Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Besançon, January 15, 1809 - Passy, January 19, 1865), was a French philosopher, politician and revolutionary anarchist and, along with Bakunin, Kropotkin and Malatesta, one of the fathers of the historical anarchist movement and its first economic trend, mutualism.
Biography
He was born in Besançon, into a family of artisans and peasants. His father, Claude Proudhon, was a cooper and brewer, and considered that the beer he made should be sold for a value that he added to the cost price, just the salary of his work, since "he would have thought he was stealing if he had charged the buyer more ». This paternal behavior will influence Pierre-Joseph, in whose work this search for the right price will be evidenced as strict remuneration for work, considering all "earnings" as "unearned income". His mother was a cook and servant. He himself worked all his life manually: first, as a cow keeper and herdsman until the age of 12, and later as a cooper, together with his father; then as a farmhand, then as a printer.
Originally, like Charles Fourier, from Franche-Comté, in which, as G. Lefranc says, «until the revolution of 1789, there were serfs at the service of the abbeys, but which since the Middle Ages was oriented towards cooperative formulas, through the constitution of greengrocers», his economic and social conceptions have a first and deep root in the observations of his childhood on work, property, sale, value.
Studies
Thanks to a scholarship in 1820, he was able to study for some time at the College of Besançon, but financial reasons prevented him from completing his baccalaureate there. At the age of 19, he joined an important printing company in Besançon, working as a proofreader, while learning the art of typography. As the publishing house was preparing an edition of the Bible, he took advantage of the opportunity to learn the Hebrew language, notions of theology and also to initiate himself in comparative philology and linguistics.Basically, he must be considered, therefore, like Fourier, an autodidact. The unsystematic character, the contradictions (real or apparent), the grandiose flight and the brilliant rigor of his style are the result of his genius, peasant-artisan, self-taught.
Between 1831 and 1832 he traveled around France in search of work, visiting Paris, Lyon, Neuchâtel (Switzerland), Marseille and Toulon. Back in Besanzón, the Fourierist Just Muiron offered him a job as editor-in-chief of the newspaper El Imparcial. During all this time he did not stop learning and deepening his knowledge of classics such as Descartes or Rousseau. After another brief trip through France, he founded a small printing company with two other partners. The first work Proudhon wrote was an Essay on General Grammar (1837), published as an appendix to a work on linguistics by Abbe Bergier. In 1838 he had to close the printing house due to his financial difficulties and the suicide of his partner. On August 23 of that year he obtained the Suard scholarship from the Besançon Academy, which allowed him to enjoy an income of 1,500 francs for 3 years. In 1839 he published a work of a historical-sociological nature, On the utility of celebrating Sunday, which, like the first, did not attract much attention, although it did obtain an academic mention. But his third work, What is property?, published in 1840, made him suddenly famous in Paris, France and the world. The following year, in 1841, and then in 1842, he completed the theories expounded there with a Second and Third Memoir.
In 1843 he wrote two important works: The creation of order in humanity and The system of economic contradictions or the Philosophy of misery. The latter gave rise to a harsh response from Marx, who wrote his The Poverty of Philosophy, precisely one year after Philosophy of Poverty (1844) was published.
Proudhon met Marx in Paris; After Proudhon's death, Marx would write a letter to Herr Schweitzer commenting on his appreciation of the Frenchman's work, the letter concluded:
Proudhon had a natural inclination for dialectics. But since he never understood the true scientific dialectics, he could not go beyond sophistication. Actually, this was tied to his petty bourgeois point of view. Like the historian Raumer, the little bourgeois consists of “on the one hand” and “on the other hand”. As such it appears to us in its economic interests, and therefore also in its politics and in its religious, scientific and artistic conceptions. This is how it appears to us in his morals and in all things. It is the personified contradiction. And if it is, as Proudhon, a person of ingenuity, he will soon learn to play hands with his own contradictions and to turn them, according to circumstances, into unexpected paradoxes, spectacular, ora scandalous, ora brilliant. charlatanism in science and contemporization in politics are inseparable companions of such a viewpoint. Such individuals are left with only one acicate: vanity; like all the vain, they are only concerned about momentary success, sensation. And here is where that moral touch that always preserved a Rousseau, for example, of any compromise, was indefectably lost, even with the existing powers.Perhaps posterity distinguishes this recent period of France's history by saying that Luis Bonaparte was his Napoleon and Proudhon his Rousseau-Voltaire.
