Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (48 page)

More important to his subsequent development, Proudhon came into contact with local socialists, including his fellow townsman Charles Fourier who rejected existing civilization with its repressive moral codes. He even supervised the printing of Fourier’s greatest work
Le Nouveau monde industriel et sociétaire
(1829) which gave the clearest account of his economic views. It also advocated a society of ideal communities or ‘phalansteries’ destined ‘to conduct the human race to opulence, sensual pleasures and
global unity’.
¹⁴
Fourier maintained that if human beings attuned to the ‘Universal Harmony’, they would be free to satisfy their passions, regain their mental health, and live without crime. Proudhon acknowledged that he was a captive of this ‘bizarre genius’ for six whole weeks and was impressed by his belief in immanent justice, although he found his phalansteries too utopian and his celebration of free love distasteful.

Determined to strike out on his own, Proudhon left Besançon and spent several years as a journeyman wandering throughout France from town to town, finding work wherever he could. His travels took him to Lyon, where he came into contact with workers advocating co-operative workshops, and to Paris, which he detested. His
tour de France
demonstrated only too well Alexis de Tocqueville’s observation that authority in France at that time consisted of ‘a single central power controlling the administration throughout the country’ by means of rigid rules covering every administrative detail.
¹⁵

Proudhon eventually returned to Besançon where he became a partner in a small printing firm. But he was not content to live the obscure life of a provincial printer; he could not make up his mind whether to become a scholar or to serve the working class. In 1838 he applied for a scholarship from the Besançon Academy to continue his studies, declaring himself to be ‘born and raised in the working-class, and belonging to it in heart and mind, in manners and in community of interests and aspirations’.
¹⁶
Echoing the last testament of Henri de Saint-Simon, he asserted that he wanted to improve ‘the physical, moral and intellectual condition of the most numerous and poorest class’.
¹⁷
He won the scholarship as well as the prize in a competition for an essay on
Sunday Observance.
The hero of the essay is Moses, founder of the Sabbath; he is depicted as a great social scientist for having laid the foundations of society based on ‘natural’ law and for discovering, not inventing, a code of laws. It was an achievement which Proudhon wanted to develop in drawing up the moral rules for people to live in equality and justice.

Proudhon dedicated his next work
What is Properly? First Memoir
(1840) to the respectful scholars and burghers of the Besançon Academy. They were deeply shocked when they read the contents for the book questioned the twin pillars of their privilege: property and government. Not surprisingly, they insisted that the dedication be removed. As the obscure author later recalled, after a long, detailed and above all impartial analysis he had arrived at the astonishing conclusion that ‘property is, from whatever angle you look at it, and whatever principle you refer it to — a contradictory notion! Since denying property means denying authority, I immediately deduced from my definition the no less paradoxical corollary that the true form of government is
anarchy.
’
¹⁸

Proudhon replied to his own question ‘What is Property?’ with the bold paradox: ‘Property is Theft’. It became his most famous slogan and its implications have reverberated ever since. But although Proudhon claimed that the principle came to him as a revelation and was his most precious thought, Morelly had expressed a similar idea in the previous century and Brissot had been the first to declare it during the French Revolution.

In fact, Proudhon had a very specific view of property and his slogan was not as revolutionary as it might appear. Stirner was quick to point out that the concept of ‘theft’ can only be possible if one allows the prior validity of the concept of property.
¹⁹
Proudhon did not attack private property as such; indeed, in the same work he called those communists who wanted to collectivize it as enemies of freedom. He was principally opposed to large property-owners who appropriated the labour of others in the form of revenue, who claimed the
droit d’aubaine.
At this stage, he was in favour of property as long as it meant ‘possession’, with the privileges of ownership restricted to the usufruct or benefits accruing from it.

In
What is Property?
, Proudhon not only threw down a gauntlet at the capitalists but also at his contemporary socialists. He attacked bitterly communism as oppression and servitude. Man, he believed, likes to choose his own work, whereas the communist system ‘starts from the principle that the individual is entirely subordinate to the collectivity’.
²⁰
It therefore violates both the principles of equality and the autonomy of the conscience which are so close to Proudhon’s heart.

Is there a way through the Scylla of accumulated property and Charybdis of communism? Can society exist without capital and government or a communist State? Proudhon thought he had discovered the answer. He was convinced that the authority man has over man is in inverse ratio to his intellectual development. In his own society, he believed that force and cunning were being limited by the influence of justice and would finally disappear in the future with the triumph of equality. He concluded:

Proudhon, as he acknowledged in a footnote, was fully aware that the meaning usually given to the word ‘anarchy’ is ‘absence of principles, absence of laws’, and that it had become synonymous with ‘disorder’.
²²
He deliberately went out of his way to affirm the apparent paradox that ‘anarchy is order’ by showing that authoritarian government and the unequal distribution of wealth are the principal causes of disorder and chaos in society. By doing so, he became the father of the historic anarchist movement.

What is Property?
was under threat of being proscribed, but the Ministry of Justice eventually decided that it was too scholarly to be dangerous. Undeterred, Proudhon followed up his strident squib by a new memoir entitled
Warning to the Property Owners
(1842). He called for economic equality and insisted that the man of talent and genius should accept it gracefully. This time Proudhon was prosecuted but was acquitted by a jury who again thought the work was too complicated for ordinary people to understand.

