The Theory of Property included the following notice, describing the state of the manuscript and the nature of their preparations:

NOTICE THE READER

In the preface placed at the beginning of the book on Art [Du principe de l'art et de sa destination social], we have undertaken to tell the public the manuscripts of each of Proudhon's posthumous works has been found.

The one that we publish today contained two well-designed notes:

I. "To inform the reader to distinguish well form of possessing (possession), that everyone, learned and ignorant, even some jurists, confuse with property, giving the name of the one to the other."

II. "PROPERTY. To give an exact and forceful analysis of all my critiques:

"1st Memoir (1840)
"2nd Memoir (1841)
"3rd Memoir (1842)
"Creation of Order (1843);
"Economic Contradictions (1846);
"The People, etc. (1848-1852);
"Of Justice (1858);
"Of Taxation (1860);
"Of Intellectual Property (1862)."

Proudhon did not want to publish his Theory of Property, although it was ready in 1862, as he announced in his Majorats Littéraires, before the program sketched in the two preceding notes, and especially in the second, was fulfilled. The author having not had time to do this work himself, we have thought, in the interest of his memory, that it fell to us to supply it. It was for him principally a question of showing that his ideas on property developed according to a rational series in which the last term always had its point of departure in the preceding term, and that his present conclusion is not at all contradictory with his premises.

This summary forms the first sixty-two pages of the Introduction. We have used the form I, as if Proudhon himself had written: 1) because the idea of that analysis belongs to him; 2) because the work sketched in advance does not constitute on our part an individual, original production; 3) because it is composed in large part of textual citations from the author; 4) because we have inserted some of his unpublished notes; 5) finally, because, in the last pages of the chapter, Proudhon takes over, as if he had made the summary himself.

The reading thus informed, we do not hesitate to cite, in support of the author's idea, a judicial act which has occurred since his death, and which has inspired Mr. Eugène Paignon to one of his best articles (see the Introduction, page 10).

In the rest of the work we have only done, as in the book on Art, some arrangement and ordering; choosing, between several expressions of the same idea, the most lucid, and most complete; transporting to the chapters that they concern the scatter supplementary and explanatory notes scatter, whose place was naturally indicated by their content.

Let us add finally that the chapter divisions had not been made, but that the titles were all found in summary form on the first page of the manuscript.

J. A. Langlois. F. G. Bergmann.
G. Duchêne. F. Delhasse.

This is ultimately not the description of a marginal work, of uncertain provenance. It places it in the midst of a body of work from the earliest years of the 1860s that reflects Proudhon at the height of his intellectual powers: War and Peace, The Theory of Taxation, Literary Majorats, and The Principle of Federation were all published between 1861 and 1863. Those works are, with the exception of The Principle of Federation, largely untranslated and unknown to readers in English. They are also, without exception, difficult amalgamations of theoretical and occasional writing. The combination of complex, antinomic theory and unfamiliar contexts means that they are very resistant to coherent interpretation, but their unfamiliarity has allowed would-be interpreters to cherry-pick provocative quotes and peddle them as Proudhon's conclusions with pretty good success. The treatment of War and Peace has been pretty exemplary in that respect—and it's one of many refreshing aspects of McKay's treatment of Proudhon that he has taken the position that Proudhon's conclusion—"Humanity wants no more war"—ought to be taken as seriously as the potentially troubling things he says on his way there. But we should be honest about the fact that, apart from a very, very small number of scholars—and I don't think either of us number in that minority—everyone in the English-speaking world is pretty much flying by the seat of their pants when it comes to the full two-volumes-worth of Proudhon's theory in War and Peace, and that the same is probably true for most of the other works published after the mid-1850s. The best-informed of us generally still have a lot of hard reading to do.

Of course, flying by the seat of one's pants is not flying blind, and the fact that none of us have a complete picture of Proudhon's thought is no reason not to push forward, and put forward general interpretations of that thought's importance. But those interpretations—those interpretive approximations, to use a bit of Proudhon's own critical apparatus—have to incorporate the facts of the texts as we find them, not as we would like them to be. There is obviously a stage at which we must accept or reject elements of Proudhon's thought—and, ultimately, the "New Theory" of property does not seem to have many supporters at all—but that stage comes after we establish what that thought really was. The "gift economy of property" is precisely neo-Proudhonian, because it begins with a rejection of the "New Theory" as the most desirable solution to the problems posed by Proudhon's work on property. But it is neo-Proudhonian, because its inspirations are all the result of wrestling with the difficulties of Proudhon's "contradictions" and antinomies.

Texts are, of course, notoriously open to a range of interpretations, and difficult texts even more so. But one of the most basic principles of interpretation is that the interpreter has to know what sort of text, what sort of expression, they are dealing with, in order to even make a beginning at understanding it. Texts can be haunted by subtle and tenuous influences, like those that may or may not have been inherited by the later texts from The Celebration of Sunday. That sort of question is difficult to deal with, and the pay-offs are equally uncertain, as I suspect my treatment so far may well have demonstrated, but the stakes are nonetheless potentially very high, when it comes to understanding, in general terms, the thought of an author. But many of the interpretive hurdles are much more clearly identified for us, particularly in the works of someone like Proudhon, who was prone to talk about his method.

So the question I was confronted with, in a social networking forum, was:

did proudhon support private property in land? there's "principal function of private property within the political system will be to act as a counterweight to the power of the State, and by so doing to insure the liberty of the individual." then there's "What I cannot accept, regarding land, is that the work put in gives a right to ownership of what has been worked on."

It appears there might indeed be a contradiction. And to the questioner, who is not a student of Proudhon, a contradiction is fairly likely to look like a problem. But is that a reasonable assumption for a more seasoned reader? The solution presented to us in What is Property?, and in a number of McKay's other writings on Proudhon, is actually that there is no logical contradiction, but instead that Proudhon has subtly shifted the meaning of the word "property." The section "On Terminology" presents this explanation:

After 1850, Proudhon started to increasingly use the term “property” to describe the possession he desired. This climaxed in the posthumously published Theory of Property in which he apparently proclaimed his whole-hearted support for “property.”

The only real problem that I can find with it is that it doesn't appear to be true. The familiar 1840 definition of "property" ("simple property") as "the right of use and abuse" is used consistently throughout The Theory of Property, except in the section on the various uses of the term, where, naturally, the definitions are a bit more diverse. It appears twice in the portions of the conclusion of that work that were included in the Appendix. A footnote includes Proudhon's original argument for not calling "possession" by the name of "property," without noting his later argument for the use of the name more broadly, but the fact of the matter seems to be that he remained faithful to his 1840 definition the vast majority of the time, and particularly so in the disputed Theory of Property, where "property" is very specifically related, in several different analyses, to allodium, a particularly strong and unencumbered form of individual domain. If anything, the 1862/5 definition of "simple property" emphasizes even more strongly the absolutist, and potentially objectionable, character of that property. In an earlier section of The Theory of Property, Proudhon wrote: "Property, psychological by its nature, by constitution a matter of Law, and, I will soon add, social by destination, is ABSOLUTE: it cannot not be so." And, ultimately, this was the foundation on which the "New Theory," by which simple, absolute property could become a tool for liberty, would be built. Proudhon had worked himself clear of a potential problem posed by his introduction to the second edition of What is Property? There, he had claimed, or admitted, that by "property" he meant the "sum of its abuses," which potentially took a lot of the wind out of his in/famous phrase, although his analysis made pretty short shrift of the existing forms of simple property anyway. But, arguably, he was being rather more consistent when, at the height of his career, he began to claim that property ["simple property," and perhaps all individual property, to one extent or another] was abusive in sum.

Critically, there is also no shift in the meaning of "property" in the passage cited in the question:

What I cannot accept, regarding land, is that the work put in gives a right to ownership of what has been worked on. [Elizabeth Fraser translation]

More importantly, however, what is in the passage is just a familiar argument from 1840, regarding mechanisms of appropriation. Here's a little context:

Where no one lacks land, where all can find it freely at their convenience, I accept the exclusive right of the first occupant; but I accept it only on a provisional basis. As soon as the conditions are changed, I admit no more than equal division. Otherwise, I would say that there is abuse. I grant that one who has cleared the land has a right to compensation for their work. But what I do not accept, in that which regards the soil, is that the form given [to the land] involves the appropriation of the thing itself [the capital]. And, it is important to point out, the proprietors don't accept that any more than I do. Do they recognize in their tenants a right of property over the land that they have cleared or improved?... [my working translation]

What ought to be clear from the passage is that it is a clarification of potential rules of use and usufructory claims, together with a restatement of the familiar argument against the establishment of simple property in land by means of labor, a model of appropriation that Proudhon consistently opposed. What is not there is any response to the model of appropriation that Proudhon actually proposed in The Theory of Property, which had its justifications elsewhere.

Anyone interested in following the twists and turns of Proudhon's "New Theory" can read my translations, which are a little rough around the edges but sufficiently clear, I think, to present the case. Two other chapters are linked from this blog's side-bar. But there's really no point in doing so if you are not prepared to read the text that you will find, the text that Proudhon wrote—one in which the scandals, dialectical relationships, contradictions, antinomies and refusals of simplism, which had been Proudhon's explicit trademark from 1840 on, are very much in play. It's pointless to start to respond to the suggestion of contradictions in a one-sided fashion, when you're dealing with a writer who had built his career around them. In his 1849 Confessions of a Revolutionary, well within the period where his radicalism is generally least contested, he put in even blunter terms the property-related contradiction he had advanced in 1846's System of Economic Contradictions:

"Property is theft; property is liberty: these two propositions are equally demonstrated and subsist beside one another..."

It seems to me that this sort of statement is much more difficult to incorporate into the "consistent anti-propertarian, with terminological drift" narrative than the claims in 1862/5 that "property is theft," but it might still be very useful, with the right limits and under the right conditions—in the context of the right balance of free forces. It seems to me that the real question for those who resist the interpretation of The Theory of Property that says that, in it, Proudhon was both consistent with his analysis of 1840 and proposed a decidedly positive role for the very same "simple property" he consistently criticized throughout his career, is how to retain any of sense of Proudhon as an important thinker, after, say, about 1842, when he first started talking about solving the problem of property (as "theft") by universalizing it.

Unfortunately, one way to preserve the sense is to present a very one-sided selection from the texts. Ultimately, that's pretty hard to do with The Theory of Property, where "possession," explicitly of the sort "that I referred in my first Memoir," makes the individual the "dependent, bondsman, or vassal" of either a ruler or "the collective." It's not bad, said Proudhon, all things considered,

But is that the last word of civilization, and of right as well? I do not think so; one can conceive something more; the sovereignty of man is not entirely satisfied; liberty and mobility are not great enough.

And the alternative is simple, allodial property. There just doesn't seem to be any ambiguity here, nor any definitional slippage. Readers of Property is Theft! should read the whole of the concluding chapter, with the heart of the argument for the "New Theory" intact. I'm not going to insist anyone accept the theory of 1862/5. After all, I've been very publicly a little underwhelmed by it for some time. But if one wants to say that they are engaging with Proudhon's thought, there is no alternative to facing it head on.

But also, if readers of this blog hope to make sense of "the gift economy of property," or "two-gun mutualism," then they need to encounter the Proudhon whose definitions did not slip much. I have set up my project in the space opened by Proudhon's broader definitions of "property," which, from 1840 through to the end, included at least the possibility of options that would be neither "simple possession," with its threat of vassalage to the collective, or "simple property," by which liberty could be wrested only by pitting the potential for abuse against the potential for abuse. Proudhon's original project of a "synthesis of community and property" is just another more or less empty phrase, if we cannot come to grips with the tensions that were present even in 1840—or, as I have been suggesting, even before.

I have to admit that the particular edit my translation was given leaves a fairly bad taste in my mouth. The only silver lining really is that the excised portions amount to something very close to a summary of the summary. If you're curious about what is really at stake in the debate over The Theory of Property, perhaps you don't need to look any farther than the omitted portions of the conclusion:

___

The constitution of a republic,—permit me at least to use that word in its high juridical sense,—is the sine qua non condition of safety. General Lafayette said one day, in presenting Louis-Philippe, “This is the best of republics;” and the constitutional royalty was defined: “A monarchy surrounded by republican institutions.” The word republic is not then seditious by itself: it responds to the views of science as much as it satisfies desires.

The immediate consequences of allodial property are: 1) administration of the commune by the proprietors, farmers and workers, gathered in council; communal independence and the arrangement of its properties; 2) administration of the province by the provincials: thus decentralization and the germ of federation. The royal function, defined by the constitutional system, is replaced here by the citizen proprietors, having an open eye on public affairs: nothing is in need of mediation.

Feudal property will never engender a republic; and similarly a republic which would allow allodium to sink into fief, which would return to slavic communism from property, will not remain; it will become an autocracy.

Likewise, true property will not engender a monarchy; a monarchy will not engender true property. If the opposite was achieved, if an agglomeration of proprietors elected a head, by that same they would abdicate their share of sovereignty, and sooner or later the proprietary principle would be altered by their hands; or if a monarchy created proprietors, it would implicitly abdicate, it would demolish itself, unless it transformed itself voluntarily into a constitutional royalty, more nominal than effective, representing the proprietors. We have seen this in France, when, under Louis-Philippe, liberals and republicans made war on parochialism, l’esprit de clocher. The cause of royalty was served.

In this way, all of my previous criticisms, all the egalitarian conclusions that I have deduced from them, receive a brilliant confirmation.

The principle of property is ultra-legal, extra-legal, absolutist, and egoist by nature, to the point of iniquity: it must be this way.

It has for counter-weight the reason of the State, which is absolutist, ultra-legal, illiberal, and governmental, to the point of oppression: it must be this way.

This is how, in the projections of universal reason, the principle of egoism, usurper by nature, without integrity, becomes an instrument of justice and of order, to the point that property and right are inseparable ideas and nearly synonyms. Property is egoism idealized, consecrated, invested with a political and juridical function.

It must be this way: because right is never better observed than when it finds a defender in selfishness and in the coalition of egoisms. Liberty will never be defended against power, if it does not have at its disposal a means of defense, if it does not have its impregnable fortress.

The reader must take care not to see in this antagonism, these oppositions, these equilibrations, a simple witticism, a jeu d’esprit. I know that a simplistic theory, like communism or the absolutism of the State, is easier to comprehend than the study of the antinomies. But the fault is not in me, a simple observer and seeker of series. I hear certain reformers say: Let us suppose all of the complications of authority, liberty, possession, competition, monopoly, tax, balance of trade, public services; let us create a uniform plan of society, and all will be simplified and resolved. They reason like the doctor who said: With its diverse elements,—bone, muscles, tendons, nerves, viscera, arterial and venous blood, gastic and pancreatic fluids, chyle, lachrymal and synovial humors, gas, liquids and solids,—the body is ungovernable. Let us reduce it to a single, solid, resilient matter, bone for example; hygiene and therapy will become child’s play.—So be it, only society cannot ossify any more than the human body. Our social system is complicated, much more than one would have thought. If, today, we have acquired all the data, it needs to be coordinated, synthesized according to its own laws. There, a thought exposes itself, an intimate collective life that develops apart from the laws of geometry and mechanics; that is reluctant to assimilate to the rapid, uniform, infallible movement of a crystallization; of which the ordinary, syllogistic, fatalist, unitary logic is incapable of taking account, but which is explained marvelously with the aid of a larger philosophy, admitting in a system the plurality of principles, the struggle of elements, the opposition of contraries and the synthesis of all the indefinables and absolutes.

Now, as we know that there are degrees in intelligence as well as in force; degrees in memory, reflection, idealization, the faculty of invention; degrees in love and in thought; degrees of sensibility; degrees of self or of consciousness; as it is impossible to say where that which we call the soul begins and where it ends, why refuse to admit to us that the social principles,—so well linked, so well thought out, and in which are found so much reason, foresight, feeling, passion, and justice,—are the sign of a true life, of a higher thought, of a reason constituted differently from our own.

Why, if it is thus, won’t we see in these facts the achievement of the direct creation of society by itself, resulting from the simple connection of the elements and of the play of forces which constitute society?

We have surprised a logic apart, maxims which are not those of our individual reason, although that reason comes, by the study of society, to discover them and to make them its own. There is then a difference between individual reason and collective reason.

We have been able to observe again, thanks to property and its accompaniments, another phenomenon, another law, the one of free forces, going and returning, indefinite approximations, latitude of action and of reaction, elasticity of nature, harmony extended, which is the distinctive character of life, of liberty, and of imagination. Property and government are to spontaneous creations of a law of immanence which denies itself to the idea of an foreign initiation, in which case each human group would need a special initiator.

This understood, we will remark that the general laws of history are the same as those of social organization. To make the history of property among a people is to tell how it has gone through the crises of its political formation, how it has produced its powers and its organs, equalized its forces, regulated its interests, endowed its citizens; how it has lived, and how it has died. Property is the most fundamental principle by the aid of which one may explain the revolutions of history. It has not yet existed in the conditions where theory places it; no nation has ever been up to that institution, but it positively governs history, although absent, and it hastens the nations to recognize it, punishing the traitor.

The Roman law had recognized it only in an incomplete manner, unilaterally. It had well defined the sovereignty of the citizen on the land due to him; it had not recognized the role and defined the right of the State. Roman property is property independent of the social contract, absolute, without solidarity or reciprocity, prior to and also superior to the public right, egoist, vicious, sinful, and thus justly condemned by the Church. The Republic and the Empire have crumbled, the one atop the other, since the patriciate had only wanted property for itself alone; because the victorious plebe has not known how to acquire it, to put it to work, and to consolidate it; and because slavery, the colonat spoiled everything. For the rest, it is by allodial property that all the aristocracies and all despotism have been defeated, from the end of the western empire up to today. Allodial property, abandoned by the nobility to the communes and to roture, stifled the lordly power, and, in 1789, gobbled up the fiefs;—it is the same principle which, after having brought about the usurpation of the Polish nobility, simple usufructaries in the beginning, turned against it and cause it to lose the nationality; which, in 1846, has brought about the massacres of Gallacia.

It is against the allodial principle that England stiffened itself, preferring, following the example of the Roman patricians, to throw the world to its workers [“jeter la monde en pâture, as one would throw food to hungry animals] than to allow the division and mobilization of the soil, and to equalize property.

The principle of synthetic, allodial or equal property, would have progressively conducted the France of ‘89 to an egalitarain Republic, without or without dynasty: the dynastic principle having to be subordinated in France as it is in England, but following another system. There was a moment of hope, in 1830. Sadly, the spirits predisposed to English ideas did not grasp the profound difference which must distinguish the French Constitution, based on allodium, and the English constitution, based on fief. It was Sieyès, one of the most profound of our politicians, who spread the error.

An electoral census was then established, of large and small colleges: these supposed large and small property holdings; imperceptibly, while [possession of] the soil eroded dramatically among the lower class, it was gathered anew, and large property reformed itself with the aid of industrial capital; feudalism,—financial, manufacturing, transport, mining, Judaic,—followed; so that today France no longer knows itself; some say that the constitutional government, imported from England, was not made for it; a small number, who affirm the Republic and desire only a Chamber, do not themselves know the reason for their desire, or the constitutive principles of the government of the Revolution.

Property has undergone numerous eclipses in history, under the Romans, among the barbarians, in modern times and in our own day. We find the causes of those lapses in ignorance, incompetence, and especially in the indignity of the proprietors. In Rome, the avarice of the nobles, their blind resistance to the legitimate complaints of the people, the decline of the plebians, preferring to culture the brigandage of armies, military pillage, and the caesarean grants, made a clean slate, along with property, of law, liberties, and nationality. Feudal oppression, in the Middle Ages, expelled all the small proprietors from allodium to fief. Property, eclipsed for more than a thousand years, reappeared with the French Revolution. Its ascendant period stopped at the end of the reign of Louis Philippe; since then, it is in decline: indignity.

The mass of the proprietors are disgraceful, especially in the countryside. The Revolution, in selling the goods of the Church and of émigrés, has created a new class of proprietors; it has believed them to be interested in liberty. Not at all: what has interested this class is that the émigrés and the Bourbons do not return, and that is all. To that end, the beneficiaries have imagined nothing better than to given themselves a master, Napoleon. And when, exercising clemency, he authorized the émigrés to return, they made it a crime: they would never have thought them far enough away.

Property, created by the Revolution, no longer thinks of itself as a political institution, counter-balancing the State, as a guarantee of liberty and good administration; it considers itself, by force of habit, as privilege, enjoyment, as a new aristocracy, allied to the poor by the division of employments, consequently of taxes, and it is interested in that way in the exploitation of the masses. It has only to think of its prey. The chaos is profound and it is not clear which particular system to accuse. The legislature of ‘89 lacked foresight; the new proprietors, purchasers of national goods, have lacked character and public spirit, in saying to Napoleon I: Reign and govern, provided that we enjoy. Under the Restoration, there was an instinct of reform; the bourgeoisie passed into the opposition, which is its place; it made an antithesis to the State; but this was accidental: some saw in the Bourbons the princes of the ancien regime; some made war for the maintenance of sales; and when the Revolution of July had changed the dynasty, property devoted itself to power. Their deal was soon concluded: the bourgeoisie, through its deputies, consented to the tax, nine-tenths of which returned to them by employment. It had created corruption in a system, and dishonored property by agiotage; it wanted to join the benefits of the bank to those of rent; it had preferred the stipends of the state, the gains of traffic and of the stock market to production and to commerce; it is the serf of the big companies.

A key point that must not be forgotten is that the citizen, by the federative pact which confers property to him, brings together two contradictory duties: he must follow, on one side, the law of his interests, and, on the other, he must make sure that, as a member of the social body, his property is not detrimental to public affairs. In short, he is constituted police agent and watcher over himself. That double quality is essential to the constitution of liberty; without it all edifices crumble; it is necessary to return to the principle of police and authority. Where is public morality in that chapter?

We have had a regulation of the baker’s shop. Now, it would have been useless if the social body had been organized in such a manner that the making of bread, the sale of wheat, was made truthful and upright, which has not taken place and will not take place so long as our morals are not renewed. Anyway, regulation has never had any power against the pact of famine, as real today as before ‘89. We have regulated the butcher’s shop, which sells cadavers for fresh meat, and dogs for beef; regulation of the markets: weights and measures, quality and quantity. Vegetables, fruits, poultry, fish, game, butter, dairy,—all is defective, all is over-priced. There is not a remedy in suppression, so long as public consciousness is not renewed, so long as, by that regeneration, the citizen producer does not become his own strict supervisor. Can he do that, yes or no? Can property become holy? Is the condemnation, which the Gospel has placed on it, indelible? In the first case, we can be free; in the second, we have resigned ourselves; we are fatally and always under the double law of the Empire and the Church, and all of our displays of liberalism are pure hypocrisy and increase of misery.

All things considered, it is a question of knowing if the French nation is capable today of supplying true proprietors. What is certain is that property is to be regenerated among us. The element of that regeneration is, along with the moral regeneration of which we have just spoken, equilibration.

[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]

2012 translation plans / an anarchist-communist children's book from 1901

2012-01-01T00:35:00.001-08:00

I'm in the process of working out my 2012 plan of action, including which works I'm going to concentrate of translating. I'm collaborating with a colleague on some of Charles Fourier's more entertaining writings, and will be serializing The Exploits of Ravachol in the "Gallery of Rogues," but what I generally find is that I can only give one translation project so much attention in a given day or week, before the work gets dull and, more importantly, I don't get a chance to process and internalize what I've learned from translating a given set of passages. If some of my translations have had a bit of a distracted air about them, it's because this business of translating and studying texts at the same time is a complicated dance. Those who have muddled through some of my more tentative productions may be pleased to know that all the early translations which have not been revised are in the process of revision, and should be available in fairly finished form soon. In any event, one of the things I've found, aside from the fact that some authorial voices take a lot of time to learn, is that I do better work if I putter away at three or four translations at once, giving each a couple of hours in a day, but not every day. So the big question has been what project I focus on in 2012, once a couple of nearly completed works, like The Celebration of Sunday, are done. My thought has been that Emile Armand's Individualist Anarchist Initiation and Proudhon's The Creation of Order in Humanity are the major works that have most to contribute to my ongoing research, and my thought was to start right in on those with the new year's beginning. But a little more thought made me reconsider. Arguably, the most important event of my year as publisher, translator and such is the Bay Area Anarchist Book Fair, and it probably doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to be focused on year-long projects, like those two major works, until after the 2012 fair. So I've given myself permission to push back those genuinely deserving projects and work on some shorter-term goals: the completion of the second issue of Bellegarrigue's Anarchy: A Journal of Order, work on a collection of the works of Joseph Déjacque, including The Humanisphere, The Revolutionary Question and a number of other articles from Le Libertaire, and an odd 1901 children's book, by the anarchist communist Jean Grave, The Adventures of Nono. I had actually made a start at translation Nono back in April of last year, and posted most of the first chapter for friends, but didn't get any response. But it came up in a conversation online this weekend, and the response was considerably more enthusiastic. So I guess I'll push forward, and hope to have something complete to share around the time of the book fair. For now, here's the first chapter, and a bit of the second....

THE ADVENTURES OF NONO

by JEAN GRAVE

DESIRE

Nono is a little boy, nine years old, intelligent, noisy, but not a bad devil. Like all children, he certainly has some moments of high spirits and turbulence when he enrages his parents; some instants when his little, rapidly growing, pours itself out in leaps and cries of joy, not always choosing the favorable moment to give them free rein, expending his energies in mischief, without concerning himself whether his parents are in a mood to bear it.

But what spoils a bit his natural goodness, is a persistent stubbornness that he has no means to correct. Obstinate, not like a mule, not like two goats, but rather like ten thousand hogs.

When has once got it in his head that he does not want to do something, that’s the end of it; there is no longer any means of making him do it: reprimands, blows, arguments, sweet words, promises, nothing can move him. By himself, he recognizes that it is wrong, especially when he has been made to understand that if he cannot be agreeable to other, the others will do nothing to please him.

I do not mean that Nono was beaten; that is a means that parents use often enough against stubborn children; for it is easier to give a slap than a reason, and too often parents have recourse to that means. If they were obliged to give the reason for their orders, they would be forced to admit that they have none, other than their simple caprice, and no other right than being the strongest. When one is in a bad mood, it is a relief to be able to take it out on someone who can’t respond.

But Nono’s parents, if not entirely immune to this failing, if, at times, they have had a somewhat ready hand, they have not, however, abused too much this means of reprimand, and have sometimes gone to the trouble to reason with the dogged little one, making him understand that we cannot reasonably expect people to be kind to us only on the condition that we are the same to them in this regard.

Nono recognized that he was wrong to persist in its refusal, but he considered it a point of honor not to go back on what he had said — especially when it was a refusal to accomplish a thing that someone had asked him to do. — For him to return to better feelings, it was best to leave him to sulk in his corner, and wait for reflection to lead to more sociable sentiments.

If parents are, often enough, in a bad mood, children, on their side, also have their disagreeable moments. Among parents, household cares, worries about work; in the workshop, the boss has been unjust, we have not been able to say bluntly to him what we think, we return to the house in a bad mood; and it is the wife and kids who are on the receiving end.

When they are in this unfortunate state of mind, sometimes parents, without realizing it, give their orders in a very imperative tone. Nono is often hurt by this tone, even when he is most disposed to do what they ask him; then he balks, but he obeys.

Very often, too, when he does not always understand the necessity of an order, — after all, at nine years old, we cannot know as much as our parents, — a word of explanation would be enough, but the parents are too used to believing that children should obey without argument, and because, very often, they don’t know how to make themselves understood, they imagine that the children have no understanding, so they do not take the trouble to explain. “A child should obey his parents without argument,” and that dispenses with all explanation.

Also, there many opportunities to scolding and friction, as you see.

Many books have been written to teach children that they should be wise, obedient; but, sadly, it is parents who have written them, and we have forgotten to recommend to parents that they only ask children things within reach of their age and their reason; it happens that most fathers and mothers do not know their job as parents at all.

Let us hope that a few can be written to teach them to be reasonable with regard to their children. Perhaps one of the children who read me at this moment will remember, when he grows up, the things that seemed most unjust to him in the conduct of his parents toward him, and he will sit himself down to write that book; unless he finds it better to point them out in succession. But in that case, I am not very certain that he would not be more prudent to try to make a story of it. The least that he could do, would be to treat as cheeky, a heartless child who dares criticize the conduct of his parents. The story would be much more amusing to write than the stupidities that we are given as compositions at school, the parents would be rather amused by it; and if they were not too stupid, they would perhaps grasp the lesson without hitting the ceiling.

From the child’s side, it is another story: it is very hard to leave the book one holds to pour to go in search of four cents worth of butter or a quart of potatoes; just as you get to the most interesting passage: at the moment when the heroes of the book come to be taken by brigands, or at the point of being shipwrecked; one does not want to abandon them is such a critical position. Or else one is playing an exciting game of hide and seek with one’s friends; mother is very unwelcome when she disturbs you, to send you off for two cents worth of salt, or to make you come in to wash the crockery. Also, it happened that Nono did not always promptly execute the orders received, and made them repeat them many times, before performing them, not without murmuring and dragging his feet heavily on the ground as a sign of his discontent. Alas! no one is perfect, and good little children — like parents without flaws — exist only in the books one makes them read to teach them how to be well-behaved.

It also happened sometimes, that our young hero would fight with his big brother Alexandre — who was generally called Titi — and with his sister Cendrine. His brother Titi was much older than him, but scarcely more reasonably; so, sometimes they would argue like cats and dogs.

Cendrine was only one year older than him; she was also teasing at times. But as Nono was the youngest, his sister was required to yield to the fancies of monsieur; a necessity of which she was not particularly convinced, and to which she was even less inclined to submit.

One begins by squabbling a bit; one snatches the toys, and then, my faith! fists enter the game, until a few slaps, impartially distributed, come to make peace between the belligerents.

There was also another little brother, Paulo, but he was so young, barely a year old, that it was hardly possible to quarrel with him, and one was, on the contrary, very glad to have him, for he never finished his porridge or cake; with him there were always some crumbs to catch.

But, all told, Nono’s parents loved their children; their faults reflected prejudices, habits that they had found already established, that they picked up with the education they had been given, and not from their character, which was instead inclined to kindness.

Nono, if he was headstrong, was not a real devil, he loved his parents and, — especially when he had something to ask of them — knows to find some caresses which never fail to have their effect and have, more than once, made his father chuckle inside, and then, to make an impression, he frowns.

Besides the dreadful quarter-hours of which we have spoken, there are plenty of good moments in the house, and the squalls are soon forgotten, for nobody bears all ill will.

At the moment when we meet the family, Nono has just shown exemplary good behavior. — He had long desired that his father to buy him a book of stories, with good pictures! — his marks for the school-week are excellent; he has acquitted himself promptly, and without complaint, — inwardly only, so as not to lose the habit — of the errands that he has bee asked to do; also, his father has promised to go with him next day — since it will be Sunday — and take him to visit the shops, where he can choose an object that pleases him. — Not too expensive, for Nono’s parents are workers, and the rich spend much of their money trivially, but the workers almost never have more to spend than their children require. But this time his father wants to do things up, and he promises to spend at least forty cents on Nono!

And Nono, with a heart full of hope, went to be promising himself mountains and marvel for tomorrow. As his mother tucked him into bed:

— Tell me, mother, how much would it cost, a storybook, like the one that Charles lent me, with fine pictures?

The question is perhaps not in perfect in syntax, but as a child of nine is not expected to speak as well as an academician, if you don’t mind, we will write as our hero speaks.

— Father, said his mother, you boy wants to know how much it will cost for a storybook, with nice colored images?

— I don’t know. Three or four francs, at least.

— Mother, said Nono, throwing his arms around her neck, and pulling her close to kiss her, I have five cents in my piggy-bank, I will give them to Father to buy me one, if you will add what I lack. Try to convince Father?

— You know how to ask nicely, but will you always be so well-behaved?

— I promise, said the little rascal, and redoubled his kissing.

— You promise, you promise, you are not stingy with promises, but you do not always keep them, your promises!

— I will mother, I will be good, I will do my errands.

— Go on, sleep! We will do this tomorrow. I will ask your father.”

And thereupon, two big kisses on the eyes, with a recommendation not to wiggle too much, so as not to throw off the bedclothes.

And Nono, his nose stuffed under the covers, is thinking about all the books he has seen, asking himself which he should prefer. He wants one with engravings, beautiful colored pictures. His imagination retraces a whole ocean of volumes, among which he does not know where his preference should lie.

His reverie little by little becomes lively and animated: Donkeyskin, Don Quixote, Ali Baba, Red Riding Hood, and The Blue Bird dance a frenzied saraband around him. It is in the midst of a multitude of fairies, genii, elves, enchanters, gnomes, goblins, fabulous birds, and fantastic flowers that he falls asleep, losing the sense of reality.

His mother is exposed to the fury of the fairy Carabosse; his father held prisoner by the enchanter Abracadabra and forced to make, for Nono, a book in which the character, in the illustrations, speak and move. His sister Cendrine his brother Titi are changed into small pink pigs by the fairy Melusine, and he, Nono, is charged with guarding them, to lead them to the acorns and prevent them from escaping or be changed himself into a bat.

FIRST ADVENTURES

When Nono awoke, it was broad daylight. But, surprisingly, instead of being in his bed he was lying on a lawn thick, filled with flowers raising their petals over the green grass.

The sun lit up that place, making the floral colors gleam, shimmering off the variegated wings of the countless insects that fluttering in its golden rays, or bustling among the blades of grass. The sky, of a deep blue, was cloudless.

Nono had risen on his elbow, and, eyes wide with astonishment, he looked around him, not remembering ever having visited this place.

...

Joseph Déjacque, on "Exchange"

2011-12-30T00:34:00.000-08:00

EXCHANGE

Joseph Déjacque

(from Le Libertaire, No. 6, September 21, 1858)

“Be then frankly an entire anarchist and not a quarter anarchist, an eighth anarchist, or one-sixteenth anarchist, as one is a one-fourth, one-eighth or one-sixteenth partner in trade. Go beyond the abolition of contract to the abolition not only of the sword and of capital, but also of property and of authority in all its forms. Then you will have arrived at the anarchist community; that is to say, the social state where each one is free to produce or consume according to his will or his fancy without controlling, or being controlled by any other person whatever; where the balance of production and consumption is established naturally, no longer by the restrictive laws and arbitrary force of others, but in the free exercise of industry prompted by the needs and desires of each individual. The sea of humanity needs no dikes. Give its tides full sweep and each day they will find their level.”

(De l’Etre-Humain, Lettre à P.J. Proudhon.)

Exchange, like all things, can be considered from three perspectives: the past, the present, and the future.

In the past, those who would gather the scattered products of industry and agriculture in a bazaar, the merchants who would spread under a portico what they called their merchandise, would engage thus, to a certain degree, in exchange. Today, we call this commerce, which is to say parasitism, and we have reason to do so. For if, relative to the state of places and minds, they had been of some use in their time, in our own time those who keep shops have not the same excuses to for continuing to live at the expense of the producers and consumers. The trader is purely and simply a legal thief. In a district of the city, for example, where just one bazaar would be sufficient, and where a few hundred employees could easily provide the service, there exist perhaps a thousand shops and six, or even ten thousand owners or clerks. To the extent that there are more intermediaries than those hundreds strictly necessary to meet the needs of exchange, to that extent there are parasites, thieves. And now, if we consider how much labor these shops have cost, how much manpower and materials have thus been diverted from their true destination, let us judge the quantity of production squandered daily to satisfy the appetites of that rapacious and pedantic bourgeoisie, a caste of monopolists and mercenaries destined by collegiate education and paternal tradition for the noble mission of salesman, civil service brats, practiced from infancy in the handling of coins, raised with a love of plunder. Commerce is not debatable: it is organized pillage; it legally robs both those who produce and those who consume.

The shopkeeper—at wholesale, wholesale to the public, or retail—is not the only intermediary between the producer and consumer. That triple usury only fastens itself to their flanks in the last instance.

The producer who does not have in their possession the instruments of labor (and that is the majority, if not the totality), that producer is also exploited by another sort of parasite—the industrialist—the head of the factory and his clerical staff, to say nothing of the banker and his assistants, fed by the manufacturer, and consequently fed by the worker, since nothing productive is done except by the worker’s hands, and since everything done by those hands passes under control of the owner. In exchange for the instrument of labor the workers delivers their labor to the master and receive a wage from him; they give the master an apple to eat, so that the master will leave them the seeds. What a curious compensation! What a laughable exchange! It is the same for the peasant with regard to the landlord, for the proletarian with regard to the proprietor. The proletarians have built the house; the masons, carpenters, roofers, joiners, locksmiths, painters, to say nothing of the quarry-workers, lumberjacks, miners, foundry workers and smiths, potters and glass-blowers, all those who work the earth, the sand and stone, the wood and iron have labored there; it is they who have made the house, from the foundations to the roof’s peak. Well! To live there, even in the attic, they still must pay an odious, quarterly tribute, house-rent, to the fortunate lazy-bones who holds the property. All these proprietors, these landlords, these factory bosses and their clerical personnel, their superiors, the bankers, and the budgetary bureaucracies, all those are so many swarms of locusts who swoop down on the harvest of the towns and the countryside, and devour the wheat while it is green, the bread before it is cooked. Thieves! Thieves! Thieves!

And yet all these vampires are within the law, these rogues are honest people? Will you rely then on official qualifications!

Such is exchange, as the reactionaries understand it, otherwise known as commerce, or exploitation, or theft. It is exchange in civilization, in its barbarity, in its primitive savagery, exchange in its original arbitrariness, exchange by divine right, commerce in its absolute despotism.

At the present time,—not in fact, since commerce, exploitation, and theft always have legal force, but as an idea,—exchange is understood differently.