Now I place on you all the responsibility for having imposed on me so soon after the death of this man the role of posthumous judge.
These appreciations, however, collide with what Marx himself recognized Proudhon years before in his work The Holy Family, where he had written:
Any development of the national economy considers private property as an inevitable hypothesis; this hypothesis is an incontestable factor for it that does not even try to investigate and which it only refers accidentally, according to Say's naive expression. Proudhon has proposed to critically analyse the basis of the national economy, private property, and has been his first strong, substantial and scientific research at the same time. That is the remarkable scientific progress he has made, progress that revolutionized the national economy, creating the possibility of making it a true science. What is the property? of Proudhon has for the economy the same importance as the work of Say What is the third state? has had for modern politics.(...)
Proudhon not only writes for the proletarians, but he is also a proletarian, a worker; his work is a scientific manifesto of the French proletariat.
Politics
In 1848 Proudhon was elected deputy to the National Assembly when the Second Republic was proclaimed. Within that legislative body, he combats the proposal of the reformist "whose national workshops lull the proletarians to sleep without granting them anything essential." In this bourgeois-republican milieu, he appears as a strange dissident. He himself writes in his Carnets: "These deputies are amazed that I do not have horns and claws." However, his ideas, through the newspaper he publishes, Le representative du peuple , came to have great influence in the popular strata of Paris. When General Louis-Eugène Cavaignac violently suppressed the popular revolt of June 23, 691 of the 693 deputies of the Assembly approved of his conduct while Proudhon was one of the two who condemned it.
Prison, exile and books
On December 10 of that same year, Luis Napoleón was proclaimed President of the Republic by the National Assembly. Two and a half years later this President would become Emperor, in the same way that the first Napoleon had passed from the Consulate to the Empire.
Proudhon harshly attacks Louis Napoleon in his newspaper La voix du peuple, and considers him the worst enemy of the proletariat and socialism. For this reason he is sentenced, in 1849, to several years in jail. He flees to Belgium, where he lives anonymously for a time, earning a living as a private math teacher.
On one occasion, when he returned to France for private reasons, he was discovered and locked up in the famous Santa Pelagia prison. There he devoted himself with passionate fervor to study and wrote, among other books, The general idea of the revolution . He also maintains a large and clandestine correspondence with many opposition figures, and promotes an alliance of the proletariat with the middle class to overthrow Louis Napoleon, an attitude that will be reproached by some socialists, who recall that a few years before Proudhon had contrasted in a blunt way the proletariat and the bourgeoisie.
In 1858 he wrote, against the Catholic Mirecourt, one of his most extensive and important historical-philosophical works: On Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, which earned him a new sentence, for his attack on the state religion, and a new exile in Belgium. An amnesty allowed him to return to his country, where in 1863 he published another of his fundamental works: The Federative Principle . In it, he broadly develops his conception of integral federalism, which seeks not only to decentralize political power and make the central State break up into communes or municipalities, but also, and above all, decentralize economic power and put the land and instruments of production in the hands of the local community of workers. This concept of federalism is perhaps the one that best summarizes that mobile totality that is Proudhon's thought.
In the last two years of his life he wrote another work of great doctrinal importance, which decisively influenced the ideological formation of the founders of the First International: On the political capacity of the working class, appeared in 1865.
Death
Proudhon died in Passy on January 19, 1865, being buried in Paris, in the Montparnasse cemetery.
