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Editorial Note. This is the text of an undated rich-text document retrieved (thanks to a Google Cache) on December 27, 2012 from a document-upload website. The text document identifies itself as an essay by the Anarchist writer Gary Elkin, on Mutual Banking. Gary Elkin is a contemporary anarchist writer, the author of several articles on individualism, anarchism, economics and ecology, and a listed contributor to An Anarchist FAQ. The document must have been written no later than 2002 (since it is cited in Carson's The Iron Fist Behind the Invisible Hand but no earlier than 1994 (since it cites an Economist article from November of that year). The document was divided into two parts, but without explanation of the dividing line chosen. We have retrieved the document because a quote from this document is referenced in several works by the mutualist writer Kevin Carson, and unfortunately the full text of the document doesn't currently seem to be available from any other source on the public Internet. The RTF documents were missing apparent footnotes and bibliographical material; if you have this, or if you have any information to help authenticate the date or authorship of the document, please contact us or leave a note in the comments below. --Editors, Fair Use Repository.

Gary Elkin on Mutual Banking.

Part 1 of 2

This article discusses the idea of a zero-interest credit system, commonly known as "mutual banking," which was first suggested by Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and later taken up by American individualist anarchists such as William B. Greene and Benjamin Tucker. We'll first examine an anarchist analysis of the State which underpins the argument for mutual banking, then go on to see how an updated version of mutual banking, complete with Internet "e-money" transfer capability, would work in practice.

"Reduction of interest rates to vanishing point is itself a revolutionary act, because it is destructive of capitalism." -- Proudhon

The State as legalized goon squad

1. Anarchists point out that the State is, in effect, society's biggest criminal gang, since its main function is to serve as a kind of goon squad, a protection and enforcement arm, for certain private racketeers called "bankers," "industrial capitalists," and "landlords." I'll use the United States government as an example, since it's presently the most powerful goon squad in the world. As Chomsky (1988, 1993) has shown in great detail, US protection and enforcement activities in foreign countries is handled primarily by the military and CIA, whose job is to coerce foreign governments into allowing their citizens to continue being fleeced by the US-based racketeers mentioned above; whereas, domestically, the same racketeers are protected by the courts, police, and prison system. In return for this protection, the US government receives a kickback from these clients in the form of corporate taxes, license fees, campaign contributions, bribes, etc. The "rackets" in question take the form of three major monopolies, which the State creates and sustains, namely:

1. credit-and-currency-issuing monopoly, the basis of capitalist banking;

2. capital-goods monopoly, the basis of industrial profiteering; and

3. land-and-buildings-monopoly, the basis of landlordism.

Following Benjamin Tucker (1972), I'll refer to income derived from such monopolies as "usury," a term that may thus be defined broadly as the exaction of tribute for the use of any object whose artificial scarcity and monopolization by an elite class are created and protected by the State. This definition widens the usual meaning of usury to include not only interest but profits and rents as well.

The State creates and sustains the first monopoly, of credit and currency, primarily through legislation that restricts allowable currency to a "legal tender" that can be issued only by the central bank. Banks (including credit unions, thrifts, etc.) are then required to transact all business -- whether as cash, deposits, reserves, or extensions of credit ("loans") -- only in units of this currency. Moreover, in order to be granted a bank charter, numerous other conditions must be met, including the raising of a given amount of deposit capital in a specific period of time; proving to the banking authorities that another bank is necessary; showing that it has a viable chance of success, and so on (Morris and Hess 1974: 81).

Such laws, and the interpretive lattitude given to those who enforce them, function effectively to restrict banking to an elite class whose members have enough "standing" in the financial community to raise the necessary capital and convince the authorities that the proposed new bank represents no threat to the overall system of finance-capitalist exploitation. Hence this elite class is able to maintain a monopoly over the power to issue money as credit, and hence to exact monopoly fees for its use.

In turn, this State-protected monopoly of credit-issuing power is combined with other forms of action by the State (e.g. its protection of titles to unused and unoccupied land) in order to create further artificial scarcities: notably of land, buildings, and capital goods, which are expensive items that generally cannot be acquired without credit. These items are then also sold or rented out at high price by those who monopolize them. For example, the surplus value extracted by capitalists from workers can be viewed as a form of monopoly rent charged by those who own the means of production to those who need to use them to earn a living.

Although all monopolies are detrimental to society, anarchists like Proudhon and Tucker have maintained that the credit-issuing monopoly is by the most pernicious. This is not to say that capitalists' exploitation of labor or landlords' exploitation of tenants are any less evil in themselves than bankers' exploitation of debtors. It's merely to say that monopoly of the power to create money as credit is the main root from which the other two monopolies grow and without which they would wither and die. For if credit were not monopolized, its price (i.e. interest rates) would be much lower, which in turn would drastically lower the prices of capital goods, land, and buildings.

Therefore, if the State would stop protecting the credit-issuing monopoly -- which is to say, if any group of people could legally form a "bank" and issue credit based on any form of collateral they saw fit to accept -- the price of credit would fall to the labor cost of the paperwork involved in issuing and keeping track of it. As banking statistics reveal, this cost is less than one percent of principal (Tucker 1972). Hence, as Proudhon emphasized, a fee which covers this cost and no more is the only non-usurious charge a bank can make for extending credit. To refer to this legitimate cost-covering fee as "interest" is to confuse the issue. Anarchist banking would in fact reduce interest, that is, usurious fees for credit, to zero.

"But," I hear, "what about risk? Is there no risk in the anarchist's world that would justify charging more for credit than the cost of paperwork and similar overhead?" As we'll see in section 2, there is virtually no risk for a mutual bank, because the credit it extends is based on more than enough collateral to cover defaults. And, as is also discussed there, a mutual bank does not actually "lend" money, but instead creates it. Hence there is no excuse for mutual banks to charge interest as compensation for "postponing the use" of any previously existing money that was "lent."

The beneficial results of a zero-interest credit system

Reduction of the interest rate to zero through mutual banking, along with an end to the State's protection of titles to land not being occupied and used by its "owners," would lower both profits and rents toward zero as well. Let's consider profits first. Under mutualism, capitalists' ability to extract surplus value from the labor of employees would be eliminated or at least greatly reduced, because many more workers than now would be able to obtain zero-interest credit and use it to buy their own tools and equipment, instead of renting them from capitalists at exorbitant rates.

Although, at the start of the new system, not everyone would have enough collateral to obtain credit, many more people would be able to do so than now. This would result in a huge increase in the purchase of capital goods, which in turn would create a huge demand for labor. Such a demand would then raise employees' wages toward equivalence with the surplus value produced by their labor. For this reason, workers would be able to save much more of their earnings than is presently the case, until soon virtually any person or group of persons, if they so desired, could accumulate enough wealth to use as collateral, obtain credit, and buy their own tools and equipment.

In this situation it would be absurd for workers to pay someone else (i.e. a capitalist) more for the use of tools and equipment than a fee equal to their depreciation and maintenance costs plus the cost of the taxes (if any) and utilities involved in housing them. Then, as Tucker (1972) noted, an employee would be in a position to say to his or her employer: "Here, boss, you are a good business manager, and I am willing to continue to work under your superintendence on a strictly equitable basis; but unless you are willing to content yourself with a share of our joint product proportional to your share of the labor and give me the balance for my share of the labor, I will work for you no longer, but will set up in business for myself on the capital which I can now obtain on my credit." With their vastly increased bargaining power, employees in this situation would be able to demand and get workplace democracy.

Of course, on a purely individual level, a dissatisfied employee of the sort described above would be limited to starting up a relatively small-scale business that did not require a huge capital outlay. However, it's important to emphasize that groups of workers could pool their mutual credit and start larger-scale collective enterprises. By a similar line of reasoning it can be shown that a zero-interest credit system, combined with an end to the State's protection of titles to land not being occupied and used by those who claim to "own" it, would lower rents toward zero as well -- that is, toward equivalence with the maintenance, utilities, and other costs absorbed by the owners of rental property.

But these are not the only social benefits that would accrue from mutual banking. Other positive effects would be the elimination or alleviation of the business cycle and of the tendency toward high inflation, both of which are largely attributable to the current "fractional reserve" method of expanding the money supply for political purposes. In addition, mutual banking would greatly reduce the financial pressure responsible for much of the current "grow-or-die" philosophy of business, which is destroying the biosphere. Contrary to popular belief, when a commercial bank makes a so-called "loan" it does not actually allow the "borrower" to use a sum of money that the bank already possesses on deposit (the usual meaning of "to lend money"). What it actually does is to create new money, as credit, by the process of fractional reserve banking -- a process in which only a certain fraction of the newly created credit-money (usually between 10 and 20 percent) really exists in the bank's reserve account at the central bank. The rest of the "loan" is created out of thin air, simply by the bank's crediting the account of the customer for the amount "borrowed" (Rothbard 1983; Greider 1987).

This process is analogous to an ordinary person's writing a bad check for more than exists in his or her checking account. As Rothbard puts it, "a bank is always inherently bankrupt, and would actually become so if its depositors all woke up to the fact that the money they believe to be available on demand is actually not there." (Rothbard is right about this, though he's wrong about much else, as discussed below.)

We should not be surprised to learn, then, that the fractional reserve banking system actually originated as a form of fraud. Here's the story. In the days before banks of deposit existed, people often placed large amounts of gold in the vaults of goldsmiths for safekeeping. The goldsmiths would then issue warehouse receipts for the gold, which were used by their holders as a form of paper money that could be exchanged for real gold by anyone presenting them to the issuing goldsmith. However, many goldsmiths soon began issuing fake warehouse receipts for more gold than they actually had in storage, and "loaning" them at interest to "borrowers." This scheme worked quite well unless there was a run on the vault -- that is, too many holders of arehouse receipts presenting them at one time for redemption -- which clearly revealed the fraud, whereupon the goldsmith was usually taken out and hanged.

The fractional reserve system of modern commercial banks, in which enormous amounts of interest-bearing credit-money are pyramided on a small base of "reserves," is a direct descendent of this fraud. In essence, commercial banking is a giant Ponzi scheme, differing from the old goldsmiths' racket only in the fact that it has been legalized by a series of unjust court decisions which gave bankers the exclusive privilege of issuing fake warehouse receipts for something they don't actually possess. The injustice of these decisions is apparent from the fact that the writing of fake warehouse receipts for other types of goods -- for example wheat (receipts for which have also been used as money) -- is still subject to criminal penalties.

Fractional reserve banking is highly inflationary because the vast majority of the money in circulation exists in the form of interest-bearing credit, created when banks make fractional-reserves "loans," particularly to their large corporate customers. (In fact, every dollar in circulation is interest-bearing at its point of origin, since even currency must be backed by government securities.) Since all money thus represents an interest-bearing debt, every business that has "borrowed" to finance its operations must scramble madly to pay back the interest it owes by gathering profits from a pool of total dollars that is necessarily insufficient to repay the total principal and interest outstanding at any particular time. This fact obviously constitutes a strong incentive for such businesses to raise their prices and also to expand. For unless there is sufficient growth, indebted companies won't generate enough profits to continue financing their debt. Indeed, many investors seek out highly indebted companies as likely high-growth investments.

Moreover, corporations must also satisfy stockholders, who demand high growth in order to raise the value of their stock. Like the capital-goods and landlordist monopolies, the stock market depends on the State's creation of an artifical scarcity of credit, which makes it necessary for corporations to sell stock in order to raise funds to finance their operations (thus incidentally placing companies under the control of absentee owners). Under mutual banking, however, the easier availability of credit will make this practice unnecessary, or at least greatly reduce its importance.