The uselessness of the owner and shopkeeper once recognized, we say to ourselves: everything that is useless is dangerous, and what is dangerous should be suppressed; the intermediary must disappear. Parasitism, like the barren fig tree, is condemned by the masses to be cast in the revolutionary inferno to be destroyed. “That which does not produce is unworthy of life.” The idea of justice, growing more prominent in public opinion, has expressed exchange thus: the right to the possession of the instruments of labor, that is, to free credit; and the right to the possession of the fruits of their labor, that is the democratization of property, universal and direct commerce,—a formula for social transition which in the political order corresponds to this: the right to the instruments of government, that is, democratization of government, universal and direct legislation.

Commerce and government thus understood,—commerce, as direct exchange, and government, as direct legislation—that transitory organization which preserves the tradition of the past, while leaving speech to the initiation of the future, as soon as we could put it into application, that is, as soon as we want it, the society that declines today in misery and slavery, between some bundles of sticks and some piles of coins, that society will immediately enter into an ascending phase of wealth and liberty. The mark of authoritarian prejudice, the stain of propertarianism and legalism will little by little wipe clean the human brain; intellectual and moral exercise will develop the anarchist sentiment in the individual; industrial and legislative exercise will develop in society the sentiment of social community, and of individual liberty.

In beginning this article, I only wanted to speak of exchange, and I have been led to also speak of government. It was the least that I could do. Indeed, if contract is the law between the laborers, law is the contract between the people. A national or departmental or communal administration should no more make laws than an agricultural or industrial administration should make contracts. It is the business of all the laborers in the group to contract among themselves and with others, as legislation is a matter for all the inhabitants of a commune or nation. The administration, whether agrico-industrial, or communal, or national, does not command, but obeys. The administration is the delegate; the group of laborers or inhabitants is the master—and doesn’t the master always have the right to stop the wages and immediately dismiss the agent who fulfills their functions poorly?

Without doubt, conventional right, contract and law, even universally and directly exercised, is not natural right, or justice. It is a compromise between anarchy and authority, and everything that is not completely just is injustice. Direct exchange, that reform introduced into popular thought by Proudhon, is still a halfway measure; it is an addition of capacities, the diversification of the commercial census, but it is not only the overthrow of absolute commerce that we require, it is also the overthrow of constitutional or contractual commerce; it is, with regard to productive and consumptive circulation, the declaration of the individual rights of the human being, and the proclamation of the commonwealth, the res publica, that is, the freedom of production and consumption accorded to every individual with regard to the unity and universality of capital.

Nonetheless, a change similar to that which would produce direct-exchange would be a great social improvement, towards which all laborers should strive today. All their efforts should be directed towards this point, and we will arrive there before long, I hope. But in the end, that point is not the goal, that progress is not justice. It is only a stage on the best route, a step made in the direction of justice. We can relax and refresh ourselves there for a moment; but it would be dangerous to sleep there. In revolution it is necessary to double or triple the stages; we must gain ground on the enemy, if we want to escape their pursuit and instead track them down. The point farthest from the past, passing through the present, that is the point that we must try to reach. Abandoning commerce to enter into direct-exchange, we must push all the way to natural-exchange, the negation of property; moving from governmental authority to direct legislation, we must push all the way to anarchy, the negation of legalism.

By natural exchange I mean the unlimited liberty of all production and all consumption; the abolition of every sign of property, whether agricultural, industrial, artistic or scientific; the destruction of all individual monopolization of the products of labor; the demonarchization and demonetization of manual and intellectual capital, as well as instrumental, commercial and monumental capital. Every individual capital is usurious. It is a hindrance to circulation; and everything that hinders circulation hinders production and consumption. All of that is to be destroyed, and the representative sign as well: it accounts for the arbitrariness in exchange, as well as in government.

In mechanics, we almost always proceed from the simple to the composite, and then from the composite to the simple. One man discovers the lever, a simple instrument, endowed with a certain power. Others come who take hold of it, and in their turn make of it a more complicated device. They add wheels and gears, and they increase its power tenfold. However, continual frictions occur which are detrimental to the operation of this mechanism. One overloads it with other wheels and gears; one obtains results that appear more satisfactory, but always very imperfect, and above all small in relation to the care and labors spent on the improvement. Then there comes another engineer, free from the spirit of routine and having in his head the idea for a new motor; experiment has shown to him that an old mechanism overloaded with complications will not be repaired; that it must be replaced by simplifying it; and having cast down this malformed thing,—which drags along its blade on the edge of a ditch whose flow, exhausted at its source, no longer feeds it sufficiently,—he reconstructs on entirely new plans a considerably simplified machine, driven by steam or electricity, which functions this time without loss of force and produces a hundred times what was produced by the old apparatus.

It is the same for the social organism. Primitive commerce has been the lever, the simple and artless instrument of circulation; production and consumption have received the beginning of activity. Today, an old mechanism which disgraces progress, it has, between its gears of metal, ground up enough (and more) of the laborers, of whose sweat and blood and tears it is the expression. Innumerable modifications, each more complicated and more monstrous than the others, have been supplied; and still it isn’t worth a thousandth part of what it has cost the proletarian. This is ruinous for the producer as well as for the consumer.

Direct-exchange, the possession by the laborer of the products of his labor, will certainly change the face of things and accelerate in considerable proportion the movement of production and consumption, and thus it will increase the amount of individual and social well-being. But numberless upsets will still take place, and circulation will not always be free, and without the liberty of circulation there is no liberty of production, no liberty of consumption.

Once more there will be progress, but not justice. An evolution is not a revolution.

First, in principle, should the laborers have the produce of their labor?

I do not hesitate to say: No! although I know that a multitude of workers will cry out.

Look, proletarians, cry out, shout as much as you like, but then listen to me:

No, it is not the product of their labors that the workers have a right to: it is the satisfaction of their needs, whatever the nature of their needs.

To have the possession of the product of our labor is not to have possession of that which is proper to us, it is to have property in a product made by our hands, and which could be proper to others and not to us. And isn’t all property theft?

For example, suppose there is a tailor, or a cobbler. He has produced several garments or several pairs of shoes. He cannot consume them all at once. Perhaps, moreover, they are not in his size or to his taste. Obviously he has only made them because it is his occupation to do so, and with an eye to exchanging them for other products for which he feels the need; and so it is with all the workers. Those garments or shoes are thus not his possessions, as he has no personal use for them; but they are property, a value that he hoards and which he can dispose of at his own good pleasure, that he can destroy if it pleases him, and which he can at least use or misuse as he wishes; it is, in any case, a weapon for attacking the property of others, in that struggle of divided and antagonistic interests where each is delivered up to all the chances and all the hazards of war.

What’s more, is this laborer well justified, in terms of right and justice, in declaring himself the sole producer of the labor accomplished by his hands? Has he created something from nothing? Is he omnipotent? Does he possess the manual and intellectual learning of all eternity? Is his art and craft innate to him? Did the worker come fully equipped from his mother’s womb? Is he a self-made man, the son of his own works? Isn’t he in part the work of his forebears, and the work of his contemporaries? All those who have shown him how to handle the needle and the scissors, the knife and awl, who have initiated him from apprenticeship to apprenticeship, to the degree of skill that he has attained, don’t all these have some right to a part of his product? Haven’t the successive innovations of previous generations also played some part in his production? Does he owe nothing to the present generation? Does he owe nothing to future generations? Is it justice to combine thus in his hands the titles of all these accumulated labors, and to appropriate their profits exclusively to him?

If one admits the principle of property in the product for the laborer (and, make no mistake, it really is a property, and not a possession, as I have just demonstrated), property becomes, it is true, more accessible to each, without being for that better assured to all. Property is inequality, and inequality is privilege; it is servitude. As any product will be more or less in demand, its producer will be more or less harmed, more or less profited. The property of one can only increase to the detriment of the property of the other, property necessitates exploiters and exploited. With the property of the product of labor, property democratized, there will no longer be the exploitation of the great number by the smallest minority, as with property of labor by capital, property monarchized; but there will still be exploitation of the smaller number by the larger. That will always be iniquity, divided interests, hostile competition, with disasters for some and success for the others. Without doubt these reversals and triumphs will not be at all comparable to the miseries and scandalous fortunes which insult social progress in our time. However, the heart of humanity will still be torn by fratricidal struggles which, for being less terrible, will not be less detrimental to individual well-being, to well-being in general.

Property is not only inequality, it is also immorality. Some producer favored with a lucrative specialty could, in their prosperity, could use their daily earnings as an excuse to distract from their work a woman (if he is a man), or a man (if she is a woman), and infect them with the virus of idleness, the contagious germ of physical and moral degradation, the result of prostitution. All the vices, all the depravations, all the pestilential exhalations are contained in that substantive hieroglyphic, a case that is only a coffin, a mummy from ancient civilizations, which has arrived in our time carried by the tides of commerce, by centuries of usury,—property!

Thus let us accept direct-exchange, like direct legislation, only conditionally, as an instrument of transition, as a link between the past and the future. It is a question to present, an operation to accomplish; but let that operation be like the welding of a transpresent cable with one end touching the continent of the old abuses, but whose other end unwinds towards a new world, the world of free harmony.

Liberty is Liberty: let us be its prophets, all of us who are visionaries. On the day when we will understand that the social organism must not be modified by overloading it with complications, but by simplifying it; the day when it will no longer be a question of demolishing on thing in order to replace it by its fellow, by denominating and multiplying it, on that day we will have destroyed, from top to bottom, the old authoritarian and propertarian mechanism, and recognized the insufficiency and harmfulness of individual contract as well as the social contract. Natural government and natural exchange,—natural government, which is the government of individuals by individuals, of themselves by themselves, universal individualism, the human self [moi-humain] moving freely in the humanitary whole [tout-humanité]; and natural exchange, which is individuals exchanging of themselves with themselves, being at once producers and consumers, co-workers and co-inheritors of social capital, human liberty, infinitely divisible liberty, in the community of goods, in indivisible property. On that day, I say, of natural government and natural exchange, an organism driven by attraction and solidarity will rise up, majestic and beneficent, in the heart of regenerated humanity. And authoritarian and propertarian government, authoritarian and propertarian exchange, machineries overburdened with intermediaries and representative signs, will collapse, solitary and abandoned, in the dried-up course of the flood of ancient arbitrariness.

So let all these Babylonian institutions perish quickly, with their unnatural wheels and gears, and on their ruins let the universal and fraternal solidarization of individual interests, society according to nature, be enthroned forever!

People of the present, it is necessary to choose. Not only is it immoral and cowardly to remain neutral, it is degrading, but still there is peril. It is absolutely necessary to takes sides for or against the two great, exclusive principles that the world debates. Your salvation is at stake. Either progress or devolution! Autocracy or anarchy!—For a radically flawed society, radical solutions are required: for large evils, grand remedies!

Choose then:

—Property is the negation of liberty.

—Liberty is the negation of property.

—Social slavery and individual property, this is what authority affirms.

—Individual liberty and social property, that is the affirmation of anarchy.

People of progress, martyred by authority, choose anarchy!

[Working translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]

Mother Earth—raw bibliography

2011-12-29T10:51:00.000-08:00

I've posted a listing of bibliographic data for articles in Mother Earth—in "raw" form, as complete as I have been able to make it, given the state of the card catalog data I was working with and the digital files I have been able to double-check that data against. As I mentioned when the data was all entered into the Libertarian Labyrinth wiki archive, this is a project which I would love to pursue—and not just with Mother Earth—assuming people see this sort of work as useful.

I'll update the listings as I can verify and complete them.

Varieties of "theft" and "property"

2011-12-26T19:15:00.000-08:00

It's generally nice to avoid taking complex problems and making them even more complex—but not always. There may be some real advances in clarity to be gained from incorporating our new questions about "theft" into the larger puzzle regarding Proudhon and "property." But we're going to have to proceed cautiously. Let's begin with a sort of catalog of the concepts that may or may not be in play, as we try to unpack Proudhon's infamous phrase, "property is theft," in the contents of his remarks on the commandment, "thou shalt not steal."

THEFT: We have two likely definitions of the term "theft." It may be taken in a fairly conventional sense, to mean misappropriation of already-existing "property."

Alternately, it may mean some broader category of blameworthy resource misuse, involving "holding, turning or putting aside." Perhaps we shouldn't call this "theft" at all, since presumably it is "the concept mistranslated as 'theft' (in the first sense)," except that our most immediate concern is whether or not the "theft" in "property is theft" should be understood according to a narrow definition, presupposing some form of legitimate "property," or more broadly, in a sense that may be antagonistic to all forms of "putting away." We'll think of both as possible definitions of "theft" in this particular context, and I don't think we'll have gone too far wrong.