In his desire to discover the underlying laws of society, Proudhon turned to philosophy and his next major work was
On the Creation of Order in Humanity
(1843). His starting-point is similar to Lao Tzu’s and Hegel’s. While we cannot penetrate to the essence of the universe, we can observe that it is in a state of flux. This constant movement in nature and society takes the form of a ‘dialectical series’, that is it operates through the reconciliation of opposing forces. Nevertheless, Proudhon is at pains to stress that he is not offering an idealist interpretation of the world in which creatures are just ideas. According to what he calls his ‘ideo-realist theory’, the ‘reality of being’ increases progressively from the mineral world through the vegetable and animal kingdoms to man. It reaches its highest peak in human society, which is ‘the freest organization and least tolerant of the arbitrariness of those who govern it’. While stressing that ‘Man is destined to live without religion’, Proudhon argues that the moral law still remains eternal and absolute once its outer religious shell has been removed.
²³

Proudhon also began developing his view of history. He argued that a scientific study of history should be based on the influence of labour on society. But while recognizing that all events depend on general laws inherent in nature and man, Proudhon asserts that there is no inevitability in particular events which may ‘vary infinitely according to the individual wills that cause them to happen’. The main facts are therefore arranged in a causal sequence, but history has little predictive value. Thus while progress in the long term is inevitable, there is room for human volition, deliberation and ingenuity: ‘it is upon ourselves that we must work if we wish to influence the destiny of the world’.
²⁴

In the winter of 1844–5 Proudhon went to Paris to write his next mammoth onslaught against government and property. In the Latin Quarter, he met many political exiles, including Marx, Herzen and Bakunin, who all sought the acquaintance of the notorious author of
What is Property?
In their garrets and cafés, they discussed passionately Hegelian philosophy and revolutionary tactics. Bakunin and Herzen became permanent friends of Proudhon. Bakunin developed his ideas and spread them amongst the growing international anarchist movement, while Herzen took them to sow in the soil of Russian populism.

With Marx, relations were more problematic. At first Marx welcomed
What is Property
?, and he and Proudhon were friendly for a while in Paris. Indeed, Marx later claimed that he had introduced Proudhon to Hegel. Engels also wrote that Proudhon’s writings had left him with the ‘greatest respect’ for the author.
²⁵
Marx tried to get Proudhon to join their international communist group, but Proudhon became quickly disenchanted both with Marx’s doctrinaire and dominating personality and his authoritarian communism. Their desultory correspondence ended when Proudhon agreed to collaborate on seeking the laws of society but insisted:

No doubt angered by Proudhon’s implied accusation of intolerance, Marx chose not to answer the letter. Instead, when Proudhon’s next work
System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty
appeared in 1846, Marx took the opportunity to attack the author at length. He wrote soon after reading the book that it was a ‘formless and pretentious work’, singling out its ‘feeble Hegelianism’ and false hypothesis of ‘universal reason’.
²⁷
In his more deliberate reply written in French,
The Poverty of Philosophy
, Marx continued to portray Proudhon as a petty-bourgeois idealist who failed to recognize that human nature is not an unchanging essence but a product of history. His principal argument was that Proudhon’s individualistic economic model made him see humanity or society as a static ‘final subject’.
²⁸
Henceforth, Marx invariably referred to Proudhon in his writings as a ‘bourgeois socialist’ or as a socialist ‘of the small peasant and master-craftsman’.
²⁹
It would seem that Marx either simply failed to understand Proudhon’s book, or deliberately misrepresented it.

Proudhon was furious. He considered writing a reply for a time but contented himself with a note in his diary (23 September 1847) to the effect that ‘Marx is the tapeworm of socialism!’ Their parting of the ways marked the beginning of the split between the libertarian and authoritarian socialists which came to a head in the dispute between Marx and Bakunin within the First International. Marx continued to attack Proudhon for advocating class collaboration and proscribing trade-union and parliamentary activity, and he could never forgive him the fact that the French working class adopted his ideas rather than his own.

The two great volumes of Proudhon’s
System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty
were published in 1846. As Marx observed, it was full of sub-Hegelian dialectics and Proudhon freely admitted later that at this stage in his life he was ‘intoxicated with the dialectic’.
³⁰
In
On the Creation of Order in Humanity
(1843), he had already adopted Fourier’s notion of a ‘serial law’ of development in both nature and society which he called the ‘Serial Dialectic’. Now in the
Economic Contradictions
, he adopted the Kantian term of ‘antinomies’ to express Hegel’s dialectic: the ‘theory of antinomies’, he wrote, ‘is both the representation and the base of all movement in customs and institutions.’
³¹
By assuming that laws of development applied both to the material world and human society, Proudhon hoped that the discovery of these laws would turn politics and economics into a science. In practice, however, his use of the dialectic was invariably wooden and mechanical and Marx rightly observed that his antinomies were presented as mutually exclusive entities. It was all very well for Proudhon to assert that ‘My whole philosophy is one of perpetual reconciliation’, but in the
Economic Contradictions
he failed to reach a satisfactory synthesis, arguing for instance that property is ‘liberty’ as well as ‘theft’.
³²

It was in this work that Proudhon declared that ‘God is Evil’ and that ‘for as long as men bow before altars, mankind will remain damned, the slave of kings and priests’.
³³
He also returned to his twin onslaught on government and property. He was critical of all forms of political democracy. While better than autocracy, constitutional government tends to be unstable and can become an instrument of bourgeois domination or degenerate into dictatorship. Even direct democracy is unacceptable since it often prevents subjects executing their own decisions; on occasion, it can be worse than autocracy since it claims legitimacy in oppressing its citizens. As for communism, Proudhon was particularly dismissive: