Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)

[excerpted from What is Property? by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon]

If I had to answer the following question, "What is slavery?" and if I should respond in one word, "It is murder," my meaning would be understood at once. I should not need a long explanation to show that the power to deprive a man of his thought, his will, and is personality is the power of life and death. so why to this other question, "What is property?" should I not answer in the same way, "It is theft, without fearing to be misunderstood, since the second proposition is only a transformation of the first? (pg. 13)

The Declaration of Rights has placed property among the natural and inalienable rights of man, which are four in number: liberty, equality, property, and security...if we compare these three or four rights with each other, we find that property bears no resemblence at all to the others; that for the majority of citizens it exists only potentially and as a dormant faculty without application; that for the others who do enjoy it, it is susceptible of certain transactions and modifications which are repellent to the idea of a natural right; that in practice governments, tribunals, and laws do not respect it; and finally that everybody, spontaneously and with one voice, regards it as chimerical.

Liberty is inviolable. I can neither sell nor alienate my liberty; every contract, every condition of a contract which aims at the alienation or suspension of liberty, is null: the slave who plants his foot on free soil instantly becomes free. When society seizes a malefactor and deprives him of liberty, it is a case of legitimate defence: whoever violates the social contract by the commission of a crime declares himself a public enemy; in attacking the liberty of others, he forces them to take away his own. Liberty is the orginal condition of man; to renounce liberty is to renounce the quality of man: If we do this, how could we behave as men?

Similarly, equality before the law cannot survive either restrictions or exceptions....It is the same with the right of security....How different with property! Worshipped by all, it is recognised by none: laws, morals, customs, public and private conscience all plot its death and ruin. (pp. 37-38)

...liberty is an absolute right because it is to man what impenetrability is to matter, a sine qua non of existence; equality is an absolute right because without equality there is no society; security is an absolute right because in the eyes of every man his own liberty and life are as precious as another's. These three rights are absolute, that is, susceptible of neither increase nor diminution because every member of society receives as much as he gives - liberty for liberty, equality for equality, security for security....

But property, in its etymological sense and by the definitions of law, is a right outside of society; for it is clear that if the wealth of each were social wealth, the conditions would be equal for all, and it would be a contradiction to say "Property is the right of a man to dispose of property in the most absolute way." Thus, if we are associated for the sake of liberty, equality, and security, we are not associated for the sake of property; thus, if property is a natural right, this natural right is not social but antisocial. Property and society are completely irreconcilable with one another....Either society must perish, or it must destroy property. (pp. 42-43)

Whoever says commerce says exchange of equal values, for if the values are not equal and the injured party perceives it, he will not consent to the exchange, and there will be no commerce.

Commerce exists only between free men; there may be transactions carried on through force or fraud, but there is no commerce.

To be free means a man who enjoys the use of his reason and his faculties, who is not blinded by passion, constrained or driven by fear, or deceived by erroneous opinions.

Thus, in every exchange there is a moral obligation that neither of the contracting parties shall gain at the expense of the other; that is, to be legitimate and true, commerce must be exempt from all inequality; this is the first condition of commerce. The second condition is that it be voluntary; that is, that the parties act freely and openly.

The civilised labourer who gives his best effort for a bit of bread, who builds a palace and sleeps in a stable, who weaves rich fabrics and dresses in rags, and who produces everything and does without everything, is not free. The employer for whom he works does not become his comrade by the exchange of salaries and services which takes place between them but rather his enemy.

The soldier who serves his country through fear instead of love is not free; his comrades, his officers, and the ministers or institutions of military justice, are all his enemies.

The peasant who leases the land, the manufacturer who borrows capital, the taxpayer who pays tolls, duties, patent and license fees, personal and property taxes, etc., and the deputy who reinforces them all act neither intelligently nor freely. Their enemies are the proprietors, the capitalists, and the government. (pp. 103-104)

What sophisms, indeed, what obstinate prejudices can stand before the simplicity of the following propositions:

1. Individual possession is the condition of social life; five thousand years of property demonstrate this. Property is the suicide of society. Possession is within right; property is against right. Suppress property while maintaining possession, and by this simple modification of principle, you will revolutionise the law, government, economy, and institutions; you will drive evil from the face of the earth.

2. The right of occupation being equal for all, possession varies according to the number of possessors, and property cannot be formed.

3. The effect of labour being the same for all, property is lost in foreign exploitation and rent.

4. All human labour being the result of collective force, all property thereby becomes collective and undivided; in more precise terms, labour destroys property.

5. Since every capacity for labour is, like every instrument of labour, an accumulated capital and a collective property, inequality of wages and fortunes (on the basis of inequality of capacities) is unjust and thus theft.

6. The necessary conditions of commerce are the liberty of the contracting parties and the equivalence of the products exchanged. Now, since value is expressed by the amount of time and expense which each product costs and since liberty is inviolable, labourers should have equal wages as well as equal rights and duties.

7. Products are brought only by products. Now, because the condition of exchange is equivalence of products, profit is impossible and unjust. If this elementary principle of economy is observed, pauperism, luxury, oppression, vice, crime, and hunger will disappear from our midst.

8. Men are associated by the physical and mathematical law of production before being associated by choice. Therefore, equality of conditions is demanded by justice; that is, by social law and formal law: esteem, friendship, gratitude, admiration, all belong only to equitable or proportional law.

9. Free association, liberty, which is limited to maintaining equality in the means of production and equivalence in exchanges, is the only possible, the only just, the only true form of society.

10. Politics is the science of liberty. The government of man by man, under whatever name it is disguised, is oppression. The highest perfection of society is found in the union of order and anarchy. (pg. 214-216)