RESOURCE RELATIONSHIPS THAT ARE NOT THEFT: With the first, narrow sense of "theft," we know that the other key concept presupposed by the definition is, in fact, "property." We may not know the details of what that "property" entails, but we know that we can't very well get to "theft" (of "property") without that other term. (The vaguer our notion of "property," the vaguer, naturally, will be our concept of "theft"—and we know that there is an extremely vague notion of "property" lurking in the background of Proudhon's work. We also know, however, that he seems to have been addressing the phrase "property is theft" to a much more clearly defined variety.)

But if "putting aside" is not blameworthy because there is a previously existing form of legitimate property that is somehow being abused, but because of some other sort of impropriety (and, yes, the two may be hard to separate), we are left to figure out what "not putting aside" is in its positive form, and what is positive about it. If, for instance, "property is theft" because the precondition for any sort of property would be an accumulation or "putting aside" that would violate the broader interpretation of the injunction against "theft," we would be left to determine just what relationship or order is being disrupted by the diversion of resources. The most obvious candidate for an equivalent of "not putting aside" is probably the "community" (communauté) that Proudhon proposes as the first form of sociability, and the thesis to the antithesis of "property," in 1840. That term has unfortunately been translated by Tucker as "communism," leading to misunderstandings and questionable "clarifications" about what Proudhon was objecting to in his criticisms of "community." I think this is a case where we're frequently been too quick to leap to the defense of labels, when a little closer attention to the relevant texts would have made it clear that Proudhon was playing a rather different game. This isn't the place for a thorough treatment of what Proudhon said about "community" in 1840, but it probably is worth noting that he characterized it in one key passage as the "spontaneous movement" of "sociability." If the antithesis of individual "holding, turning or putting aside" is a spontaneous and sociable movement, maybe we at least have the beginnings of a little more convincing thesis/antithesis relationship, a more interesting basis for that "synthesis of community and property" that Proudhon associated with "liberty" most of the ones we have proposed thus far.

PROPERTY: That leaves us with the slipperiest of Proudhon's key-terms: "property." While he was fairly explicit about his definitions at every stage, it's not clear that he was always entirely faithful to his stated definitions, and, even if he was, he made a bit of a tangle of them. As I've already noted, Proudhon acknowledged a broad, vague category of "property," within which the key terms of his 1840 analysis, "simple property" and "simple possession," can be counted as possible varieties. This is the point on which he was probably least consistent, however, since at times he did not want to call "possession" by the name of "property" while at others he did—but during the period when he did not want to do so, he still acknowledged (in the introduction to the second edition of What is Property?) that by "property" he meant "the abuse of property." He never seems to have denied the possibility of a "property" that would not be "theft" for very long at a stretch.

"Simple property," or "domain," was consistently defined as a "matter of right," and specifically of "the right of use and abuse," and it was this "property" about which Proudhon said that "property is theft" in 1840. And it was a particularly strong form of "simple or allodial property" around which Proudhon built his "new theory" of property in The Theory of Property. In that final work, it was precisely the absolute nature of "simple property," its character as "theft," that gave it the power its desirable character, since that theory depended on the use of property to create a space within which the individual would be sheltered from the absolute demands of other proprietors and whatever "state" or state-like institutions might exist in a free society.

"Simple possession," which Proudhon constantly lumps together with "fief," is, on the contrary, a "matter of fact." Proudhon admitted, in The Theory of Property, that he hadn't really defined "possession" in his earlier works, and he made the following remarks on the subject:

Possession, indivisible, untransferable, inalienable, pertains to the sovereign, prince, government, or collectivity, of which the tenant is more or less the dependent, feudataire or vassal. The Germans, before the invasion, the barbarians of the Middle Ages, knew only it; it is the principle of all the Slavic race, applied at this moment by the Emperor Alexander to sixty millions peasants. That possession implies in it the various rights of use, habitation, cultivation, pasture, hunting, and fishing—all the natural rights that Brissot called property according to nature; it is to a possession of that sort, but which I had not defined, that I referred in my first Memoir and in my Contradictions. That form of possession is a great step in civilization; it is better in practice than the absolute domain of the Romans, reproduced in our anarchic property, which is killing itself with fiscal crises and its own excesses. It is certain that the economist can require nothing more: there the worker is rewarded, his fruits guaranteed; all that belongs legitimately to him is protected. The theory of possession, principle of civilization of the Slavic societies, is the most honorable of that race: it makes up for the tardiness of its development and makes inexpiable the crime of the Polish nobility.

But is that the last word of civilization, and of right as well? I do not think so; one can conceive something more; the sovereignty of man is not entirely satisfied; liberty and mobility are not great enough.

(Unfortunately, Proudhon also observed, in What is Property?, that: "Possession is a right; property is against right." This isn't necessarily a contradiction of the other characterizations, but it certainly will complicate matters more than a bit, when the time comes to talk about "right" and "rights.")

The Theory of Property contains a chapter on "The Various Meanings of the Word 'Property'," which clarifies a few points in the earlier works. But most of the difficulties in Proudhon's works on property are not really terminological. Of those that are, most of the thorniest revolve around the ill-defined or undefined "possession."

If we focus, for the moment, on unpacking the possible meanings of the phrase "property is theft," we seem to have most of what we need. There are a range of potential interpretations, the least interesting of them being the one suggested by the redefinition of "property" as "abuse of property," which means that the phrase can be rendered as: The abuse of property is theft. And this in turn breaks down, depending on how we define "theft," into either "the abuse of property is the abuse of property," or, perhaps, "the abuse of property—which is based on "putting aside," which makes it theft—is theft." But if we accept the broader definition of "theft," then we've already essentially defined "simple property" as "theft." Honestly, neither formulation seems to pace quite the punch of the phrase with all of its apparent scandal and paradox intact. But we've probably become a little too attached to the scandal and paradox anyway.

What have we gained from all this complication and exploratory explication? I think we have at least clarified the sorts of questions we need to answer to move beyond the in/famous phrase, and perhaps more successfully pursue the project of that "synthesis of community and property," and to confront the thorny problem of "possession."

Two new translations from "l'Almanach de la Question Sociale" for 1895

2011-12-25T22:00:00.000-08:00

I've been puttering away at translating some short items from one of the radical socialist almanacs available online. This evening, I've posted an article on "Worker Mortality," by Paule Mink, and an obituary of Emile Digeon, the hero of the Narbonne Commune and theorist of "rational anarchism." There are quite a number of other interesting items in the Almanach de la Question Sociale. I'm working on a letter about Louise Michel at the moment [now complete], and I'll probably return to a couple of other items by Paule Mink and Louise Michel as time allows.

"Community" and "Property"

2011-12-23T23:52:00.000-08:00

[Continued from "Proudhon, property and theft, in 1839"...]

There is a lot more that could, and ultimately should, be said about the relationship between Proudhon's The Celebration of Sunday and his later works, but a detailed treatment will have to wait until I can complete and post the ongoing translation. There are lots of interesting issues raised in that early work that seem to resonate with those that came later—and in some cases much later. And the temptation to wander off on one of half a dozen fascinating tangents is something I've been fighting off with only partial success. For the moment, however, there are probably enough questions raised by the "energetic" interpretation of the commandment against theft, which raises the possibility that theft is a precondition for property, rather than the other way around, and puts Proudhon's infamous phrase in a rather different light.

I want to tackle a number of the immediate consequences of this alternate reading is some fairly short posts.

In the fifth chapter of What is Property? Proudhon proposed a "dialectical" reading of the development of "sociability," according to which society developed from "community" (communauté, unfortunately rendered as "communism" in Tucker's translation) to "property" and then, by a sort of "synthesis" of the two previous forms, to "liberty." We know that Proudhon gradually shifted his method from the application of a more-or-less Hegelian, and fairly mechanical dialectic, through an attempt to adapt Fourier's serial method, to a preoccupation with antinomies, which, ultimately, did not resolve themselves. We also know that his concerns remained relatively constant, but we have certainly complicated the project of determining just how consistent by our translation of communauté as "communism," and, at least potentially, by not taking "property" in its most "energetic" sense.

When we look at Proudhon's account of "dialectical" development, with the terms understood as we have generally understood them, the first two terms are obviously opposed approaches, but it isn't at all clear that "community" (or "communism") and "property" have a thesis-antithesis relationship. As critical as the battle between rival schools of property theory has been, it's almost certainly a mistake to proceed as if there is really a dialectic at work. It has, in fact, been commonplace for even anarchists to agree with Marx that Proudhon was a bit of a bungler in his attempt to apply Hegel's approach. But we have to at least consider whether or not it is perhaps Proudhon's critics who have been a little clumsy. If "property is theft," "theft" is a matter of "holding, turning or putting aside," and "community" is, in its primitive form, not much more than the absence of property—a form of society in which there is not "holding, turning or putting aside"—then the thesis-antithesis relationship looks a lot more convincing.

Proudhon, property and theft, in 1839

2011-12-23T00:04:00.000-08:00

Over the last few years, I've spent a lot of time demonstrating how the very suggestive general observations in Proudhon's What is Property? only really emerge as a property theory when we bring them together with developments in his later writings—and how, even then, we are arguably left to pick up his positive project, imagining a property that would not be theft, ourselves. As it turns out, there are also so clarifications to be made by looking back at Proudhon's earlier work, from 1839, The Celebration of Sunday.

The Celebration of Sunday is a peculiar mix of things. It's mostly a celebration of the genius and foresight of Moses, whose legislation is presented as a canny mix of realpolitik and insights so deep that he could only present them in the form of a seed which might germinate and flower under other conditions. For those who know Proudhon as the guy with some harsh things to say about the Jews, his high praise for Israelites may come as a bit of a surprise—and/or his criticisms of the Talmudic tradition may come as a kind of confirmation. I think a bit of both reactions is probably appropriate, and that adding some content to our sense of Proudhon's position can only help. In relation to Proudhon's economic and social theory, we can also see a lot of his early attempts to come to terms with issues like equality, the role of the family, the nature of just authority and government, etc.—and in one passage on the Decalogue's injunction against theft, we get a very interesting first look at Proudhon attempting to relate theft and property. Here is the passage in French:

L'égalité des conditions est conforme à la raison et irréfragable en droit, elle est dans l'esprit du christianisme, elle est le but de la société ; la législation de Moïse prouve que ce but peut être atteint. Ce dogme sublime, si effrayant de nos jours, a sa racine dans les profondeurs les' plus intimes de la conscience, où il se confond avec la notion même du juste et du droit. Tu ne voleras pas, dit le Décalogue, c'est-à-dire, selon l'énergie du terme original lo thignob, tu ne détourneras rien, tu ne mettras rien de côté pour toi (1). L'expression est générique comme l'idée même : elle proscrit non-seulement le vol commis avec violence et par la ruse, l'escroquerie et le brigandage, mais encore toute espèce de gain obtenu sur les autres sans leur plein acquiescement. Elle implique, en un mot, que toute infraction à l'égalité de partage, toute prime arbitrairement demandée, et tyranniquement perçue, soit dans l'échange, soit sur le travail d'autrui, est une violation de la justice communicative, est une concussion.

And the accompanying footnote reads: "Le verbe ganab signifie littéralement mettre de côté, cacher, retenir, détourner." (The verb ganab literally means to put aside, to hide, to hold, to divert." Some of these terms also have more specific applications to commerce. Détourner can mean to swindle, but Proudhon seems to be arguing for a rather literal translation of the terms, one which respects the original "energy" of an injunction which he associates with a basic "equality of conditions and goods." So we might be inclined to translate the passage in this way:

Equality of conditions is in conformity to reason and an irrefutable right, it is in the spirit of Christianity, it is the aim of society; the legislation of demonstrates that it can be attained. That sublime dogma, so frightening in our time, has its roots in the most intimate depths of the conscience, where it is mixed up with the very notion of justice and right. Thou shalt not steal, says the Decalogue, which is to say, with the vigor of the original term, lo thignob, you will divert nothing, you will put nothing aside for yourself. The expression is generic like the idea itself: it forbids not only theft committed with violence and by ruse, fraud and brigandage, but also every sort of gain acquired from others without their full agreement. It implies, in short, that every violation of equality of division, every premium arbitrarily demanded, and tyrannically collected, either in exchange, or from the labor of others, is a violation of communicative justice, it is a misappropriation

There is a fair amount here that requires some clarification, some of which is undoubtedly somewhat different than the positions that Proudhon would adopt later. Approaching the passage on the treacherous ground of probably authorial intent, I'm honestly torn between two readings. The first is comparatively cautious. We have, after all, a catalog of the varieties of robbery in What is Property?

