Who was Pierre-Joseph Proudhon?
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon came from a modest family in Besançon and began as a printer before a scholarship let him study. He became famous with What Is Property?, published in 1840, which answered that property is theft, meaning income taken from other people's work. In 1848 he sat in the French Constituent Assembly. Later he went to prison for attacking Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte in print. His own plan, called mutualism, rested on free contracts, associations of workers and a people's bank that lent without interest. In his last years he argued for a federation of self-governing communities. He died in 1865.
Political views
- Rejected government in itself, writing that the rule of one person by another is oppression.Source: plato.stanford.edu
- Said that property which pays rent, interest or profit without any labor is a kind of theft, while defending the right of people to hold what they use.Source: marxists.org
- Developed mutualism, in which producers trade under fair contracts and a bank offers credit free of interest.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- Preferred a federation of self-governing local communities and trade associations to a centralized state.Source: theanarchistlibrary.org
- Distrusted state communism as one more form of authority, a view that led to an open break with Marx.Source: en.wikipedia.org
- Held patriarchal views about women and the family, which appeared in works published after his death.Source: journals.lwbooks.co.uk
Legacy
Proudhon influenced Bakunin and Kropotkin, French syndicalism, Spanish federalists and the cooperative movement, and he did much to make anarchist a proud label. Marx attacked his economics in The Poverty of Philosophy in 1847, and the quarrel helped divide anarchists from Marxists. Readers today include libertarian socialists and some market anarchists who like his defence of contracts and decentralization. His antifeminism is condemned by feminist and anarchist scholars, and his private notebooks, historians have shown, contain antisemitic passages. Admirers point to his originality on federalism, credit and workers' self-management, and to his belief that change should come through voluntary association, not orders from the state.
In their own words
“Why, then, to this other question: What is property! may I not likewise answer, It is robbery, without the certainty of being misunderstood”