A further inflationary pressure -- perhaps the main one -- occurs because central government finance their deficit spending by, in effect ,printing the money they need to pay their debts, a practice that increases the money supply. This is done by issuing new interest-bearing securities, which of course puts such governments even further in debt, leading to the printing of even more debt-money, and so on in a vicious circle.

Fractional reserve banking is also a major contributor to the business cycle, simply because Ponzi schemes have an inherent tendency to collapse when public confidence in them is weakened for one reason or another. This is why recessions and depressions in the past were often triggered by bank runs -- which is to say, when the "inherent bankruptcy" of certain banks was discovered by the public -- whereupon all banks would begin calling in their old loans and refusing to make new ones in order to increase their reserve base, fearful that their own insolvency would also be discovered.

Today, deposit insurance has largely eliminated the problem of bank runs; but other reasons still exist for banks to contract credit from time to time. The result is a "credit crunch," which shrinks the total pool of available money from which funds for loan repayments can be gathered by businesses, thus producing a wave of business bankruptcies. Such a wave causes many weak banks to fail as their bankrupt business customers default on loans, which in turn causes the remaining "solvent" banks to tighten their credit even further, producing more business bankruptcies, further bank failures, and so on, until eventually there's a full-blown recession.

The failure of Libertarianism

Some Libertarians (e.g. Rothbard) have proposed as a solution to such problems that currency be returned to the gold standard; that banks be required to maintain a 100 percent reserve of gold or paper currency redeemable in gold as backing for all extensions of credit; and that the central bank be eliminated in order to increase competition among banks (which, among other things, would lower interest rates.) Unfortunately, however, although this proposal would probably do some good, it still fails miserably as a solution to the major problems of exploitation which arise from the State's creation and protection of a financial monopoly.

For consider: Since gold is a naturally scarce commodity, and since the State would require that this scarce commodity be used as the basis of all money, the power to issue credit and currency based on gold would still be monopolized by a financial elite -- namely those who monopolized gold. As Greene (1919) points out, the history of gold-standard banking in this country demonstrates that gold is one of the easiest commodities to monopolize, especially with the State's help. But any financial monopoly, whether based on gold or not, will give rise to further monopolies of capital goods, land, and buildings. Moreover, although interest rates might fall under the system Rothbard proposes, they would certainly not fall to zero. Hence the three forms of usury previously discussed -- interest, profits, and rents -- would continue, though perhaps at a somewhat lower rate.

In fact, right-wing Libertarians such as Rothbard never suggest that the fundamental mechanisms of economic exploitation, i.e. the goon-squad functions of the State, should be dismantled. Rather, they wish merely to "limit" the State to its "classical" role of performing only goon-squad functions -- a role in which it would not get into the further businesses of providing social welfare, building roads and bridges, educating people, protecting the rights of workers, etc. In other words, Libertarians propose that the activities of the State should be confined entirely to protecting those key monopolies which allow the racketeering elite (i.e. bankers, capitalists, and landlords) to continue robbing and enslaving the rest of the population.
Thus, in order to find proposals that strike at the heart of capitalist exploitation, we must turn instead to the ideas of libertarian socialists, and especially to the idea of a zero-interest credit system of the type first set forth by Proudhon.

An updated version of mutual banking

2. In an article in the Nov. 26th issue of The Economist it is stated: "The transformation of the Internet from a huge virtual community into a huge virtual economy may herald the age of electronic money -- and with it, headaches for traditional banks and regulators." What the article does not state is that "e-money" is potentially a means of destroying the monopoly-capitalist system as we know it. For the lynch-pin of that system is finance-capital's monopoly of the power to create money as credit.

Along these lines, I want to sketch an updated version of mutual banking, complete with e-money transfer capability via the Internet. As I see it, a mutual bank should grow from a collectively owned and operated barter association that is responsive to the participatory-democratic assembly of a radical urban community. Here's a possible scenario: The new economic system -- not yet self-sufficient but increasingly so -- is born when the community barter association begins issuing an alternative currency accepted as money by all businesses within the system. For reasons discussed below, this "currency" does not at first take the form of tangible monetary tokens (i.e. coins or bills), but is circulated entirely through transactions involving the use of barter-cards, personal checks, and "e-money" transfers via modem/Internet. [1]

Since it doesn't charge interest -- the source of regular banks' profits -- and since its purpose is to provide economic assistance to the community, it may be possible to charter this new financial institution as a nonprofit charitable organization. In order to get non-profit status, however, it is essential that mutual-credit organizations not be officially described as "banks" "thrifts," "savings and loans," "credit unions," etc., which would make them subject to the charter laws governing such institutions. For convenience I'll refer to an anarchist zero-interest credit-issuer as a "mutual barter clearinghouse" (or just "clearinghouse" for short). Other semantic expedients regarding the official description of its operations may also be necessary in dealing with the State.

The clearinghouse has a twofold mandate: first, to extend interest-free credit to members; second, to manage the circulation of credit-money within the system, charging only a small service fee (probably one percent or less) which covers its costs of operation. Such costs would include the making of plastic barter cards, printing personal checks, keeping track of transactions, paying its workers, insuring itself against losses from uncollectible debts, and so forth.

The clearinghouse is organized and functions as follows. Members of the original barter association are invited to become subscriber-members of the mutual bank by pledging a certain amount of property as "collateral" (referred to by some other term -- perhaps "pledge" is good enough). On the basis of this pledge, an account is opened for the new member and credited with a sum of mutual dollars equivalent to some fraction of the assessed value of the property pledged. [2] The new member agrees to repay this amount plus the cost-covering service fee by a certain date. The mutual dollars in the new account may then be transferred through the clearinghouse by using a barter card, by writing a personal check, or by sending e-money via modem to the accounts of other members, who have agreed to receive mutual money in payment for all debts.

The opening of this sort of account is, of course, the same as taking out of a "loan" in the sense that a commercial bank "lends" by extending credit to a borrower in return for a signed note pledging a certain amount of property as security. It's like fractional-reserve banking in this respect. The crucial difference, however, is that the clearinghouse does not purport to be "lending" a sum of money that it already has, as is fraudulently claimed, with much hand-waving and doubletalk, by commercial banks. (Hence the creation of mutual credit does not have to be officially described as "making a loan.") Instead it honestly admits that it is creating new money in the form of credit, but charging no interest for doing so. New accounts can also be opened simply telling the clearinghouse that one wants an account and then arranging with other people who already have balances to transfer mutual money into one's new account.

Part 2 of 2

Mutual dollars have no intrinsic value, that is, they cannot be bought and sold as commodities, since they are not redeemable at the clearinghouse in Federal Reserve notes, gold, or anything else. Thus, as Greene (1919) points out in his classic work on mutual banking, mutual dollars are "a mere medium for the facilitation of barter." In this respect they are closely akin to the so-called "barter dollars" now being circulated by barter associations through the use of checks and barter cards. To be precise, then, we should refer to the units of mutual money as "mutual barter dollars."

But whereas ordinary barter dollars are created at the same time that a barter transaction occurs and are used to record the values exchanged in that transaction, mutual barter dollars are created before any actual barter transaction occurs, being intended to facilitate future barter transactions. This fact is important because it can be used as the basis for a legal argument that clearinghouses are essentially barter associations rather than banks, thrifts, or credit unions, and therefore should not be subject to the laws governing the latter institutions.

Low inflation and the end of the business cycle

Unlike fractional-reserve banking, a mutual credit system will not create money by pyramiding fake interest-bearing "warehouse receipts" (i.e. Federal Reserve dollars) on top of a small base of "reserves." Moreover, it will not be used by the State to print money to cover deficit spending. Therefore mutual banking will eliminate the current system's contribution to both inflation and the business cycle.

Nevertheless, critics may object that the easier availability of credit in the mutualist system would still produce a tendency toward inflation. In reply, we must consider the complete economic context of the proposal under discussion. This context is a network of worker-controlled productive enterprises. As mentioned earlier, mutualism will empower workers, who will gradually establish an economy based on firms practicing workplace democracy, self-management, and collective ownership.

Hence we can assume that productivity will be much higher among the highly motivated worker-owners and self-managers in the new economy than it will be among the bored, apathetic, and resentful wage-slaves of the capitalist economy -- who will continue to engage in featherbedding, high absenteeism, slowdowns, sabotage, strikes, and so on, just as they now do.

Therefore, in the alternate system there will be more goods and services available in relation to the amount of credit-money that has been "borrowed" into circulation to finance start-up and production costs. This will have a deflationary effect on prices, offsetting inflationary tendencies that might emerge from the easier availability of credit.

Moreover since the clearinghouse charges no interest on the credit it extends to members, worker-owners who have borrowed to finance start-up or production costs will be under far less pressure to raise their prices than capitalist owners who have borrowed from commercial banks at high rates of interest. As noted already, reduction of this pressure will also lessen the incentive to expand, with obvious environmental benefits. Worker cooperatives, which the new system will promote, have the further advantage of typically growing at a slower rates than capitalist firms, as several studies have shown (see Levin 1984 for a bibliography). Hence mutualism is an essential ingredient in the type of "steady-state" economy advocated by eco-economists.

To quote Greene (1919) again, once a mutual credit system gets started in any part of the country, it will inevitably spread to all parts, until eventually it overwhelms the old system. This is because money and credit will periodically become scarce (or more accurately, scarcer) in the mainstream economy during recessions and depressions; hence at such times many people will start using mutual money simply in order to survive. But once they perceive the many advantages of the new system --e.g. low inflation, high employment, no recessions, high incomes for orkers, and an automatic, equitable redistribution of wealth -- word will spread and others will join the system by a ripple effect.

Mutual clearinghouses do not lend money, they create it Money lenders often claim that interest is their compensation for postponing the use of the money they lend. This is often raised as an objection to the claim that interest rates would fall to zero in a mutual-credit system. "People would still want compensation for postponing the use of their money, even if there were mutual banks, so interest rates could not fall to zero," it is alleged.

Such an objection reveals a misunderstanding of what a mutual bank or clearinghouse does. The "compensation-for-postponing-use" justification for charging interest is not available to such an institution, because it does not actually lend anybody's money. Instead it creates new money, as credit, by monetizing the credit recipient's collateral. This new money does not belong to any of the clearinghouse's depositors, nor is it "based on" or "backed by" a portion of the money of any of those depostors. In this respect a mutual-credit system is unlike the current fractional reserve system, where a certain portion of despositors' money is held in "reserve accounts" at the central bank.

Since mutual credit-money does not exist prior to its creation by the clearinghouse, no depositors have to "postpone the use" of any of their money when the clearinghouse extends credit. Nor does the clearinghouse itself have to forego the use of any money that it has on its books. This is one reason that it will charge only a small service fee to cover the cost of the labor involved in issuing and keeping track of credit, plus other overhead.

Defending clearinghouses from the State

Once a clearinghouse is up and running, the government can be expected to step in and try to kill it. Chartering clearinghouses as nonprofit charitable organizations is admittedly a best-case scenario. But of course there is no guarantee that it will be possible in this way to circumvent banking laws whose purpose is to prevent the threat to commercial banking that schemes such as mutualism represent. Nevertheless, even if clearinghouses are not able to obtain nonprofit status, they may still be able to function legally as barter associations of a special kind. Besides the fact that mutual dollars are actually a variety of barter dollars, another factor on which arguments for their legality can be based is that they are not circulated as tangible monetary tokens (i.e. coins or bills). The attempts of earlier American anarchists to start mutual banks were quashed on the grounds that their currency violated legal-tender laws. However, this was before the days of credit cards and electronic credit transfers. As we've previously observed, some barter organizations today already use barter cards to transact business in barter dollars -- a practice that is certainly close to what is being proposed here. So far the IRS has not been able to suppress the use of barter dollars, but has merely insisted that barter-dollar income be reported for tax purposes in the same way as regular-dollar income.