We rob,—1. By murder on the highway; 2. Alone, or in a band; 3. By breaking into buildings, or scaling walls; 4. By abstraction; 5. By fraudulent bankruptcy; 6. By forgery of the handwriting of public officials or private individuals; 7. By manufacture of counterfeit money. ... 8. By cheating; 9. By swindling; 10. By abuse of trust; 11. By games and lotteries. ... 12. By usury. ... 13. By farm-rent, house-rent, and leases of all kinds. ... 14. By commerce, when the profit of the merchant exceeds his legitimate salary. ... 15. By making profit on our product, by accepting sinecures, and by exacting exorbitant wages.

And what these fifteen varieties of theft have in common is that they all seem to involve something which could be considered abuse—even, if we are careful about our terms, the abuse of property. If we choose to translate détourner as swindle, and proceed as if those other synonyms for theft also refer specifically to unjust forms of holding, turning or putting aside, then we seem to be in general agreement with the work of 1840, and if there are some awkward elements in that work—perhaps particularly the definition, in the introduction to the second edition, of "property" as "the abuse of property,"—we are at least no worse off than we were before.

The more "energetic" approach is to treat the prohibitions against holding, turning or putting aside much more literally. Instead of assuming that the target of the commandment is abuse, and thus that Proudhon's reading of 1839 is in agreement with his catalog of the forms of robbery in 1840, we can see that holding, turning or putting aside are the very means by which any sort of property, beyond the most transient sort of use or consumption, might be established—and property is theft, in a much more literal and consistent sense than any we find in What is Property?

[Continued in "'Community' and 'Property'"...]

A couple of historical gems

2011-12-22T17:11:00.000-08:00

Roderick Long has posted a translation of a chapter from Gustave de Molinari's 1893 work on "Labor-Exchanges." I doubt anyone not already interested in Molinari's work will be won over, but it's a very interesting bit of that particular puzzle—and it's good to see more of Molinari's work in translation. Our understanding of all the players in anarchist/libertarian circles is enhanced by making more works available to more readers.

Readers of French may be interested in P.-J. Proudhon's review of the "Essai sur l'analyse physique des langues, ou Alphabet méthodique," by Paul Ackermann, which Woodcock cites as Proudhon's first published article.

M. Corbeau's Gallery of Rogues

2011-12-20T15:54:00.000-08:00

‎"M. CORBEAU’S Gallery of ROGUES" is the monthly miscellany of radical auto/biography that I'm hoping to launch about January 15, 2012. I've said that I won't release an issue until I have three ready to print, so there are minimal hassles with subscriptions and standing orders. I'm just a couple of dozen pages of translation from that point, and feeling pretty good about how things are coming together. Here are tentative contents for those first three issues.

M. CORBEAU’S Gallery of ROGUES

1. Shawn P. Wilbur—“Who was Eliphalet Kimball?” (with texts and working bibliography)
2. Charles Malato—“Some Anarchist Portraits”
3. Shawn P. Wilbur—“Josiah Warren: A Most Unlikely Internationalist” (with articles)
4. Dio Lewis—On Lysander Spooner’s eating habits
5. The Worcester Spy—On William Batchelder Greene
6. “Bolton Hall, the Man and His Books”
7. Clippings: Louise Michel
8. The People of the Comune: Jules Allix
9. Paul Adam—“Eulogy for Ravachol”
10. Serial story—“Ravachol: The Man with the Dynamite”

1. Shawn P. Wilbur—“Calvin Blanchard!!” (with “My Undertaking and Its Auspices,” miscellany and working bibliography)
2. Elbert Hubbard—“Max Stirner” & “I Am an Anarkist”
3. Maximilien Buffenoir—“Feminism in Lyon before 1848,”—I
4. J. Wm. Lloyd—“Gordak the Poet”
5. Shawn P. Wilbur—Josiah Warren and Spiritualism
6. Two Poems on Equitable Commerce
7. Claude Pelletier: Atercracy (and Artificial Flowers)
8. “Write, Let Children Starve:” The Strange Case of the Brokaws
9. Octave Mirbeau on Ravachol
10. Serial story—“Ravachol: The Man with the Dynamite”

1. Shawn P. Wilbur—“Lewis and Ann Masquerier” (with miscellany and working bibliography)
2. Emma Goldman—Was My Life Worth Living?
3. Maximilien Buffenoir—“Feminism in Lyon before 1848,”—II
4. Bessie Greene—A Miscellany
5. C. L. James and the “Vindication of Anarchism”
6. Charles Keller—“Their Poor Reasons” (poem) [to Andre Leo]
7. Benjamin R. Tucker—On Clement M. Hammond
8. Anselme Bellegarrigue, “Minister plenipotentiary of the Republic of San-Salvador”
9. Anarchist prisoners in French penal colonies
10. Serial story—“Ravachol: The Man with the Dynamite”

Issue 4 is likely to be a Mother Earth issue, with the majority of the material drawn from that magazine.

Stephen Pearl Andrews on Equitable Commerce, 1850

2011-12-20T15:47:00.000-08:00

Stephen Pearl Andrews was a bizarre, multi-faceted character, whose contributions to anarchism have sometimes been overshadowed by the peculiarity of his contributions in other fields of study. I've been slowly-but-surely trying to make sense of my notes on Andrews, and in the course of trying to fill some gaps in the story of his involvement with a sort of perpetual-motion machine scheme (a story in which Josiah Warren also plays at least a bit part), I discovered that the Library of Congress had made large runs of the New York Daily Tribune available online. They aren't pretty—they are, in fact, some of the roughest scans it has been my privilege to attempt to read—but they're there, and sort of searchable. The particular story I'm tracking down has all sorts of inherent difficulties of its own: too many players, with names that people seemed intent on misspelling; no very stable set of keywords to search; a few keywords particularly prone to frustrating OCR programs, etc. As a result, it's been slow going digging the details out of a daily like the Tribune, and I will admit to resorting to the microfilm at Portland State University for the serious searching, but I have been much more successful in digging out the other contributions that Andrews made to the paper at the same time. Having been instrumental in introducing shorthand into the United States, Andrews actually worked for awhile as a reporter in Washington, DC contributing his own brand of political journalism to a number of papers, including the Tribune. And, as it turns out, he was also engaged in introducing the paper's readership to Josiah Warren's system of equitable commerce.

Andrews' series on "Equitable Commerce" ran for seven installments, between August 3 and November 7, 1850. I haven't had a chance to transcribe the series, but all the issues are on the LOC archive site. For easiest reading, download the pdf pages.

An Index to "Mother Earth"—Phase One

2011-12-20T15:12:00.000-08:00

My friend Barry Pateman, of the Kate Sharpley Library, recently provided me with the raw data for an index of Mother Earth magazine. I had a couple of very specific questions that I needed to answer, but looking through the listings reminded me that I had gone as far as copying the contents pages for the full run and starting to digitize them some years back. I set myself the task of at least typing in the listings for a handful of major figures—Emma Goldman, Voltairine de Cleyre, C. L. James, etc. As it turns out, I managed to accomplish a lot more than that.

The complete author listings—minus a few unsigned reviews, which were slightly out of place anyway, plus a couple of omissions I caught in this first stage—are now available in the Libertarian Labyrinth archive. I've created a category for Contributors to "Mother Earth", with "contributions" including reprints, and typed in bibliographic entries for every article. Some are incomplete, and it is possible that there are still a few uncaught errors. About 60% of Mother Earth is accessible online in various archives, and I have verified every entry I could, adding full page-ranges where the entries only had starting-pages, etc. In a later phase I'll do the necessary travel to compare the remaining entries to the actual issues—possibly in connection with more digitization.

Obviously, this is one more element in my campaign to transform the Libertarian Labyrinth into a much more useful and scholarly resource. I'm currently exploring the possibilities, but I expect to be doing quite a bit more of this sort of work, and to be concentrating quite a bit of my energy on my Mother Earth-related work through at least the first quarter of 2012.

Author listings for The Rebel, in a similar state, can also be found in the archive.

[Also available: a bibliographic listing of Mother Earth articles, organized by author.]

Proudhon's "Celebration of Sunday," and other works-in-progress

2011-12-09T19:06:00.000-08:00

You can see parts of three ongoing projects, as they appear, over on From the Libertarian Library. The most interesting is probably Pierre-Joseph Proudhon's The Celebration of Sunday, the book he wrote just before What is Property? It's a very interesting read, with something to tell us about a number of aspects of Proudhon's thought, and it's something I've been puttering away at for several months. I have posted a translation of the first quarter of the book, which is relatively short, and expect to have the second major section, which takes us up to about the halfway point, typed in and posted within the next couple of days. My hope is to be able to take a relatively polished translation of the whole work to this year's Bay Area Anarchist Bookfair (March 31-April 1), along with a revised and corrected edition of The Philosophy of Progress.

Among the other texts I'm hoping to have ready for the bookfair is Gray Light, by Paul Brown, the early American communist, friend of Josiah Warren, enemy of Robert Owen, etc. It is an interesting, sometimes frustrating, but also unjustly neglected work of more or less libertarian communism, which has not, as far as I can see, ever been published as a separate work, after its run in the New-Harmony Gazette. Its serial run was thirty-two installments, over parts of three years, and the originals are of poor enough quality that I'm having to type the whole thing in by hand, but I think it will be worth the trouble to begin to reestablish Brown in his proper place in our radical histories. Once Gray Light is finished, I have some essays from the Boston Investigator that I'll probably transcribe. You can get a taste of Brown's idiosyncratic style in the portions of Gray Light I have already uploaded.

The third in-progress project is a translation of Ravachol—the Man with the Dynamite, a popular fictional account of the life and deeds of the in/famous anarchist. I had begun to work on this about a year ago, when other things took precedence, and it's been hard to find an excuse to come back to it at all seriously. Among other things, it's a fairly massive tome, and there are a lot of more significant projects already in the queue. But I've been working hard to get together the first three issues of the forthcoming Corvus monthly, M. Courbeau's Gallery of Rogues, which will be a collection of biographical and autobiographical writings about anarchists and fellow travelers, and it struck me that a serial publication of the Ravachol book might be a fun addition to that project. So here we go. The first chapter is now online.

The Impact of the Cost Principle (and Archive Upgrades, VII)

2011-11-16T17:45:00.000-08:00

It's been sort of a hard week to stay on task, with constant new developments in the Occupy movement and multiple live streams to follow. I've also been approached, out of the blue, to collaborate on a Charles Fourier translation that sounds like enough fun to shuffle some things to make room for it in my workflow. As it happens, more of a focus on Fourier will undoubtedly help with projects like Dejacque's Humanisphere and Proudhon's Creation of Order, so I'm grateful for the distraction.

And work on the archive is still moving right along. I'm at about 525 COinS-equipped entries, and I'm seeing that a lot of articles from The Radical Review and Liberty are already transcribed, which will speed things up as I turn most of my attention to the Tucker archive project. New additions are not a top priority at the moment, but they always seem to turn up if I do any research at all—and I'm always doing at least some research. If nothing else, completing citations has me searching archives constantly, and, as I've mentioned before, sometime even failed searches bring new successes.

Late last night, for example, I ran across an interesting news article from The Kansas Herald of Freedom, which describes an early trades-education experiment, which resembles Josiah Warren's school at Spring Hill, Ohio. There's probably good reason for that, as the article declares one of the goals of the school to be "to make cost the limit of price." It has become gradually more and more obvious to me that, if individualist anarchism never had a "mass" impact, it certainly did have a hard-to-measure impact on a wide range of small experiments. Here's one of them:

Education.

HenryHiatt and others, living in the vicinity of Bloomington, have made a beginningfor a Manual Labor School. It isintended to introduce a new principle: that is, to make cost the limit ofprice,—to arrange so that indigent young men, as well as the wealthy, canobtain a liberal education; that teachers, as well as pupils, shall labor apart of each day for their health and daily bread; that after buildings areerected and the land brought under cultivation, enough shall be produced on thedomain to supply the current demands of both pupils and teachers.

On the oldsystem of education, multitudes of young men are unable to attend the schoolsand colleges, principally on account of the expense of boarding. While thetuition is not over from twenty to fifty dollars per year, boarding amounts tofive times that sum. The Manual Labor School meets this contingency. Theexpense of boarding can be met every day by three hours’ labor, and as muchtime as usual devoted to study. Cheap tenements can be erected also in thevicinity, where those living near by can board themselves, bringing theirprovisions from home.

Forfurther particulars, address Henry Hiatt, Bloomington, K. T.

“Education,” The Kansas Herald of Freedom 2, no. 31 (February 28, 1857): 1.

_________________________

And here's another listing of newly updated articles. I've hyperlinked a letter by Lysander Spooner that was new to me:

Joseph H. Allen, “Current Literature—The Principles ofSociology. By Herbert Spencer,” TheRadical Review 1, no. 2 (August 1877): 352.