Thought
Proudhon's thought stems, above all, from the philosophy of the Enlightenment. The English empiricists (Locke, David Hume, etc.) and the French encyclopedists, such as Voltaire, Helvetius, and particularly Diderot, are frequently the tacit or explicit assumption of their doctrinal developments. He strongly attacks Rousseau (as Godwin before him and Bakunin after him), but takes from him some of his basic ideas.
Proudhon was also influenced by the sharp criticisms of utopian socialists, such as Saint-Simon and Fourier, although no one was more reluctant than him to ideal constructions and the drawing of brilliant futuristic pictures.
Property is theft
Pierre Joseph Proudhon famously said that "property is theft" at a time when many Frenchmen were frustrated by the results of the revolutions of the previous decades. When he published What is property? 10 years had passed since the Revolution of 1830 that ended the Bourbons. The new monarchy of July was expected to realize the ideals of liberty and equality of the 1789 Revolution. However, by 1840, class conflict had spread, with an elite enriched alongside a people still impoverished. Many saw that the result of so much struggle had not been freedom and equality, but growing corruption and inequality.
Proudhon held that the rights to liberty, equality and security were natural, absolute and inviolable and formed the very substratum of society. But he also added that the apparent right to property was not the same, unlike Locke. In fact, in Proudhon's view, property undermined the aforementioned fundamental rights: Just as the freedom of the rich and that of the poor can coexist, the rich have property at the cost of the lack of many. Thus, property is intrinsically antisocial. And that was the main problem of the working class and of the socialist movements that were emerging in the Europe of the XIX century, so that Proudhon's forceful declaration was the revolutionary ferment of the time.
I believe that neither work, occupation, nor law, can breed property, for this is an effect without cause. Can I be censored for it? How many comments will these statements produce?
The property is a robbery! Here's the '93 rebate touch! The turbulent turmoil of revolutions!...
- Proudhon, What is the property? (1840)
The serial dialectic
The serial dialectic or balance of forces is a logical method and a philosophical notion that affirms that antinomies (thesis and antithesis) are not resolved by means of an overcoming synthesis of both, and instead complement each other generating a balance without losing each one of its autonomy and contradiction of the other.
This dialectical notion, originated by Proudhon in his observations of the pluralism of nature or society, extends to economics and politics, especially around the concept of federative principle of anarchism. Proudhon does not accept the isolated absolutization of an element of social reality whose truth can only be apprehended within its dialectical relations with the other integrating elements of that.
Federative Principle
The federative principle or social federalism is a concept developed by Proudhon in the homonymous book of 1863. A treatise on the union of communities self-governed governments and sovereignties through different levels of local, county, regional or national federations and confederations in such a way that political power is distributed and flows from the particular to the general, that is, from the base that is the commune to the maximum confederation with the purpose of avoiding the centralism of powers.
Pornocracy and its conception of women
Proudhon was a major critic of women's access to education and their desire to participate in public life, declaring the physical and intellectual inferiority of women. He considered that the key role of women was in the home where they prevailed the authority of the male. Thus he writes in his book & # 34; The Pornocracy, or Women in Modern Times (1875)
I say that the reign of the woman is in the family; that the sphere of her irradiation is the conjugal domicile; that man, in whom the woman should love not beauty, but strength, will develop her dignity, her individuality, her character, her heroism and her justice."