Mutual-dollar income is arguably in the same category.

But even if a mutual barter clearinghouse does manage to get established, it would be a mistake to believe that the banking industry would take this threat lying down or that it might fail to use its tremendous political clout in an attempt to destroy the new credit system through legislation. No doubt we'll then witness a barrage of propaganda and scare tactics designed to convince people that mutual credit is "unsound" and "unsafe," and therefore should be outlawed.
There are a number of strategies that can be used to respond to this challenge. For one thing, as many idealistic lawyers as possible must be recruited to the anarchist cause. Although cynics may be inclined to regard the phrase "idealistic lawyer" as an oxymoron, a few such beings are rumored to exist in legal-aid clinics, government regulatory agencies, extra-governmental watchdog organizations, and even private practice. (Clarence Darrow, for example, was an anarchist.) Sharp legal minds can help organize test cases, court challenges, and efforts to repeal any obstructive laws that may be passed. For another thing, anarchists will be ready to engage in civil disobedience by ignoring any obstructive laws that may be placed in their way. So, while legal efforts are being mounted in its defense, the alternate economy can still function as an underground system.

As Morris and Hess (1975: 73) report, unlawful underground credit systems already exist in many ghetto areas, based on funds collected through illegal gambling. In such systems, many of the small stores in the area take bets and use the cash profit to extend credit to the large welfare population. In addition, "the numbers runners and controllers are known to lend funds to their better customers who are temporarily short on funds (and the custom is that the loan is interest-free)." It would appear that if an underground zero-interest credit system based on organized crime can maintain its existence in statist society, a mutualcredit system organized by an ethically motivated radical community that has widespread public support and employs a variety of mass direct actions to defend itself stands an even better chance of maintaining its viability against State attempts to suppress it -- particularly now, with the advent of e-money, which can be transferred using encryption codes that will make such transactions extremely difficult to trace.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule:

These two short articles by Désirée Gay (Jeanne Desirée Véret Gay, 1810-1891) appeared in the August 1848 issue of L'Opinion des Femmes, which seems to have been a kind of testing of the waters before the launch of the official "First Year" of the paper. That issue had been preceded by a 4-page "Prospectus," written by Jeanne Deroin, and the paper was essentially a continuation of La Politique des Femmes, but there was still a certain amount of work to do setting the tone for the project, and Gay seems to have taken on much of that work in the one issue that appeared in 1848. These two pieces are particularly interesting because they give us a clear sense of how Gay and Deroin understood their relation to the broader radical movement, and to Proudhon, whose increasingly hostile relations with Deroin and other socialist feminists would be documented in the paper.

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Socialism

It is the modern Proteus.—It is the hydra with innumerable heads.—You fall upon the communists!—Socialism rises up behind you in another form.—Socialism is the crucible into which all those touched by misery inevitably fall, one by one.—Socialism, which a few years ago was the meeting of several systems, is today a militant army, peaceful in its spirit, but marching with the blind force of the providential legions, which have at all times led the people towards their new destinies! — Désirée Gay

The Malthusians.

As women and as Christians, we embrace with all our hearts the opinions expressed by M. Proudhon, against the system of Malthus; we have seen, not without pain, over the last few years, Miss Martineau and several intelligent women of England, declare themselves partisans of a doctrine that simple and honest spirits reject as immoral and ...

Read the whole thing at Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule:

[Jeanne Deroin. "Lettre a M. Proudhon." L'Opinion des Femmes. No. 1, Year 1. January 28, 1849.]

Letter to Proudhon.

Monsieur,

I know that, preoccupied most especially with questions of political economy, you have not accepted all the consequences of the principles on which our social future rests.

You are one of the most formidable adversaries of the principle of equality—a principle which does not allow unjust exclusion and privileges of sex.

I know that you do not wish to recognize the right of women to civil and political equality. This right, which contain in it the abolition of all social inequalities, of all oppressive privileges.

But I also know that this opposition on your part is founded on a respectable motive. You fear that the application of this principle seriously undermines the holy laws of morality.

If it was demonstrated to you that you are in error, I believe, Monsieur, in your honesty, in your sincere love for truth, and I do not doubt that you would use all your influence on the minds of the people, to destroy the direst of prejudices which hinder the march of humanity on the road of progress.

You will yourself be the firmest supporter, the most ardent defender that holy cause—that of all the weak, and all the oppressed.

I appeal to you, Monsieur, to examine more seriously all the aspects of this great question, so important in this epoch of transition where our social regeneration is prepared.

Permit me to present to you some observations on this subject. The superiority of your knowledge and intelligence is one more reason for me to hope that they will be received with kindness.

As a Christian socialist, I would say, like you, Monsieur, rather housewives that courtesans, if I wasn’t certain that ...

Read the whole thing at Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Contr'un:

Proudhon was fond of scandal and provocation—and it got him, and his friends, into hot water. In his System of Economic Contradictions, he wrapped his already provocative thesis about the evolution of institutions around a scandalous narrative about "the hypothesis of God." Proudhon was fascinated with Christianity, and wrote about it from a variety of perspectives and in a variety of tones, but he is probably best remembered for writings like his "Hymn to Satan" and the final chapter of the first volumes of the Economic Contradictions, where he worked himself up to a sort of declaration of war against the very idea of God:

"If God did not exist"— it is Voltaire, the enemy of religions, who says so, — "it would be necessary to invent him." Why? "Because," adds the same Voltaire, "if I were dealing with an atheist prince whose interest it might be to have me pounded in a mortar, I am very sure that I should be pounded." Strange aberration of a great mind! And if you were dealing with a pious prince, whose confessor, speaking in the name of God, should command that you be burned alive, would you not be very sure of being burned also? Do you forget, then, anti-Christ, the Inquisition, and the Saint Bartholomew, and the stakes of Vanini and Bruno, and the tortures of Galileo, and the martyrdom of so many free thinkers? Do not try to distinguish here between use and abuse: for I should reply to you that from a mystical and supernatural principle, from a principle which embraces everything, which explains everything, which justifies everything, such as the idea of God, all consequences are legitimate, and that the zeal of the believer is the sole judge of their propriety.

...

Read the whole thing at Contr'un.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule:

[Note: For some general thoughts on The Theory of Property, see "property must justify itself or disappear"]

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, The Theory of Property, Chapter VI: "The New Theory" (1865)

New theory: that the motives, and thus the legitimacy of property, must be sought, not in its principle or origin, but in its aims. Presentation of these motives.

Philosophy has had, for three centuries, many institutions and many beliefs: will it be the same for property? If my opinion is of any weight here, I dare to respond that it will not. Jurisprudence has not grasped thus far the causes or the reasons for property, because property, as it has come to reveal itself to us in its principle and in its history, is a fact of collective spontaneity of which nothing would have been able a priori to detect the spirit and the reason; because, on the other hand, it is still in the process of formation, and in this regard experience is incomplete; because, until the last few years, philosophical doubt has struck it only timidly, and because it is necessary, beforehand, to destroy its religion; because in this moment it appears to us rather as a revolutionary force than as an inspiration of universal conscience, and that if it has reversed many despotisms, overcame many aristocracies, one cannot finally say that it has founded anything at all.

The moment has come when property must justify itself or disappear: if I have obtained, these last ten years, some success for the critique that I have made of it, I hope that the reader will not show themselves less favorable today to this exegesis.

I will first observe that if we want to be successful in our research, it is completely necessary that we abandon the road where our predecessors became lost. In order to make sense of property, they returned to the origins; they scrutinized and analyzed the principle; they invoked the needs of personality and the rights of labor, and appealed to the sovereignty of the legislator. That was to place oneself on the terrain of possession. We have seen in Chapter IV, in the summary critique that we have made of all the controversies, into what paralogisms the authors were thrown. Only skepticism could be the fruit of their efforts; and skepticism is today the only serious opinion which exists on the subject of property. It is necessary to change methods. It is neither in its principle and its origins, nor in its materials that we must seek the reason of property; in all those regards, property, I repeat, has nothing more to offer us than possession; it is in its AIMS.

But how to discover the purpose of an institution of which one has declared it useless to examine the principle, the origin and the material? Is it not, to lightheartedly pose an insoluble problem? Property, indeed, is absolute, unconditional, jus utendi et abutendi, or it is nothing. Now, who says absolute, says indefinable, says a thing which one can recognize neither by its limits nor its conditions, neither by its material, nor by the date of its appearance. To seek the aims of property in what we can know of it beginnings, of the animating principle on which it rests, of the circumstances under which it manifests itself, that would be always to go in circles, and to disappear into contradiction. We cannot even bring to testimony the services that it is supposed to render, since those services are none other than those of possession itself; because we only know them imperfectly; because nothing proves besides that we cannot obtain for ourselves the same guarantees, and still better ones, by other means.

Here again, and for the second time, I say that it is necessary to change methods and to start ourselves on an unknown road. The only thing that we can know clearly about property, and by which we can distinguish it from possession, is that it is absolute abusive; Very well! It is in its absolutism, in its abuses that we must seek the aim.

Do not let these odious names of abuse and absolutism, dear reader, frighten you unnecessarily. It is not a question of legitimating what your incorruptible conscience condemns, nor or misleading your own reason in the transcendental regions. This is an affair of pure logic, and since the Collective Reason, the sovereign of us all, is not at all frightened of proprietary absolutism, why should it scandalize you any more? Should we be ashamed, perhaps, of ourselves? Certain minds, from an excess of puritanism, or perhaps a feebleness of comprehension, have posed individualism as the antithesis of revolutionary thought: it was simply to drive the citizen and man from the republic. Let us be less timid. Nature has made man individual, which means rebellious; society in its turn, doubtless in order not to remain at rest, has instituted property; in order to achieve the triad, since, according to Pierre Leroux, every truth is manifested in three terms, man, rebellious and egoistic subject, has dedicated himself to all the fantasies of his free will. It is with these three great enemies, Revolt, Egoism and Good Pleasure that we must live; it is on their shoulders, as on the back of three caryatids, that we will raise the temple of Justice.

All the abuses of which property can make itself guilty, and they are as numerous as profound, can be reduced to three categories, according to the point of view from which one considers property: political abuses, economic abuses, moral abuses. We will examine one after another these different categories of abuse, and, concluding à mesure, we will deduce the AIMS of property, in other words its function and social destiny.

[section 2] 

[translation by Shawn P. Wilbur]

Read the whole thing at Two-Gun Mutualism & the Golden Rule.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

Here is the final section of Proudhon's study on property, from the Contradictions. The other sections I posted recently will appear, in full or part, in the forthcoming AK Press anthology, but this section didn't make the cut for various reasons, not the least of which was its difficulty. The translation is still considerably rougher than the others in a few places, but I think most of it is clear and very interesting. 


As of today, I have officially begun a revision and annotation of Benjamin R. Tucker's translations of the first two memoirs on property. Since the translations are generally quite good, this should be a fairly straightforward project, at the end of which I will turn my attention to the third memoir, the Warning to Proprietors, and the Literary Majorats, which deals with intellectual property. With a little luck, I should have the texts for a much expanded Proudhon Seminar prepared by late summer or fall.

THE SYSTEM OF ECONOMIC CONTRADICTIONS

CHAPTER XI

EIGHTH EPOCH.—PROPERTY

[concluded from Part 4]

§ IV. — Demonstration of the hypothesis of God by property.

If God didn’t exist, there would be no proprietors: that is the conclusion of political economy.

And the conclusion of social science is this: Property is the crime of the Supreme Being. There is for man only one duty, only one religion, it is to renounce God. Hoc est primum and maximum mandatum.

It is proven that the establishment of property among men has not been a matter of choice and philosophy: its origin, like that of royalty, like that of languages and forms of worship, is entirely spontaneous, mystical, in a word, divine. Property belongs to the great family of instinctive beliefs, which, under the mantle of religion and authority, still reigns everywhere over our overproud species. Property, in a word, is itself a religion: it has its theology, political economy; its casuistics, jurisprudence; its mythology and its symbols, in the external forms of justice and of contracts. The historical origin of property, like that of every religion, is hidden in the shadows. Asked about itself, it responds with the fact of its existence; it explains itself with legends, and give allegories for truths. Finally, property, like every religion once more, is subject to the law of development. Thus one sees it by turns as simple right of and habitation, as among the Germans and the Arabs; patrimonial possession, inalienable in perpetuity, as among the Jews; feudal and emphyteutic as in the Middle Ages; absolute and circulable at the will of the proprietor, pretty much as the Romans knew it, and as we have it today. But already property, come to its apogee, turns towards its decline: attacked by commandité, by the new laws of mortgage, by expropriation for reasons of public utility, by the innovations of the crédit agricole, by the new theories on rental [louage], etc., the moment approaches when it will no longer be anything but the shadow of itself.

By these general traits, we cannot mistake the religious character of property.

That mystique and progressive character shows itself especially in the singular illusion that property causes its own theoreticians, and which consists in this that the plus one develops, reforms and ameliorates property, the more one advances its ruin, and that one always believes it more when in reality one believes it less: an illusion which, moreover, is common to all religions.

It is thus that the Christianity of Saint Paul, the most philosophical of the apostles, is already no longer the Christianity of Saint Jean; the theology of Thomas Aquinas is not the same as that of Augustine and Athanasius; and the Catholicism of MM. Bautain, Bûchez and Lacordaire is not the Catholicism of Bourdaloue and Bossuet. Religion, for the modern mystics, who imagine they enlarge the old ideas while they strangle them, hardly anything more than human fraternity, the unity of the peoples, the solidarity and harmony in the management of the globe. Religion is above all love, always love. Pascal would have been scandalized by the erotic aspirations of the devout of our time. God, to the nineteenth century, is the most pure love; religion is love; morality is still love. While for Bossuet the dogma was everything, because from dogma must arise charity and the works of charity; charity is placed by the moderns at the first rank, and the dogma is reduced to a formula insignificant by itself and which takes all its value from its content, namely, love, or, more properly, morality.

That is why the true enemies of religion, those who at all times will work most for its ruin, were always those who interpreted it with the most zeal, seeking in it a philosophical sense, striving to make it reasonable, according to the vow/wish of Saint Paul, one of the first who gave himself up to that impossible work of the agreement of reason with faith. The true enemies of religion, I say, are these quasi-rationalists who claim to reduce it to what they call its principles, without realizing that they drive it to the tomb, and who, under pretext of freeing religion from the letter that kills, that is, from the symbolism which is its essence, and to teach it according to the spirit that gives life, in other words, according to reason which doubts and science which demonstrates, revising the tradition ceaselessly, to distort the faith, twisting the sense of the scriptures, arrives, by an insensible degradation of the dogma, to the formal negation of the dogma. Religion, say these false logicians on the basis of an etymology of Cicero, religion is the bond of humanity; while they should say: religion is the sign, the emblem of the social law. Now, that emblem fades everyday from the friction of critique, there remains only the expectation of a reality that positive science alone can determine and reach.

So property, once one has ceased to defend it in its original brutality, and one speaks of disciplining it, of subjecting it to morals, of subordinating it to the state, in a word of socializing it, property collapses, it perishes. It perishes, I say, because it is progressive; because its idea is incomplete and its nature is not at all final; because it is the principle moment of a series of which only the ensemble can give a true idea, in a word because it is a religion. What one looks to preserver, and that in reality on pursues under the name of property, is no longer property; it is a new form of possession, without example in the past, and that one strives to deduce from the principles or presumed motives of property, en suite de that illusion of logic which always makes us suppose at the origin or the end a thing that which it is necessary to seek in the thing itself, namely, its meanings and its scope.

But if the property is a religion, and, like every religion, it is progressive, it has, like every religion as well, its own specific object. Christianity and Buddhism are religions of penance, or of the education of humanity; Mohammedanism is the religion of fate; monarchy and democracy are one and the same religion, the religion of authority; philosophy itself is the religion of reason. What is this particular religion, the most persistent of the religions, which must lead all the others in his fall and yet only perish the last, to which already its sectarians no longer believe, property?

Since property manifests itself by occupation and use, since it aims to strengthen and extend monopoly by domain and heredity, since by means of the rent it gathers without labor, and by mortgages compromised without caution, since it is resistant to society, since its rule is good pleasure, and since it must perish by justice, property is the religion of FORCE.

The religious fables give testimony to it. Cain, the proprietor, according to Genesis, captured the land with his lance, surrounded it with stakes, makes a property of it, and kills Abel, the poor, the proletarian, son like him of Adam, man, but of inferior caste, of servile condition. These etymologies are instructive: they say more by their naïveté than all the commentaries. Men have always spoken the same language; the problem of the unity of language is demonstrated by the identity of the ideas that they express: it is ridiculous to argue about some variants of sounds and characters.

Thus, according to grammar, as according to fable and according to analysis, property, religion of force, is at the same time the religion of servitude. Depending on whether it takes over at gunpoint, or whether it proceeds by exclusion and monopoly, it engenders two sorts of servitudes: the one, the ancient proletariat, result of the primitive fact of conquest or from the violent division of Adam, humanity, into Cain and Able, patricians and plebeians; the other, the modern proletariat, the working class of the economists, caused by the development of the economic phases, which are all summed up, as one has seen, in the capital fact of the consecration of monopoly by domain, heredity and rent.

Now, property, that is to say, in its most simple expression, the right of force, could not long guard its original coarseness; from the first day, it began to compose its physiognomy, to counterfeit itself, to conceal itself under a multitude of disguises. That was at the point that the name of proprietor, synonym, in principle, for brigand and thief, became in the end, by the insensible transformation of property, and by one of those anticipations of the future so frequent in the religious style, precisely the opposite of the thief and brigand. I have recounted in another work that degradation of property: I will reproduce it with some developments.

The rapine of the goods of others is practiced by an infinity of means, that the legislators have meticulously distinguished and classified, according to their degree of brutality or fineness, as if they had sometimes wanted to punish, sometimes to encourage petty theft. Thus the one robs by murdering on the public roads, alone or in bands, by breaking and entering, cat-burglary, etc., by simple subtraction, by public or private falsifications, by fabrication of false money

This sort includes all the robbers who exercised no other means than overt force or fraud: bandits, brigands, pirates, scum of land and sea. The ancient heroes were glorified with these honorable names, and regarded their profession as noble as well as lucrative. Nimrod, Theseus, Jason and his Argonauts, Japheth, David, Cacus, Romulus, Clovis and his Merovingian successors, Robert Guiscard, Tancredo of Hauteville, Bohémond and the majority of the Norman adventurers, were brigands and thieves. Brigandage was the only occupation, the sole means of existence for the nobles of the Middle Ages; it is to it that England owes all its colonies. One knew the hated of the savage peoples for labor; honor, in their eyes was not to produce, but to take. You could cultivate a field! they said among them as a form of malediction. The heroic character of the robber is expressed in this verse from Horace, speaking of Achilles: Jura neget sibi nala, nihil non arroget armis; and by these words from the testament of Jacob, that the Jews apply to David, and the Christians mystically to Christ: Manus ejus contra omnes. That disposition to rapine has been at all times inherent in the profession of arms, and if Napoleon has succumbed at Waterloo, one can say that justice was done by him for the brigandage of his heroes. I have gold, wine and women, with my lance and my buckler, said even quite recently the general of Brossard.

Today the robber, the well-armed of the Bible, is pursued like the wolves and hyenas; the police have killed his noble industry; by the terms of the Code he is liable, according to his specialty and skills, to penalties severe and infamous, from imprisonment to the scaffold. The right of conquest, sung by Voltaire, is no longer tolerated: the nations have become towards one another, in that regard, of an extreme touchiness. As to individual occupation, made outside of a concession or the help of the State, one no longer sees examples of it.

One steals by fraud, abuse of trust, lottery and gambling.

This second sort of theft was esteemed in Sparta and approved of by Lycurgus, in view of sharpening the fineness of mind, and of arousing the spirit of invention among the young people. It is the category of Solon, of Sinon, of Ulysses, of the Jews, both ancient and modern, from Jacob up to Deutz, of the Bohemians; of the Arabs and of all the savages. The savage steals without shame and without remorse, not because he is depraved, but because he is naive. Under Louis XIII and Louis XIV one was not dishonored by cheating at games: that was part of the rules, and honest men had no qualms about correcting, by an adroit artifice, the outrages of fortune. Today still, and by all countries, there is a sort of merit highly regarded among the peasants in high or petty commerce, of knowing how to make a deal, which means to deceive his man. The first virtue of the mother of the family is to know how to rob those who sells to her or those that she hires, by constantly holding back on the wages or the price; and if we are not all sons of coquettes, as Paul-Louis said, we are at least all sons of rascals.

We know with what pain the government has resigned itself to the abolition of the lotteries: it had just lost one of its most precious properties. It was not yet sixty years since confiscation has ceased to dishonor our laws: at all times the first thought of the magistrate who punishes, like that of the brigand who murders, was to despoil his victim. All our taxes, all our laws of customs, have theft as their point of departure.

The crook, the fraud, the charlatan, those who speak in the name of God or who represent society, like those who sell charms, above all makes use of the dexterity of his hands, of the subtlety of his minds, of the prestige of eloquence and of a great fecundity of imagination. His talent consists in knowing the right moment to excite cupidity. The legislator as well, wanting to show his esteem for talent and kindness, has created below the category of crimes, where one only makes use of force and ambushes, and which leads to the most terrible punishments, the category of misdemeanors, liable only to correctional, not to ignominious, punishments. How droll of spiritualism!

One robs by usury.

This species of robbery, so odious formerly in the Church and still so severely punished in our times, does not distinguish itself from the loan at interest, one of the most energetic springs of production, and forms the transition between forbidden and authorized robbery. Also it gives place, by its equivocal nature, to a mass of contradictions in the laws and in morals, contradictions very simply exploited by the men of the palace, of finance and of commerce.

Thus the usurer who loans at 10 percent on a mortgage incurs an enormous fine, if he is caught; the banker who receives the same interest, not, it is true, from a loan, but as a commission, is protected by royal privilege. It would take too long to enumerate all the sorts of robbery which are committed by finance: let it suffice to say that among all the ancient peoples the profession of money-changer, banker, publican or traitant were not reputed very honorable. Today the capitalists who place their funds either on the State, or in commerce, at a perpetual interest of 3, 4, or 5 percent, that is to say those who receive on top of the legitimate price of the loan an interest less than that received by the bankers and usurers, are the flower of society. It is always the same system: moderation in robbery makes our virtue.

One robs by the constitution of rent, farm-rent, house-rent, and leases.

Rent, considered in his principle and its aim, is the agrarian law by which all men must become guaranteed and irremovable proprietors of the soil; as for its importance, it represents the portion of the fruits which exceeds the wage of the producer, and which belongs to the community. During the period of organization, that rent in paid, in the name of society which is always manifested by the individualization as it is explained by the facts, to the proprietor. But the proprietor does more than receive the rent, he alone enjoys it; he renders nothing to the community, he does not divide with his fellows, he devours, putting himself into it, the product of the collective labor. Thus there is robbery, legal robbery if you wish, but real robbery.

There is theft, in commerce and industry, every time the entrepreneur holds back from the worker some part of his wages, or receives a bonus on top of that which comes back to him.

I have proven, in dealing with value, that every labor must leave a surplus; so that in supposing the consumption of the laborer to be always the same, his labor should create, on top of his subsistence, a capital always greater. Under the regime of property, the excess of labor, essentially collective, passes entirely, like the rent, to the proprietor: now, between that disguised appropriation and the fraudulent usurpation of a communal good, where is the difference?

The consequence of that usurpation is that the laborer, whose share of the collective is constantly confiscated by the entrepreneur, is always on his uppers, while the capitalist is always in profit; that commerce, the exchange of essentially equal values, is no more than the art of buying for 3 fr. what is worth 6, and of selling or 6 fr. that which is worth 3; and that political economy, that upholds and advocates that regime, is the theory of robbery, as property, the respect of which maintains a similar state of things, is the religion of force. It is just, M. Blanqui said recently to the Academy of Moral Sciences in a speech on the coalitions, that labor participate in the wealth that it produces. If then he does not participate, it is unjust; and if it is unjust, it is robbery, and the proprietors are robbers. Speak plainly then, economists!...

Justice, at the end of the negative community, called by the ancient poets the golden age, is thus the right of force. In a society which becomes organized, the inequality of faculties awakens the idea of value; that leads to the idea of proportion between merit and fortune; and as the first and only merit thus recognized is force, it is the strongest, the aristos (superlative A'arés, fort, proper name of the god Mars), who, being the most deserving, the best, aristos, have a right to the largest portion; and if that portion is refused to them, tout naturellement il s'en empare. De là à s'arroger the right of property over all things, that is only a step.

Such was justice in the heroic age, preserved, at least by tradition, among the Greeks and Romans down to the last days of their republics. Plato, in the “Gorgias,” introduces a character named Callicles, who spiritedly defends the right of the strongest, which Socrates, the advocate of equality, tou isou, seriously refutes. It is related of the great Pompey, that he blushed easily, and, nevertheless, these words once escaped his lips: “Why should I respect the laws, when I have arms in my hand?” This shows him to have been a man in whom the moral sense and ambition were struggling for the mastery, and who sought to justify his violence by the motto of the hero and the brigand.

The right of force was succeeded by the right of cunning, which was only a degradation of the first, and a new manifestation of justice: detested right of the heroes, which did not shine there and wasted too much. The well-known story of Oedipus and the Sphinx is an allusion to that right of cunning, according to which the victor was master, as in war, of the life of the vanquished. Skill in deceiving an enemy by treacherous propositions seemed deserving of reward; but by a reaction which revealed already the true sentiments of the just, and which was however only an inconsequence, the strong always boasted of good faith and simplicity, while the skilled despised the strong, calling them brutal and barbaric.

In those days, respect for one’s word and observation of oaths was of a rigor literal rather than logical: Uti lingua nuncupassit, ita jus esto, — “As the tongue has spoken, so must the right be,” says the law of the Twelve Tables. Nascent raison attaches itself less to the substance than to the form; it senses from instinct that it is the form, the method, which makes all its certainty. Artifice, or rather perfidy, was nearly all of politics of ancient Rome. Among other examples, Vico cites this one, also related by Montesquieu: The Romans had had guaranteed to Carthaginians the preservation of their goods and their city, using by design the word civitas, which means society, State. The Carthaginians, on the contrary, understanding them to mean the material city, urbs, and accordingly beginning to rebuild their walls, were attacked for the infraction of the treaty by the Romans, who, acting on the heroic idea of right, did not believe it sinful, having deceived their enemies with an equivocation, to sustain an unjust war. Modern diplomacy has changed nothing of these antiques habits.

In theft, as it is forbidden by law, force and fraud are used alone and without accessories. In authorized theft they are disguised under some utility, of which they serve as a vehicle for despoiling their victim.

The direct recourse to violence and to guile has been recently, and in a unanimous voice, rejected; it is that agreement of the peoples to renounce force which constitutes and distinguishes civilization. No nation has yet managed to deliver itself from robbery disguised by labor, talent and possession.

The right of force and the right of cunning, celebrated by rhapsodies in the poems of the Iliad and the Odyssey, inspired the Greek republics, and filled with their spirit the Roman laws, from which it has passed into our mores and our codes. Christianity has changed nothing in this regard: Christianity, having arisen, in religion, hostile from the beginning to philosophy and contemptuous of science, could not fail to accommodate all that which was in essence religious. It is thus that after having made profession of equality and common sense in Saint Matthew and Saint Paul, it mustered little by little around it the superstitions that it had at first proscribed: polytheism, dualism, trinitarianism, magic, necromancy, hierarchy, monarchy, property, all the religions and abominations of the earth.

The ignorance of the pontiffs and the councils, on all that which relates to morals, has equaled that of the forum and of the lenders; and that profound ignorance of society and of right/law is what has misled the Church and which dishonors forever its teaching. Moreover, the infidelity has been general; all the Christian sects have misunderstood the precept of Christ; all have erred in morals, because they erred in doctrine: all are guilty of false propositions, full of iniquity and homicide. Let it ask pardon of society, that Church which called itself infallible, and which has not been able to preserve the deposit; let its so-called reformed sisters be humiliated/abased... and the people, disillusioned, but clement, will decide.

Thus property, the conventional right, as different from justice as eclecticism is from truth, and value from the mercurial, is constituted by a series of oscillations between the two extremes of injustice, violent force and perfidious cunning, between which the contenders stop always at a convention. But justice comes following compromise; the convention will sooner or later express the reality; the true right frees itself incessantly from the sophistical and arbitrary right; the reform will come about by the struggle of intelligence and force; and it is to this vast movement, whose point of departure is in the darkness of savagery, and which expires the day when society rises to the synthetic idea of possession and of value; it is that ensemble of transformations and of revolutions instinctively accomplishes and which seeks its scientific and definitive solution, that I call the religion of property.

But if property, spontaneous and progressive, is a religion, it is, like monarchy and priesthood, of divine right. Similarly, the inequality of conditions and fortunes, poverty, is of divine right; perjury and robbery are of divine institution; the exploitation of man by man is the affirmation, I almost said the manifestation of God. The true theists are the proprietors; the defenders of property are all God-fearing men; the sentences to death and poverty, that they carry out on one another as a result of their misunderstandings of property, are human sacrifices offered to the god of force. Those, on the contrary, who proclaim the imminent end of property, who evoke with Jesus Christ and Saint Paul the abolition of property; who think about production, consumption and distribution of wealth, are the anarchists and the atheists; and society, which advances visibly to equality and science, society is the incessant negation of God.

Demonstration of the hypothesis of God by property, and necessity of atheism for the physical, moral and intellectual improvement of man, such is the strange problem remains for us to resolve. A few words will suffice: the facts are known, our proof is mad.

The dominant idea of the century, the most ordinary and most authentic idea today is the idea of Progress. Since Lessing, progress, become the basis of social beliefs, enjoys in minds the same role as revelation did in times past, that one says that it denies, while in reality it only translates it. The Latin revelatio, like the Greek apokulupsis, means literally unfurling, progress: but religious antiquity saw that unfurling in a history recounted, before the event, by God himself, while the philosophical reason of the moderns sees it in the succession of facts accomplished. Prophecy is not the opposite, it is the myth of the philosophy of history.

The development of humanity, such is them, but with a larger and larger consciousness, our idea the most profound and most comprehensive: development of language and laws; development of religions and philosophies; economic and industrial development; development of justice, by force, cunning, and conventions; development of the sciences and arts. And Christianity, which embraces every religion, which is opposed to every philosophy, which relies on one side on revelation, on the other on penitence, that is to say which believes in the education of man by reason and experience, Christianity, in its entirety, is the symbolization of progress.

In light of that sublime, fertile and highly rational idea of progress, persists and seems to revive yet another idea, gigantic, enigmatic, as impenetrable to our dialectical instruments as are to the telescope the depths of the firmament: it is the idea of God.

What is God?

God is, hypothetically, the eternal, the all powerful, the infallible, the immutable, the spontaneous, in a word, the infinite in all faculties, properties and manifestations. God is the being in whom intelligence and activity, elevated to an Infinite power, becomes adequate and identical to fatality itself: Summa lex, summa libertas, summa necessitas. God is thus by essence anti-progressive and anti-providential: Dictum factum, there is his motto, his single and unique law. And as in him eternity excludes Providence, just so infallibility excludes the apperception of error, and as a consequence the apperception of evil: sanctus in omnibus operibus suis. But God, by his quality of infinity in all senses, acquires a specification of his own, and consequently a possibility of existence resulting from his opposition to the finite being, progressive and providential, whom he conceives as his antagonist. God, in a word, having nothing contradictory in his concept, is possible, and there is place to verify this involuntary hypothesis of our reason.

All these notions have been furnished to us by the analysis of human being, considered in its moral and intellectual constitution; they are presented to us, à la suite of an irrefutable dialectic, as the necessary postulate of our contingent nature and of our function on the globe.

Later, that which we have first conceived as only a simple possibility of existence, is raised by the theory, from irreducible dualism and the progression of beings, importance of a probability. We have noted that the fact, acquired from now on by science, of a progressive creation, which unfurls on a dualistic substance, and of which the reason and the last term are already given to us, involved at its origin another fact, that of an essence infinite in spontaneity, effectiveness and certainty, of which all the attributes, as a consequence, would be the opposite of those of man.

It remains then to bring into the light that probable fact, that existence sine qua non that reason demands, that observation suggests, but that nothing yet demonstrates, and that, in any case, its infinity and is solitude dares us to hope to understand. It remains to demonstrate the indemonstrable, to penetrate the inaccessible, to place, in short, under the regard of mortal man, the infinite.

This problem, insoluble at first glance, contradictory in its terms, is reduced, if one takes the trouble to reflect on it, to the following theorem, in which every contradiction disappears: To equate inevitability and progress, in such a manner that infinite existence and progressive existence,—adequate to one another, but not identical, and, on the contrary, opposite, penetrating each other, but not merging, serving mutually as expression and law,—appear to us in turn, as the mind and matter which constitute them, but on another dimension, like the two inseparable and irreducible faces of the being.

One has seen, and we have had care to note on more than one occasion, that in social science the ideas are all equally eternal and evolving, simple and complex, aphoristic and subordinate. For a transcendent intelligence, there is in the economic system neither principle, nor consequence, nor demonstration, nor deduction: the truth is one and self-same, without condition of sequence, because it is truth everywhere, under an infinite number of aspects, and in an infinity of theories and systems. It is only by the didactic exposition that the series of propositions are manifested. Society is like a scientist who, having science lodged in his brain, embraces it in its ensemble, conceives it without beginning or end, grasps it simultaneously and distinctly in all its parts, and find for each of them evidence and equal priority. But does that same man want to produce science? He is forced to unwind it in successive words, propositions and discourses, that is, to present as a progression that which appears to him as an indivisible whole.

Thus, the ideas of liberty, of equality, of mine and thine, of merit and demerit, of credit and debit, of servant and master, of proportion, of value, of competition, of monopoly, of taxation, of exchange, of division of labor, of machines, of customs, of rent, of inheritance, etc., etc., all the categories, all the oppositions, all the syntheses named from the origin of the world in the economic vocabulary, are contemporary in reason. And yet, in order to constitute a science which is accessible to us, these ideas must be graded according to a theory which shows them to us engendering one another, and which has its beginning, middle and end. In order to enter into human practice and realize itself in an efficacious manner, these same ideas must se poser in a series of oscillating institutions, accompanied by a thousand unforeseen accidents and long experiments by trial and error. In short, as in science there is the absolute and transcendental truth, and the theoretical truth, so in society there is at once both inevitability and providence, spontaneity and reflection, the second of these two powers laboring constantly to supplant the first, but making always in reality only the same drudgery.

Inevitability is thus a form of being and of the idea; deduction, progress, is another form.

But inevitability, progress, these are abstractions of language that do not know nature, in which all is realized or is not. There is, then, in humanity, inevitable being and progressive being, inseparables, but distinct; opposed, antagonistic, but never irreducible.

As creatures endowed with an unreflective and involuntary spontaneity, subject to the laws of a physique and social organism, ordained for all eternity, immutable in its terms, irresistible in its ensemble, and which fulfilled and realized by development and belief; as we live, grow and die, as we labor, exchange, love, etc., we are the inevitable being, in quo vivimus, movemur and sumus. We are its substance, its soul, its body, its face, by the same title and neither less nor more than the animals, plants and stones.

Bust as we observe, reflect, learn and act in consequence; as we submit ourselves to nature and become masters of ourselves, we are the progressive being; we are men. God, natura naturans, is the base, the eternal substance of society; and society, natura naturata, is the inevitable being in perpetual emission of itself. Physiology represents, somewhat imperfectly, that duality, in its well-known distinction between organic life and the life of relation. God does not exist solely in society, he is in all nature: but it is only in society that God is glimpsed, by his opposition with the progressive being; it is society, it is man who by his evolution made the original pantheism cease, and that is why the natural scientist who buries himself and is absorbed in physiology and matter, without ever studying society or man, loses little by little the sense of divinity. Everything is God for him, which is to say, there is no God.

God and man, divers de nature, are thus distinguished by their ideas and their acts, in short, by their language.

The world is the consciousness of God. The ideas or of consciousness in God are attraction, movement, life, number, measure, unity, opposition, progression, series, equilibrium: all the ideas conceived and produced eternally, consequently without succession, foresight or error. The language of God, the signs of his ideas, are all the beings and their phenomena.

The ideas or facts of consciousness in man are attention, comparison, memory, judgment, reasoning, imagination, time, space, causality, the beautiful and the sublime, love and hate, sadness and sensuality. These ideas, man produces them outside by some specific signs: speech, industry, agriculture, sciences and arts, religions, philosophies, laws, governments, wars, conquests, joyous and gloomy ceremonies, revolutions, progress.

The ideas de God are common to men, which comes from God like nature; which is only even the consciousness of nature; which takes the ideas of God for principles and materials for all of his, and converts in his being and assimilates incessantly the divine substance. But the ideas of the man are strangers to God, who does not understand our progress, and for whom all the products of our imagination are monsters, or voids. That is why man speaks the language of God as his own, while God is powerless to speak the language of man; and no conversation, no pact between them is possible. That is why all that which in humanity comes from God, focuses on God or returns to God, is hostile to man, harmful to his development and to his perfection.

God creates the world, and drives, so to speak, man from himself, because he is infinite power, and his essence is to engender progress eternally: Pater ab Å“vo se videns parem sibi gignit natum, says the Catholic theology. God and man are necessary to one another, and one of the two cannot be denied without the other disappearing at the same time. What would progress be without an absolute and immutable law? What would necessity be, if it did not unfold outside? Let us suppose, against all reason, that the activity in God suddenly ceased: creation would return to a chaotic existence; it returns to the state of matter without forms, mind without ideas, unintelligible necessity. If God ceases to act, then God is no longer.

But God and man, despite the necessity which enchains them, are irreducible; what the moralists have called, by a pious calumny, the war of man with himself, and who is at base only the war of man against God, the war of reflection against instinct, the war of the reason which prepares, chooses and temporizes, against the impetuous and fatal passion, is its unimpeachable proof. The existence of God and man is proven by their eternal antagonism: here is what explains the contradiction of the cults, who sometimes plead with God to spare man, to not deliver him to temptation, like Phaedra begging Venus to uproot from his heart the love of Hippolytus; sometimes ask God for wisdom and intelligence, like the sons of David in mounting to the throne, as we still make in our masses of Saint-Esprit. There is what explains, finally, the majority of civil and religious wars, the persecution made to ideas, the fanaticism of customs, the hatred of science, and the horror of progress, premiere causes of all the evils that afflict our species.

Man, as man, can never be found in contradiction with himself; he senses trouble and suffering only by the resistance of God that is in him. In man is brought together all the spontaneities of nature, all the instigations of inevitable Being, all the gods and demons of the universe. In order to subdue this powers, to discipline that anarchy, man has only his reason, his progressive thought: and this is what makes up the sublime drama of which the incidents form, by their ensemble, the last reason of all the existences. The destiny of nature and of man is the metamorphosis of God: but God is inexhaustible, and our struggle eternal.

Let us not be surprised then if everything that professes to mysticism and religion, everything that raises or claims to represent God, all that which endeavors to retrogress towards primitive ignorance, all that which advocates the satisfaction of the flesh and the worship of the passions, shows itself a partisan of property, enemy of equality and of justice. We are on the verge of a battle where all the enemies of man will be summoned against him, the senses, the heart, the imagination, pride, sloth, doubt: Astiterunt reges terrœ adversus Christum!... The cause of property is the cause of dynasties and of priesthoods, of demagoguery and of sophism, of the unproductive and of the parasites. No hypocrisy, no seduction will be spared to defend it. In order to lead the people, one will begin by feeling pity for its misery; one will excite in them love and tenderness, everything that can weaken courage and relax the will; one will raise above philosophical reflection and science its pleasant instincts. Then one will preach the national glories; one will stir up their patriotism; one will speak to them of their great men, and bit by bit, to the worship of Reason, always proscribed, one will substitute the cult of the exploiters, idolatry of the aristocrats.

For the people, like nature, loves to fulfill its ideas: to theoretical questions, the prefer questions of persons. If it revolts against Ferdinand, it is in order to obey Mazaniello. It requires a Lafayette, a Mirabeau, a Napoleon, a demi-god. It will not accept its salvation from the hands of a delegate, unless he dresses it up generally. And see how the worship of idols prospers! See the fanatics of Fourier and of good Icaria, great men who want to organize society, and have never been able to establish a kitchen; see the democrats, making greatness and virtue consist in a grandstand victory, always ready to race on the Rhine, like the Athenians at Chaeronea, at the voice of some Demosthenes who the day before would have received the gold of Philippe, and will cast his shield into the battle.

Nobody is occupied with ideas, principles, knowledge of accomplished facts: it seems that we already have too much ancient wisdom. Democracy is Rousseau; the dynastics and legitimists dream of Louis XIV; the bourgeois go back to Louis the Fat; the priests stop only at Gregory VII, and the socialists at Jesus: it is a question of who will go back the farthest. In this universal subsidence, study is no longer, like fragmented labor, anything but a manner of exhausting oneself; critique is reduced to some insipid farces; all philosophy expires.

Isn’t it there that we have seen, some months ago, when, in order to cite a single example of it, a scientist, friend of the people, professing to teach history and progress, across a flood of elegiac and dithyrambic phrases, was able to express on the social question only this pitiful judgment:

“As for communism, a word suffices. The last country where property will be abolished, it is precisely France. If, as someone of that school said, property is robbery, there are twenty-five million proprietors who will not part with it tomorrow.”

The author of that mockery is M. Michelet, professor at the College of France, member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences; and the someone to whom he alluded, is me. M. Michelet could name me without causing me to blush: the definition of property is mine, and my only ambition is to prove that I have understood its sense and range. Property, it is robbery! He has not said, in a thousand years, two words like those. I have no other goods on the earth than that definition of property: but I hold it more precious than the millions of the Rothschilds, and I dare say that it will be the most significant event of the government of Louis-Philippe.

But who then has said to M. Michelet that the negation of property necessarily implies communism? How does he know that France is the last country in the world where property will be abolished? Why, instead of twenty-five millions proprietors, hasn’t he said thirty-four? Where has he seen that we have accused persons, as we blame the institutions? And when he adds that the twenty-five millions of proprietors who possess France will not relinquish tomorrow, who gives him the right to suppose that one had need for that of their consent? In five lines M. Michelet has managed to be absurd five times: he intends doubtless to fulfill the prediction that I had formerly made against whoever should attempt in the future to defend property. But what to respond to a man who, after forty years of the study of history, has come, despite all science, to preach to the nineteenth century emancipation by instinct?... Let another debate with M. Michelet: as for me, I refer him to the chronology.

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THE SYSTEM OF ECONOMIC CONTRADICTIONS

CHAPTER XI

EIGHTH EPOCH.—PROPERTY

[continued from Part 4]

Thus property, which should consummate the holy union of man and nature, leads only to an odious prostitution. The sultan uses and abuses his slave: the earth is for him an instrument of luxury... I find here more than a metaphor; I discover a profound analogy.

What is it that, in the relations of the sexes, distinguishes marriage from concubinage? Everyone senses the difference between these two things; few people would be in a state to render an account of it, so obscure has the question become by the license of the custom and insolence of the Romans.

Is it the progeny? One sees some illicit affairs produce as much and as well as the most fecund of legitimate unions. — Is it the duration? Quite a number of bachelors keep for eighteen years a mistress, who, first humiliated and shamed, subjugates in her turn and demeans her disgraceful lover. Moreover, the perpetuity of the marriage can very well change from obligatory to optional by means of divorce, without the marriage losing any of its character. Perpetuity is doubtless the wish of love and the hope of the family: but it is not at all essential to the marriage; it can always, without offending the sacrament, be, for certain causes, interrupted. — Is it, finally, the wedding ceremony, four words pronounced in front of a deputy and a priest? What virtue can such a formality have for love, steadfastness, devotion? Marat, like Jean-Jacques, had married his governess in the woods, with the sun as his witness. The holy man had contracted in very good faith, and did not doubt that his alliance was as decent and respectable as if it had been counter-signed by the municipal clerk. Marat, in the most important act of his life, had judged it proper to do without the intervention of the Republic: he put, in accordance with the ideas of M. Louis Blanc, the natural fact above the convention. Who then prevents us from all doing as Marat did? And what is meant by this word marriage?

What constitutes marriage is the fact that society is present there, not only at the instant of the promises, but as long as the cohabitation of the spouses lasts. Society, I say, alone receives for each of the espoused the oath of the other; it alone gives them their rights, since it alone can make these rights authentic; and while seeming only to impose some mutual duties on the contracting parties, actually specifies for itself. “We are united in God,” said Tobias to Sarah, “before we are between ourselves; the children of the saints cannot be joined in the manner of the beasts and barbarians.” In that union consecrated by the magistrate, visible organ of society, and in the presence of witnesses who represent it, the love is supposed free and reciprocal, and the posterity predicted as in the accidental unions; the perpetuity of the love is wished for, evoked, but not guaranteed; even voluptuousness is permitted: the only difference, but that difference is an abyss, is that in concubinage egoism alone presides over the union, while in marriage the intervention of society purifies that egoism.

And see the consequences. Society, which takes revenge on the adulterer and punishes the perjurer, does not receive the plaint of the man against his concubine: it thinks no more of such amours than it does of the couplings of dogs, foris canes et impudici! It turns away in disgust. Society rejects his widow and orphan, and does not allow them the succession; in its eyes the mother is a prostitute; the child is a bastard. It is as if it said to the one: You have given birth without me; you can defend yourself and provide for yourself without me. To the other: Your father has sired you for his pleasure; it does not please me to adopt you. That which does injury to marriage cannot claim the guarantee of marriage: such is the social law, a law that is rigorous, but just, which it is only for the socialist hypocrisy,—to those who want a love that is at once chaste and lewd,—to calumniate.

This feeling for social intervention in the most personal and most self-willed act of man, this indefinable respect for a present God, which increases love by rending it chaste, is for the spouses a source of mysterious affections, unknown apart from it. In marriage, man is the lover of all women, because in marriage alone he feels the true love, which unites him sympathetically to all of the sex; but he knows only his spouse, and by knowing only her, he loves more, because without that carnal exclusion, the marriage would disappear, and love with it. The platonic community, asked for increasingly by contemporary reformers, does not give love, it only shows its caput mortuum; because, in this communism of bodies and souls, love, not determining itself, remains in a state of abstraction and dream.

Marriage is the true community of loves and the type of all individual possession. In all his relations with persons and things, man truly contracts only with society, which is to say, at the end of the day, with himself, with the ideal and holy being which lives in him. Destroy that respect of the self, of society, that fear of God, as the Bible says, which is present in all our actions, in all our thoughts; and man, abusing his soul, his mind, his faculties, abusing nature, man, sullied and polluted, becomes, by an irresistible degradation, libertine, tyrant, scoundrel.

Now, just as by the mystical intervention of society, impure love becomes chaste love, so that wild fornication is transformed into a peaceful and holy marriage; just so, in the economic order and in the forecasts of society, property, the prostitution of capital, is only the first moment of a social and legitimate possession. Until then the proprietor abuses rather than enjoys; his happiness is a lewd dream: he embraces, but does not possess. Property is always that abominable droit du seigneur which in times past stirred up the outraged serf, and which the French Revolution was not able to abolish. Under the empire of that right, all the products of labor are filthy: competition is a mutual incitement to debauchery; the privileges accorded to talent are the wage of prostitution. In vain, by its police, the State would like to oblige fathers to recognize their children, and to sign for the shameful fruits of their works. The stain is indelible: the bastard, conceived in iniquity, heralds the turpitude of his creator. Commerce is no longer anything but a traffic in slaves destined, these to the pleasure of the rich, those to the cult of the Vénus populaire; and society is a vast system of procuring where each, discouraged from love, the honest man because his love is betrayed, the man of good fortunes because the variety of intrigues is for him an appurtenance of love, dashes and rolls in the orgy.

Abuse! Cry the jurists, perversity of man. It is not property that makes us envious and greedy, which makes our passions spring up, and arms with its sophisms our bad faith. It is our passions, our vices, on the contrary, which sully and corrupt property.

I would like it as well if one says to me that it is not concubinage that sullies man, but that it is man who, by his passions and vices, sullies and corrupts concubinage. But, doctors, the facts that I denounce, are they, or are they not, of the essence of property? Are they not, from the legal point of view, irreprehensible, placed in the shelter of every judiciary action? Can I remand to the judge, summon to appear before the tribunals this journalist who prostitutes his pen for money? That advocate, that priest, who sells to iniquity, the one his speech, the other his prayers? This doctor who allows the poor man to perish, if he does not submit in advance the fee demanded? This old satyr who deprives his children for a courtesan? Can I prevent a licitation that will abolish the memory of my forefathers, and render their posterity without ancestors, as if it was of incestuous or adulterine stock? Can I restrain the proprietor, without compensating him beyond what he possesses, that is without wrecking society, for heeding the needs of society?...

Property, you say, is innocent of the crime of the proprietor; property is good and useful in itself: it is our passions and our vices which deprave it.

Thus, in order to save property, you distinguish it from morals! Why not distinguish it right away from society? That was precisely the reasoning of the economists. Political economy, said M. Rossi, is in itself good and useful; but it is not moral: it proceeds, setting aside all morality; it is for us not to abuse its theories, to profit from its teachings, according to the higher laws of morality. As if he said: Political economy, the economy of society is not society; the economy of society proceeds without regard to any society; it is up to us not to abuse its theories, to profit from its teachings, according to the higher laws of society! What chaos!

I not only maintain with the economists that property is neither morals nor society; but more that it is by its principle directly contrary to morals and to society, just as political economy is anti-social, because its theories are diametrically opposed to the social interest.

According to the definition, property is the right of use and abuse, which is to say the absolute, irresponsible domain, of man over his person and his goods. If property ceased to be the right of abuse, it would cease to be property. I have taken my examples from the category of abusive acts permitted to the proprietor: what happens here that is not of an unimpeachable legality and propriety? Hasn’t the proprietor the right to give his goods to whomever seems good to him, to leave his neighbor to burn without crying fire, to oppose himself to the public good, to squander his patrimony, to exploit and fleece the worker, to produce badly and sell badly? Can the proprietor be judicially constrained to use his property well? Can he be disturbed in the abuse? What am I saying? Isn’t property, precisely because it is abusive, that which is most sacred for the legislator? Can one conceive of a property for which police would determine the use, and suppress the abuse? And is it not evident, finally, that if one wanted to introduce justice into property, one would destroy property; as the law, by introducing honesty into concubinage, has destroyed concubinage?

Thus, property, in principle and in essence, is immoral: that proposition is soon reached by critique. Consequently the Code, which, in determining the right of the proprietor, has not reserved those of morals, is a code of immorality; jurisprudence, that alleged science of right, which is nothing other than the collection of the proprietary rubrics, is immoral, and justice, is instituted in order protect the free and peaceful abuse of property; justice, which orders us to come to the aid against those who would oppose themselves to that abuse; which afflicts and marks with infamy whoever is so daring as to claim to mend the outrages of property, justice is infamous. If child, supplanted in the paternal affection by an unworthy mistress, should destroy the document which disinherits and dishonors him, he would respond before justice. Accused, convicted, condemned, he would go to the penal colony to make honorable amends to property, while the prostitute will be sent off in possession. Where then is the immorality here? Where is the infamy? Is it not on the side of justice? Let us continue to unwind this chain, and we will soon know the whole truth that we seek. Not only is justice, instituted to protect property, itself abusive, itself immoral, infamous; but the penal sanction is infamous, the police are infamous, the executioner and the gallows, infamous, and property, which embraces that whole series, property, from which this odious lineage come, property is infamous.

Judges armed to defend it, magistrates whose zeal is a permanent threat to those accused by it, I question you. What have you seen in property which has been able in this way to subjugate your conscience and corrupt your judgment? What principle, superior without doubt to property, more worthy of your respect than property, makes it so precious to you? When its works declare it infamous, how do you proclaim it holy and sacred? What consideration, what prejudice affects you?

Is it the majestic order of human societies, that you do not understand, but of which you suppose that property is the unshakeable foundation?—No, since property, as it is, is for you order itself; since first it is proven that property is by nature abusive, that is to say disorderly and anti-social.

Is it Necessity or Providence, the laws of which we do not understand, but the designs of which we adore? —No, since, according to the analysis, property being contradictory and corruptible, it is for that very reason a negation of Necessity, an injury to Providence.

Is it a superior philosophy considering human miseries from on high, and seeking by evil to obtain the good? — No, since philosophy is the agreement of reason and experience, and in the judgment of reason as in that of experience, property is condemned.

Would this not be religion? — Perhaps!....

[to be continued...]

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THE SYSTEM OF ECONOMIC CONTRADICTIONS

CHAPTER XI

EIGHTH EPOCH.—PROPERTY

1.—Property is inexplicable apart from the economic series.—Of the organization of common sense, or problem of certainty.

The problem of property is, after that of human destiny, the greatest that reason can propose, and the last that it will be able to resolve. Indeed, the theological problem, the enigma of religion, has been explicated; the philosophical problem, which treats the value and legitimacy of knowledge, is resolved: there remains the social problem, which simply joins these two, and the solution of which, as everyone believes, comes essentially from property.

I will set out in this chapter the theory of property in itself [en soi], that is, in its origin, its spirit, its tendency, and its relations with the other economy categories. As for determining property for itself, as it must be after the integral solution of the contradictions, and what it becomes every day, this is, as I have said, the last phase of the social constitution, the object of a new labor, of which this one aims to provide a glimpse of the design and to posit the bases.

In order to understand clearly the theory of property in itself, it is necessary to address the highest concerns, and to present in a new way the essential identity of philosophy and political economy.

As civilization, from the point of view of industry, aims to constitute the value of products and organize labor, and as society is nothing other than this constitution and this organization, the object is to found judgment by determining the value of knowledge and organizing the common sense; and what we call logic is nothing other than this determination and organization.

Logic, society, which is to say always reason: such is then the destiny here below of our species, considered in its generative faculties, activity and intelligence. Thus humanity, by its successive manifestations, is a living logic: it is this which made us say, at the beginning of this work, that each economic fact is the expression of a law of the mind, and that as there is nothing in the understanding that has not been previously in experience, neither is there anything in social practice which does not come from an abstraction of reason.

Thus, society, like logic, has as a primordial law the agreement of reason and experience. To bring reason and experience into accord, to advance theory and practice in unison, is what both the economist and the philosopher propose; it is the first and last commandment imposed on every man who acts and thinks. It is a simple condition, doubtless, if one only envisions it in that formula, seemingly so simple; but it involves a prodigious effort, if one considers all that man has done from the beginning, as much in order to escape from it as in order to comply.

But what do we mean by the agreement of reason and experience, or, as we have called it, the organization of common sense, which is itself only logic?

First, I call common sense judgment insofar as it applies to things that are intuitively and immediately evident, of which the perception requires neither deduction nor research. Common sense is more than instinct: instinct has no consciousness of its determinations, while common sense knows what it wants and why. Common sense is not faith, genius or habit, which are neither known nor judged, while common sense is known and judged, as it knows and judges all that surrounds it.

Common sense is equal in all men. This is what brings to ideas the highest degree of evidence and the most perfect certainty: it is not this which has aroused philosophical doubt.

Common sense is at once reason and experience synthetically united: it is, once more, judgment but without dialectic or calculation.

But common sense, by the very fact that it falls only on things that are immediately evident, rejects general ideas, and the linking of propositions, and consequently method and science: so that the more a man gives himself to speculation, the more he seems to depart from common sense, starting with certainty. How then do men, equal in common sense, become equal in science, which they naturally reject?

Common sense is susceptible to neither increase nor decrease: judgment considered in itself cannot cease to be always the same, always equal to itself and identical. How, once more, is it possible, not only to maintain equality of capacities apart from common sense, but also to raise knowledge in them above common sense?

That difficulty, so formidable at first glance, evaporates when we look at it closely. To organize the judiciary faculty, or common sense, is, properly speaking, to discover the general procedures by means of which the mind comes to know the unknown by a series of judgments which all, taken in isolation, are of an intuitive and immediate evidence, but taken together give a formula that one could not have obtained without that progression, a formula which, consequently, surpasses the ordinary scope of common sense.