WilliamBailie, “Problems of Anarchism: Introduction, 1. Social and Individual Liberty,”Liberty 1, no. 19 (April 1916): 1.

Alexander Berkman, “Prisons and Crime,” Mother Earth 1, no. 6 (August 1906): 23-29.

Warren Edwin Brokaw, “The Only Unpardonable Sin,” The Pacific Monthly 15, no. 6 (June1906): 763-767.

Warren Edwin Brokaw, “Who Should Possess the Wealth of theWorld?,” The North American Review214, no. 3 (September 1921): 431-432.

Steven T. Byington, “The Function of the Church,” The New Republic 27, no. 340 (June 8,1921): 50.

Steven T. Byington, “Preventing Wires from Sinking intoEnd-bars,” Gleanings in Bee Culture45, no. 1 (January 1917): 62-63.

William Henry Channing, “Prospectus for Volume II. of the Present,” The Present 1, no. 7-8 (January 15,1844): 288.

I. Crane Clark, “Where is Robert Palmer?,” The Black Cat 9, no. 5 (February 1904):19-24.

Henry Edger, “Prostitution and the International Woman’sLeague,” The Radical Review 1, no. 3(November 1877): 397-418.

C. W. Ernst, “Practical Socialism in Germany,” The Radical Review 1, no. 1 (May 1877):25-45.

W. B. G., “What Is the Minus Quantity?,” Massachusetts Teacher and Journal of Homeand School Education 13, no. 9 (September 1860): 330-333.

Emma Goldman, “Preparedness, the Road to UniversalSlaughter,” Mother Earth 10, no. 10(December 1915): 331-338.

Bolton Hall, “The Fond Father,” Life 38, no. 977 (July 25, 1901): 68.

Bolton Hall, “The God of Evil,” The American Theosophist 15, no. ?? (n.d.): 712-714.

Bolton Hall, "The Good of Evil," in International Metaphysical League,Proceedings of the 2d Annual Convention, Held at New York, N.Y., October 23-26,1900 (Boston: International Metaphysical League, 1901).

Bolton Hall, “The Gospel Of Wealth,” Life38, no. 978 (August 1, 1901): 85.

Bolton Hall, “The Gospel Of Wealth,” TheIndependent 53, no. 2749 (August 8, 1901): 1869.

Bolton Hall, “The Gospel Of Wealth,” ThePublic 4, no. 185 (October 19, 1901): 442-443.

Bolton Hall, “Remedial Measures,” The Public 1, no. 51 (March 25, 1899): 12.

Edward Henry, “What is the Use in Building Laws? Whereinthey are Useful—A Criticism,” EngineeringMagazine 2, no. 2 (November 1891): 238-246.

Joshua King Ingalls, “The Grave of the Landless,” The Spirit of the Age 1, no. 8 (August25, 1849): 113.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Profession,” Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher 2, no. 12 (August 19, 1848):186.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Property and Its Rights,” The Spirit of the Age 1, no. 10(September 8, 1849): 146-148.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Property and Its Rights,” The Journal of Progress 1, no. 11 (July9, 1853): 1-3.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Property Rights in Debt and Contract,”The Twentieth Century 12, no. 15(April 12, 1894): 8-9.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Protective Unions,” Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher4, no. 2 (June 9, 1849): 24-25.

Joshua King Ingalls, "Relation of Labor to Land," Report of the Committee of the Senate uponthe Relations between labor and Capital, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC:Government Printing Office, 1885).

Joshua King Ingalls, “Relations, Existing and Natural,between Man and Property,” The Spirit ofthe Age 1, no. 16 (October 20, 1849): 243-246.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Relations, Existing and Natural,between Man and Property,” The Journal ofProgress 1, no. 11 (July 9, 1853): 3.

Joshua King Ingalls, “What Is Economic Rent?,” The Twentieth Century 9, no. 26(December 29, 1892): 6-8.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Who Will Be an Oberlin? Who Will Go toNew Jersey?,” Universalist Union 8,no. 11 (January 28, 1843): 167.

Alan P. Kelly, “The Foundations of Trade,” Liberty 2, no. 24 (September 6, 1884):4.

Peter Kropotkin, “The Fortress Prison of St. Petersburg,” The Nineteenth Century 13, no. 76 (June1883): 928-949.

Marx Edgeworth Lazarus, “Political Liberalism,” Liberty 3, no. 18 (November 28, 1885):5.

Marx Edgeworth Lazarus, “Rational Communism,” Liberty 4, no. 6 (July 17, 1886): 5. [review]

Marx Edgeworth Lazarus, “Relative Longevity of the Negro andMulatto,” The Spirit of the Age 1,no. 23 (December 8, 1849): 355.

Marx Edgeworth Lazarus and Benjamin R. Tucker, “Rent:Parting Words,” Liberty 4, no. 19(December 12, 1885): 3.

Marx Edgeworth Lazarus, “Whom to Kill?,” Liberty 3, no. 23 (February 6, 1886): 8.

Hughes Le Roux, and Benjamin R. Tucker (translator), “ASheriff’s Sale in Paradise,” TheFreethinker 10, no. 4 (February 2, 1890): 57-58.

J. William Lloyd, “Plumb-Centre,” Liberty 4, no. 4 (June 19, 1886): 1.

Dyer D. Lum, “Prognostications,” The Index 6, no. 296 (September 9, 1875): 429.

Errico Malatesta, “Pro-Government Anarchists,” Freedom 30, no. 324 (April 1916): 28.

Lewis Masquerier, "Progressive and Rotary Motion,"in American Institute of the City of New York, Transactions of the American Institute of the City of New York, for theYears 1860-61 (Albany, NY: C. Van Benthuysen, 1861): 576-578.

Lewis Masquerier, “Propagandists,” The Boston Investigator 32, no. 35 (December 31, 1862): 275.

Sidney H. Morse, “Political Evolution,” Liberty 3, no. 14 (September 12, 1885): 4.

William C. Owen, “Proudhon Condensed,” Freedom 34, no. 369 (February 1920): 11.

J. Stahl Patterson, “Current Literature—The ReligiousSentiment: Its Source and Aim. A Contribution to the Science and Philosophy ofReligion. By D. G. Brinton,” The RadicalReview 1, no. 3 (August 1877): 364-366.

John Beverley Robinson, “Why I Oppose Building Laws.—ARejoinder,” Engineering Magazine 2,no. 2 (November 1891): 246-251.

Lysander Spooner and Joseph Barker, “Free Soil Inconsistency,” The Liberator 24, no.8 (February 24, 1854): 31.

Benjamin R. Tucker, “Moral Courage,” The Boston Investigator 43, no. 38 (January 14, 1874): 6.

Benjamin R. Tucker, “Proudhon and Fraternity,” Liberty 5, no. 21 (May 26, 1888): 11.

Benjamin R. Tucker, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, and EdmondLepelletier, “Proudhon as a Dramatic Author,” Liberty 10, no. 23 (March 23, 1895): 4-8.

Benjamin R. Tucker, “What We Mean,” Liberty 1, no. 19 (April 15, 1882): 2-3.

Benjamin R. Tucker, “Who Is the Somebody?,” Liberty 1, no. 1 (August 6, 1881): 3.

James L. Walker, “Proudhon’s Works a Source of Health,” Liberty 4, no. 6 (February 26, 1887): 1.

James L. Walker, “Regicides and Republicans,” Liberty 4, no. 11 (November 20, 1886):5.

James L. Walker, “What is Justice?,” Liberty 3, no. 25 (March 6, 1886): 8.

Robert Dale Owen and Josiah Warren, “Printing in PrivateFamilies,” The Free Enquirer 2, no.20 (March 13, 1830): 157.

John Weiss, “Preacher’s Love-Vacation,” The Radical Review 1, no. 3 (November 1877): 443-446.

Archive upgrades, VI

2011-11-09T12:07:00.000-08:00

Some days the archive work seems to go very slowly, despite the fact that I'm spending 40+ hours each week now doing very little but research, data entry, COinS generation and other tasks directly related to getting the Labyrinth archive straightened out and hammered into a more usable shape. And, ultimately, that's coming along well enough that I can probably turn most of my attention towards the now-looming Benjamin R. Tucker archive project, and start puttering away at translations again. So here's your archive update:

Max Baginski, “Without Government,” Mother Earth 1, no. 1 (March 1906): 20-26.

B. W. Ball, “To Benedict Spinosa,” The Radical Review 1, no. 1 (May 1877): 24.

I. G. Blanchard, “The Warfare,” The Radical Review 1, no. 3 (November 1877): 522.

Steven T. Byington, “Martin and Bee-Martin Very Different,” Gleanings in Bee Culture 44, no. 21 (November 1, 1916): 1038.

Steven T. Byington, “Non-Resistance; and Did Jesus Mean to Say that We Should Not Protect Ourselves as a People and as a Nation?,” Gleanings in Bee Culture 44, no. 5 (March 1, 1916): 213.

Steven T. Byington, “The Super-Spring Fixes It,” Gleanings in Bee Culture 44, no. 12 (June 15, 1916): 499.

William Henry Channing, “The State Agricultural Fair,” The Present 1, no. 2 (October 15, 1843): 68-70.

François Coignet, “The Ways and Means of Free Exchange and Credit.,” The Spirit of the Age 1, no. 6 (August 11, 1849): 81-82.

Voltairine de Cleyre, “To Strive and Fail,” Mother Earth 3, no. 9 (November 1908): 360-363.

Jean Deroin, “Woman—Her Position and Duties,” The Spirit of the Age 1, no. 2 (July 14, 1849): 27-28.

Jean Deroin, “Woman—Her Position and Duties,” The Spirit of the Age 1, no. 4 (July 28, 1849): 59.

Editor, “To Correspondents,” The Boston Investigator 19, no. 11 (July 18, 1849): 3.

Emily E. Ford, “To a Man about Town,” The Radical Review 1, no. 4 (February 1878): 688-689.

Jay Fox, “Trade Unionism and Anarchism,” Mother Earth 2, no. 9 (November 1907): 395-405.

Emma Goldman, “The Woman Suffrage Chameleon,” Mother Earth 12, no. 3 (May 1917): 78-80.

Covington Hall, “Why I am a Socialist,” The International Socialist Review 5, no. 6 (December 1904): 347.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Tolstoi on Henry George and Single Tax,” The Twentieth Century 20, no. 11 (March 12, 1898): 9-12.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Woman’s Industrial Subjection.—No. 1.—Its Origin,” The Woman’s Tribune ??, no. ?? (February 23, 1889): 82-??.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Woman’s Industrial Subjection.—No. 2.—Its Gradual Development Under Governments of Force,” The Woman’s Tribune ??, no. ?? (March 23, 1889): 114-115.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Woman’s Industrial Subjection.—No. 3.—In Relation to Land Ownership,” The Woman’s Tribune ??, no. ?? (April 20, 1889): 147.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Woman’s Industrial Subjection.—No. 4.—In Exchanges of Labor and its Product,” The Woman’s Tribune ??, no. ?? (May 18, 1889): 174.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Work and Wealth,” The Radical Review 1, no. 4 (February 1878): 650-660.

C. L. James, “The Subliminal Self,” Popular Science News 32, no. 12 (December 1898): 280.

Samuel Johnson, “Transcendentalism,” The Radical Review 1, no. 3 (November 1877): 447-478.

Peter Kropotkin, “The Sterilization of the Unfit,” Mother Earth 7, no. 10 (December 1912): 354-357.

[Announcement of ‘The Wife of Number 4,237’], Liberty 3, no. 24 (February 20, 1886): 4.

Sophie Kropotkin, “The Wife of Number 4,237,” Liberty 3, no. 25 (March 6, 1886): 2-3.

Sophie Kropotkin, “The Wife of Number 4,237,” Liberty 3, no. 26 (March 27, 1886): 7.

Sophie Kropotkin, “The Wife of Number 4,237,” Liberty 4, no. 1 (April 17, 1886): 2-3.

Sophie Kropotkin, “The Wife of Number 4,237,” Liberty 4, no. 2 (May 1, 1886): 7.

Sophie Kropotkin, “The Wife of Number 4,237,” Liberty 4, no. 3 (May 22, 1886): 3.

Marx Edgeworth Lazarus, “To the Radical Review,” Liberty 2, no. 44 (June 14, 1884): 8.

Marx Edgeworth Lazarus, “Too Much Devotion,” Liberty 4, no. 5 (July 3, 1886): 7.

sJ. William Lloyd, “The World’s Future—A Prophecy,” The Phrenological Journal and Science of Health 75, no. 4 (October 1882): 180-183.

Edwin Markham, "To Louise Michel," The Man with the Hoe (New York: Doubleday and McClure, 1899): 65.

Lewis Masquerier, “To Robert Owen,” The Crisis, and National Co-Operative Trades’ Union Gazette 4, no. 13 (July 5, 1834): 99-100.