Proudhon has a conservative view of the roles of the sexes, and highlights how both sexes need each other to be happy. Thus he writes in 1846 in The Philosophy of Misery :
The house is the first thing the young woman dreams about, and those who talk about attraction and want to suppress the house government, should explain this depravity of the sex instinct. For my part,... less I explain the fate of women outside the family and the home. Courtesy or housewife (lamb of keys I say, and not raised); I see no middle term; but... what does this alternative have to humiliate? In what is the mission of the woman, in charge of the direction of the house, of all that refers to consumption and savings, is less than that of the man, whose own function is the direction of the workshop, that is, the government of production and change? Men and women need each other as the two constitutive principles of work: marriage, in its indissoluble duality, is the incarnation of economic dualism that is expressed with general terms, consumption and production. For this purpose the skills of the sexes were fixed; the work for the one, the expense for the other; and... disgraced union that in which one of the parties lacks its duty! The happiness that the husbands had promised will change in pain and bitterness, and they can only accuse themselves!... If only women existed in the world, they would live together as a company of turtledoves; if there were no more than men, they would have no reason to rise above the monopoly and renounce agiotaje; they would be seen to all, masters or servants, surrounding the table of play or coveted under the yoke of work. But man is male and female, and hence the need of the house and the property. That the two sexes join, and instantly, this mystical union, the most amazing of all human institutions, is born the property and division of common heritage into individual sovereignty. The home: there, in the economic order, the most desired of all the goods for women; the property, the workshop, the work on their own: there is what man ambitions more, after the woman. Love and marriage, work and home, property and domesticity: all these terms are equivalent.
Her position generated numerous reactions in defense of women's rights even from within the ranks of anarchism, as in the case of Joseph Déjacque or André Léo, responding to Proudhon's theses, demonstrated to what extent the political spheres and Caoline Ganier points out in Le Monde Libertaire and explains how in a letter addressed to Proudhon in May 1857, Déjacque demonstrates how Proudhon, by denying the rights of women, shown "just like their masters".
Jenny d'Héricourt, who in 1848 received a degree in homeopathic medicine at the University of Paris, also argued with him and argued that it is false that nature made man rational and woman emotional and that it is education and morality those who did so, in his work La Femme affranchie, réponse à MM. Michelet, Proudhon, E. de Girardin, Legouvé, Comte et autres innovateurs modernes from 1860.
Elvira López (1901) affirms that Proudhon had to share a Political Economy prize with Clemencia Roger at the University of Lausanne, a fact that surely should not have been liked since it did not confirm his appreciations, quite the contrary.
Discussions between Marx and Proudhon
The cordial relations between Proudhon and Marx did not last long. Marx, who broke with all those who preceded him, wanted to attack, at a certain moment, the German Grün, representative of the so-called "true socialism", and wanted to drag Proudhon with him, who, like Bakunin, did not lent to it Here is what the "father of French socialism" to the "father of German socialism": "After having demolished all a priori dogmas, let us not fall, in our turn, into the contradiction of your compatriot Luther; let us not also think of indoctrinating the people; Let's have a good and loyal polemic. Let us give the world an example of wise and farsighted tolerance, but, since we are at the head of the movement, let us not become leaders of a new intolerance, let us not position ourselves as apostles of a new religion, even if it be the religion of the logic".
Marx attacks Proudhon when he publishes his System of Economic Contradictions, three or four years after having praised him for his What is property?.
For many Marxists, Proudhon is an ideologue of the petty bourgeoisie, and particularly of the artisan and peasant classes. Proudhonians respond to this by recalling Proudhon's origins as a manual worker. Some authors like Jean Touchard, in his History of Political Ideas, prefer to define Proudhonism as "a socialism for artisans"; others have spoken of "a socialism for peasants". Proudhonians respond to this by saying that such definitions can only be accepted if one takes into account that, at the time Proudhon was thinking and writing, most wage workers were artisans and farmers rather than industrial workers. There are also those who have chosen to call him Leon Victor Bourgeois, "father of French socialism", as with Stekloff, "father of anarchism" and as Dolléans, "great philosopher and tribune of the European mob".
Main works
- What is the property? (1840)
- System of economic contradictions or Philosophy of Misery. (1846)
- Justice in the Revolution and in the Church (1858)
- The Handbook of the Bolsa Speculator (1853)
- War and Peace (1861)
- The federative principle. (1863)
- From the political capacity of the working class. (1865)
- Property theory. (1866)
- From the beginning of art and its social destiny. (1875)
- Pornocracy, or women in modern times. (1875)
- Correspondence (1875)
- Love and marriage. (1876)
- Cesarism and Christianity. (1883)
- Jesus and the origins of Christianity. (1896)
- Comments on the memories of Fouché. (1900)