Thus the entire system of our knowledge rests on common sense, but raises itself indefinitely above common sense, which, bound to the particular and the immediate, cannot embrace the general with its simple regard, and must, in order to achieve that, divide it: like a man who, covering in a step only the width of a furrow, by repeating the same movement a certain number of times, circles the globe. [1]

Agreement of reason and experience, organization of the common sense, discovery of the general procedures by which the judgment, always identical, raises itself to the most sublime contemplations: such is the major work of humanity, that which has given rise to the largest, most complicated and most dramatic incident which has been accomplished on the earth. Neither science, religion nor society had to go anywhere near so long and deploy so much power in order to be established: this great labor, begun thirty centuries ago, has hardly managed to define itself. Eight volumes would hardly suffice to tell the story: I am going, in a few pages, to retrace the principle phases. This summary is indispensable to us in order to explain the appearance of property.

[1] Dialectic is properly the advance of the mind from one idea to another, across a superior idea, a series.

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I'm working on gathering the pieces for a series of pamphlets documenting the mutualist tradition, and ran across this rather strange, but very interesting piece, but the frequently strange, but always interesting Dyer D. Lum. Tucker's translation of the first volume of The System of Economical Contradictions was published in 1888, and Lum's 1892 piece seems to be a fairly idiosyncratic commentary on it.

[I admit that I have tended to treat the Contradictions as a sort of badly flawed middle-step between the initial critique of property in 1840 and the realization that "the antinomy does not resolve itself" in 1858, but I have been spending a lot of time with it recently, translating the study on property for the forthcoming Proudhon reader, and working through some of the rest of it to establish contexts--and I have become rather enthusiastic about the work. Proudhon's suggestion that institutions had to be grappled with in the context of the political and economic "series" of which they formed only a part (the fruit of his engagement with Fourier's thought in The Creation of Order in Mankind (1842)) is key to understanding the ways that he continued to evaluate institutions, and particularly the institution of property, in his later works. Proudhon himself created a series of commentaries on property: the truth of property--or at least the truth of Proudhon's conception of property--is in the series, and in the additional steps implied, rather than in any of the particular, decidedly approximate, analyses that Proudhon made.]

---

The Twentieth Century. May 19, 1892. 7-10.

MUTUALISM

DYER D. LUM

We often derive a coign of vantage in reviewing old scenes through the lens of a different word; though the field of vision be a familiar one, the various word-lenses we use often bring out in bolder or less relief the features of the picture. The triune formula of Hegel, used so effectively by Proudhon in his analysis of industrial relations, may here offer us such an instrument for the survey of history in the same field; for, after all, history is but the biography of the race-soul in its effort to construct a cosmos from the chaotic web of events in which it finds itself immersed. In fact, it is the ceaseless transformation and flux of social relations which create the various vestments of humanity, which we ticket in the race-wardrobe as religion, poetry, philosophy, science, politics, etc. A never-ending process which actually is "the roaring loom of time which weaves for God in the garment we see him by."

In Hegel's thought, which he applied to all knowledge, from the two contradictions, is, and is not, the "roaring loom of time" weaves for us a neutral point in becoming. Without accepting his ontology, his dialectical method remains a most exhaustive instrument for synthetic generalization. Nor is this neutral point by any means a compromise between opposites, for the notion returns enriched by the process, becomes the substantial union of both its terms, richer in scope and harmony. Though the writer differs widely from his logic, his method opens rich fields when applied to the philosophy of history, of which one such is my present purpose.

In the biography of the race we see this exemplified in the evolution of industrialism. From the crude, disjointed efforts of the savage, we find industrial relations marked by two opposing characterizations of human activity: the rule of personal and impersonal will. Let us briefly scan these:

1. Slavery, the first step towards the solidarite of effort, was the cradle of industry. It was in this subordination to the personal rule of others that the first lever of civilization, division of labor, lifted mankind out of the animal phase of "each scratching for himself." Less barbarous than the slaughter of the captive, it made possible the development of the softer, or human, feelings which now are asserting mastery over the brute in man.

Excess in products became possible, and pari passu increased socialization. Through the first capital was born, and by this and the second slavery became modified to serfdom. But the advantage resulting rested mainly with the master. National wealth augmented, in which it is true all share somewhat, but the essential feature of this phase, personal rule, still dominated if but indirectly.

2. Capital supplants personal rule. It required the electric spark of the French Revolution to end the transitional agony, but since then capital has assumed a more mobile character; it has become impersonal, in itself, though confined yet by the leading strings of legalization to personal guidance in a large measure.

Labor has by this change become organized under capital. The essential spirit of this regime is free capital, but as it nears its maturity, to provide for the increasing surplus of labor, a surplusage dangerous to it, the economic struggle for existence finds manifestation in seeking new markets in new lands, Asia, Africa, South America. But this is but a struggle for breathing room only, and indicates that the world's activity is in another transition period; the issue being less how to doctor up a moribund system than to more clearly discern the phase toward which it leads and for which it is preparing the ground.

The rule of capital having been based, in itself, on freedom, it has only resulted to the benefit of those who could "corner" capital; further, that the impersonal rule of capital has too often degraded the labor it organized; that the capitalist as such is exempt from labor, and the laborer is doomed to crave as a favor the permission to use his muscles productively; all points inevitably to the conclusion that greater freedom can alone be in harmony with evolution, can meet the idea which has dominated past phases and prepared the way for each transitional change.

3. We may therefore find the third phase, the synthetic unity of the preceding ones, in free association, combining the necessity to labor of the first and the broader generalization of the second.

Both the personal rule of the one and the impersonal rule of the other, centered in the widened Self of social evolution, find the spirit of each materialized in mutual accord. The rivalry of excess of products and increased socialization merges self-will into the higher selfhood of interrelated humanity. And it is precisely because of this contradiction between the narrow self-will seen in slavery, and the broadened free-will to which capital aspires, that free association for mutual interests alone presents synthetic unity. Macaulay said that the remedy for the evils of capitalism will find their remedy in greater freedom to capital, which in turn preserves the economic benefit of slavery in the transformation of the egoistic self into the higher self of human interrelations.

We may again consider these phases under other terms. 1. Authority, the genius of the past, manifesting itself in priestcraft, statecraft, wherein "divine right" becomes personal rule intrenched in position. 2. Freedom, manifesting itself in rebellion, insubordination, the rebound to egoistic will: the negation not only of authority, but order as well. Activity, from the evils of a false cosmos, endeavoring to return to chaos, opposition. 3. Mutualism, or free association, is the synthesis wherein the race returns to enrich the union of thesis and antithesis with their harmonization in the higher self.

In other words, to use Hegel's, the formula is Position, Opposition, Composition. The position once intrenched in law, custom, tradition, etc., is negatived by opposition, of which illustrations are seen on every hand; but find their composition, or synthesis, in the order which invariably follows rather than precedes progress.

As in relogion the race has swung between the position of Faith, and the opposition of Doubt, Denial, so we may even now see philosophy seeking their composition in a reconciliating Conviction. So in the clearer consciousness of the Greater Self, the consensus of all past activity and the Over Soul of present endeavor, the ever increasing interweaving of higher and broader thought into the warp and woof of existence, the condition of social life--we may already discern reason harmonizing personal and impersonal will in the richer and fuller outgrowth and ingrowth--mutual will.

Thus through the lens, Mutualism, we view the scene of human activity, and lo! the relations which constitute it are seen to be the same we had already grown familiar with as scanned through the lens--Anarchy!

Northampton, Mass.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.

Now available thanks to Shawn P. Wilbur at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth:

In the second issue of Solidarité, dated April 1871, James Guillaume contributed this piece on the federative principle, in the context of the Paris Commune. Note the use of Proudhon's concept of "collective force." I'm working on translating a series of texts on nationality and the federative principle, to go with forthcoming issues of LeftLiberty.

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Federalism.

The true character of the revolution that was accomplished at Paris commence has been outlined in so marked a fashion that you, even the minds most unfamiliar with political theories, can now perceive it clearly.

The revolution of Paris is federalist.

The Parisian people want to have the liberty to organize themselves as they intend, without the rest of France having to mix in Parisian affairs; and at the same time, they renounce on their side all interference in the affairs of the departments, by urging them each to organize as their please, in the fullness of communal autonomy.

The different organizations which would be in this way freely constituted could then freely federate in order to mutually guarantee their rights and their independence.

It is important not to confuse federalism as it is understood by the Paris Commune with the so-called federalism which exists in Switzerland and in the United States of America.

Switzerland is simply a federative State, and that word alone already expresses all the differences between these two systems. Switzerland is a State, that is, it is a national unity; and, as a result, despite the federative appearance, sovereignty there is attributed to the nation in its ensemble. The cantons, instead of being considered as distinct individualities and absolute sovereigns, are supposed to be only fractions of a whole which is called the Swiss nation. A canton does not have the free disposition of itself: it can indeed, to a certain degree, manage its own affairs; but it does not possess true autonomy, its legislative faculties are limited by the federal constitution; and that federal constitution is not a contract, in the true sense of the word; it has not been accepted individually by each of the parties: it has been imposed on the cantons by the vote of a majority. A canton does not have the right to terminate the federal contract; it is forbidden from leaving the federation; it is even forbidden, as we see at this moment in the affairs of the Tessin, to divide in order to form new cantons. The least political or socialist movement, a strike for example, can bring federal troops into the canton.

Thus, federation, in Switzerland, is only in the words. It is not federation which is the true name of the Swiss system, it is decentralization. Switzerland realizes closely the system that had been established in France by the constitution of 1791, and that the Assembly of Versailles, “inspired by the great principles of 1789,” proposes to restore in order to seem to give in to federalist aspirations.

Federalism, in the sense given to it by the Paris Commune, and that was given to it many years ago by the great socialist Proudhon, who first scientifically outlined the theory,—federalism is above all the negation of the nation and the State.

For federalism, there is no more nation, no more national or territorial unity. There is only an agglomeration of federated communes, an agglomeration which has for its determining principle only the interests of the contracting parties, and which consequently has no regard for the questions of nationalism or of territory.

There is equally no more State, no more central power superior to the groups and imposing it them its authority: there is only the collective force resulting from the federation of the groups, and that collective force, which acts to maintenance and guarantee of the federal contract,—a true synallagmatic contract this time, stipulated individually by each of the parties,—this collective force, we say, can never become something prior and superior to the federated groups, something analogous to what the State is today to society and to the communes. The centralized and national State thus no longer exists, and the Communes enjoying the fullness of their independence, there is truly an-archy, absence of central authority.

But let us not believe that after having suppressed the States and nationalism, federalism leads to absolute individualism, to isolation, to egoism. No, federalism is socialist, and for it solidarity is inseparable from liberty. The communes, while remaining absolutely autonomous, feel themselves, by the force of things, in solidarity; and, without sacrificing any of their liberty, or, to put it better, to better assure their liberty, they unite themselves tightly by federative contracts, where they stipulate all that which touches their common interests: the large public services, the exchange of products, the guarantee of individual rights, and mutual aid in case of any aggression.

Let the French people, awakened finally by their misfortune, open their eyes to the light of truth: let them be in 1871 the initiators of the Federalist and Social Republic, as they were in 1793 the proclaimers of the rights of men; and in Europe, preserved from the gothic restoration with which the German Empire threatens it, will shine in a near future the days of liberty and equality.

Read the whole thing at Out of the Libertarian Labyrinth.