“[Response]” The Crisis, and National Co-Operative Trades’ Union Gazette 4, no. 15 (July 19, 1834): 118.

Hugh O. Pentecost, “The Crime of Capital Punishment,” The Arena 1, no. 2 (January 1890): 175-183.

Hugh O. Pentecost, “The Tap-Root of Industrial Discontent,” Engineering Magazine 1, no. 4 (July 1891): 498-504.

John Beverley Robinson, “What is the Use of a Building Law?,” Engineering Magazine 1, no. 5 (August 1891): 656-662.

Benjamin R. Tucker, “The State Its Own Outlaw,” Liberty 1, no. 16 (March 4, 1882): 2.

John Turner, “The Struggle in England,” The Rebel 1, no. 1 (September 20, 1895): 6.

William Henry Van Ornum, “The Study and Needs of Sociology,” The Arena 24, no. 3 (September 1900): 328-336.

“An Investigator” [Josiah Warren?], “The ‘Rappings’,” The Boston Investigator 20, no. 51 (April 23, 1851): 1.

Josiah Warren, “To the Friends of the Equal Exchange of Labor in the West,” The Free Enquirer 23, no. 38 (July 17, 1830): 301-302.

Josiah Warren, “Written on Hearing of the Death of Camilla Wright,” The Free Enquirer 5, no. 18 (February 23, 1833): 144.

David A. Wasson, “Theodore Parker as Religious Reformer,” The Radical Review 1, no. 1 (May 1877): 46-73.

J. W, “The Word is the Ark,” The Spirit of the Age 1, no. 17 (October 27, 1849): 267-268.

“The Stores of Protective Unions and Workingmen,” Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review 35, no. 1 (July 1856): 133-134.

“To Correspondents,” The Boston Investigator 20, no. 48 (April 2, 1851): 3.

William Henry Channing, “Victor Considerant,” The Spirit of the Age 1, no. 6 (August 11, 1949): 89-90.

Bjorkman Maulk Frances, “Vive le Roi,” Mother Earth 1, no. 1 (March 1906): 27.

Emma Goldman, “Victims of Morality,” Mother Earth 8, no. 1 (March 1913): 19-24.

Joshua King Ingalls, “Uprightness the Only Path to Safety,” Univercoelum and Spiritual Philosopher 3, no. 13 (February 24, 1849): 193-195.

Marx Edgeworth Lazarus, “True Principles of Emancipation,” The Dial 1, no. 4 (April 1860): 219-228.

Pierre Leroux and W. C. R. (translator), “Universal Regeneration,” The Present 1, no. 7-8 (January 15, 1844): 237-242.

Dyer D. Lum, “Wendell Phillips’s Grave,” Liberty 3, no. 11 (June 20, 1885): 1.

Joseph B. Marvin, “Walt Whitman,” The Radical Review 1, no. 2 (August 1877): 224-259.

Grace Potter, “Try Love,” Mother Earth 1, no. 1 (March 1906): 18-19.

James L. Walker, “Truth and Belief,” Liberty 4, no. 17 (March 12, 1887): 7.

Charles Erskine Scott Wood, “Transmutation of Virtues into Vices,” The Pacific Monthly 20, no. 4 (October 1908): 454-455.

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A low place to haunt, should you be so inclined...

2011-11-07T18:56:00.000-08:00

Rand, McNally & Co.'s Handy Guide to Chicago and World's Columbian Exposition (1893) contains the following entry among its sightseeing options:

Socialists and Anarchists.—These gentry, who received such a salutary lesson in the execution of their leaders, may be found in some of the beer halls of the West Side—beer, anarchy, and socialism being seemingly inseparable companions. Longhaired, of alien birth, entirely innocent of honest work or any kind of bathing, they "haunt low places and herd with the ignorant, possessing just enough knowledge to be mischievous." They met their Waterloo in the Haymarket Square on that memorable 4th of May. 1886. Now, other than for occasional fatuous and firebrand utterances, the public would be entirely ignorant of their existence. To use a now celebrated phrase, they seem to have fallen (perhaps fortunately for their fraternity) '' into a state of innocuous desuetude."

Those who can attest to the inseparability of beer and anarchy may enjoy Well-Aged & Slightly Bitter, with Just a Touch of Funk, the beer review blog that I have, after much arm-twisting, decided to give a try.

Property and the Essence of Mutualism — I

2011-11-05T02:18:00.000-07:00

"My principle, which will appear astonishing to you, citizens, my principle is yours; it is property itself."—P.-J. Proudhon

In my writings on mutualist property theory, I have been attempting to supplement a somewhat strange lacuna in Proudhon's theory, his failure—in at least one important sense—to ever really directly answer the question posed in his first major work, What is Property? In order to do that, I've been drawing on the work of Max Stirner, which, despite Stirner's sense that he was opposing Proudhon's position, seems to primarily address "property" in precisely the senses that Proudhon didn't even make much attempt to do justice to. And I've been drawing on Locke, and conventional propertarian theories, however much I have been reading them "against the grain." The "gift economy of property" project has been explicitly an attempt to move beyond Proudhon's "new theory" in The Theory of Property, and to take up directly his challenge that "property must justify itself of disappear," with a justification of "property" that does not simply treat it as a weapon that everyone should be allowed to wield, which is essentially where Proudhon left things.

Proudhon started by defining "property" as "the sum of the abuses of property"—a point he made explicit in his introduction to the second edition of What is Property?—and really not defining "possession," which appeared to be his chosen alternative, at all. That makes Proudhon's famous phrase translate to something more like "the abuse of property is theft," which certainly casts things in a different light than we usually assume—and takes the wind out of some of the cruder critics' sails. The "property" that would not be theft—towards which Proudhon gestures in his discussions of of equal possession—remains a desideratum for him. What I have been suggesting is that it need not remain one for us, and that, however much that might seem a wild deviation from the majority of anarchist or even mutualist thought, it is really just a step forward in the development that began with "property is theft!"

Now, one of the problems that has faced students of Proudhon's thought has been the widespread contention that either: 1) he substantially altered his project when he began to explore property in its relation to liberty; or, 2) he meant something different by "property" in those contexts—the ill-defined "possession," perhaps—when he was speaking in those terms than he did when he referred to property as "theft" or as "impossible." Frankly, the first claim seems hard to sustain. After all, Proudhon didn't even get through What is Property? without reintroducing "property" into his project, defining "liberty" as a "synthesis of community and property." As I've argued elsewhere, there's very little in the posthumously published work that differs from what he suggested in 1840-1842, except to the extent that it reflects changes in his understanding of "synthesis" and its alternatives. The development of his understanding of property is fairly simple. The somewhat unpromising start, defining "property" as "the abuse of property," is consistent with his critique of property's existing justifications, all of which seem to come apart, to reveal themselves as abuses of the principle they are supposed to uphold. But then, as he begins to develop his own philosophy—for "progress" and against "the absolute"—he raises possibilities which he may never have fully explored himself, having already identified property with absolutism. We know that the "new theory" posits evenly distributed property as one means of balancing the absolutist tendencies of individuals—but also of opening a space in which those tendencies might be to some extent overcome. We know that in The Theory of Property, property is able to contribute to liberty precisely because Proudhon has not changed his terms, precisely because property is absolutist and potentially abusive. And the more we explore the relationship between absolutism, property and liberty, the less likely it seems that there was really any change in meaning across the various writings—even if it seems likely that some of Proudhon's consistency was more intuitive than explicitly thought through.

What is property? If we step back from Proudhon, who was increasingly aware that the term covered a variety of dissimilar concepts, we find quite a number of connected kinds of uses, which then lead to an even greater proliferation of particular applications and definitions. Proudhon's work is actually remarkable for the care that he showed in separating out the varieties of "property." About a year ago, I made an attempt to inventory the kinds of uses either explicitly recognized by Proudhon or suggested by his analyses, and came up with these:

"Property" is its broadest sense, as a "social problem," involving by the issue of the "mine and thine" and that of the "you and me;"
"Property" as "ownness," relating to "the circle of self-enjoyment," that defines the unique individual, and which refers both the the material resources involved in specific instances of self-enjoyment (the facts of "possession") and the principle of organization by which they are thus involved;
"Property" or "properties," referring to those material resources;
"Properties," referring to the component characteristics of the individual (which both Stirner and Proudhon may encourage us to treat as "uniques" in their own right and at their own scale, and which some theories of property have treated as "property," in the sense of #3, in order to argue that everyone is a "proprietor" or "capitalist");
"Property rights," as social and/or legal attempts to formalize standards for answering some one or more of the question posed by the other senses of "property;"
"Propriety," in the general sense that each should have and respect its own in a well-managed society;
and a bunch of subordinate distinctions (real property, chattel property, products, allod, usufruct, etc., etc., etc.), referring to specific property norms and forms proposed in the course of our long engagement with the general problem of "property."

And I suggested that:

a coherent property theory needs to be able to carry the same terms across the terrain of appropriation, maintenance, abandonment or expropriation, exchange, exclusive and shared domain, the possibilities of "intellectual property," the relation between theories of property and their abuses, the relation between property and gift, etc.

The lacuna in Proudhon seems to be in the treatment of "ownness," which is also arguably the place to look for an equivalent of "self-ownership," and it's been in my attempt to fill that conceptual gap that I've turned to Stirner, who is almost exclusively concerned with the "self-enjoyment" of unique selves.

Now, there is nothing simple about bringing the thought of Stirner and Proudhon into play in a single scheme. There are good reasons for not making the attempt, and equally compelling reasons to think that perhaps there are other aspects of Proudhon's thought which can be used to supply what seems to be missing in his property theory. As I've suggested before, Proudhon's "positive" theory of liberty is enormously suggestive in this regard, since it is, in essence, a theory of how individuals—and not just human individuals, but all sorts of individualities—are constituted: as collectivities, organized according to an individual law. And this description of the nature of individuality really takes us most of the way towards a theory of what is proper to individuals, at least in that sense of "ownness" or "self-enjoyment"—except for the fact that the account looks a lot more like physics than any of the more social sciences. Proudhon provides us with the means to introduce agency into our model, since the playing out of the individual law is always, in his view, a play of antinomies. The fact that each individuality is at the same time an organized group, composed of other individualities, each driven by their own imperative law of organization and development, means that "life" and "health" for the individual depend on the strength and balance of the ensemble of constituent individualities—something which may even take the form, particularly at "higher" scales of organization, of an increasing conflict. As the clash of ideas casts the light, so the balanced intensification of the function of the various faculties of the individual produces life, health, and an increase in the play of deterministic systems, experienced by the individual as freedom. But in all this description of mechanisms, it remains more than a little bit difficult to identify wills and persons. For that, however, we can certainly count on Stirner—but not quite yet.

I will admit that I came to see Stirner as a means to supplement Proudhon reluctantly, and by a rather peculiar route. As much as I appreciate a certain relentlessness in egoist thought, and as much pleasure as I have had in reading and rereading Stirner, James L. Walker, John Badcock and others—as good to think with as I have found them—like Proudhon, I find that there is something in egoistic thinking which does not ultimately speak to me. The same is true, of course, of most forms of collectivism, or, on another register, of altruistic philosophy. What I have dubbed the "two-gun" approach, by which I've sought what really does speak to me in the play of various "individualisms" and "socialisms," has nonetheless committed me to an immersion in a number of approaches, which I can only really take on as useful disciplines and occasions for experiment. But it has also committed me to an engagement with the thinker arguably responsible for the terms "individualism" and "socialism"—Pierre Leroux, Proudhon's antagonist and influence, and possibly William B. Greene's most important philosophical source, philosopher of "humanity," and defender of property (but a non-exclusive property which included a sort of natural right in other people.)

With "Two-Gun Mutualism" I have elevated this decidedly challenging character to a sort of central place, both in my reading of mutualism's past and in my attempt to advance it into the future. The metaphor of the two guns is drawn from his essay on "Individualism and Socialism" (and if readers of this essay have not yet read that and my essay on "Two-Gun Mutualism and the Golden Rule," perhaps that would be in order before I try to produce too much more light from clashing ideas.)

[to be continued...]

Was Josiah Warren a spiritualist?

2011-11-01T19:46:00.000-07:00

We know that there were plenty of spiritualists in Josiah Warren's circle—including his wife, Stephen Pearl Andrews and his wife Esther, Ezra and Angela Heywood, and Mary and Thomas Nichols—we have the claim of Clarence L. Swartz that "not only in his later life, but almost from the beginning of modern Spiritualism, Warren was a believer in it." But there's been a real lack of testimony from Warren himself on the subject, at least in the sources I've been able to dig up. But I may have finally found an article by Warren addressing the question of "spiritual rappings" and "manifestations." Have a look, and judge for yourself.