The Well-Read Anarchist

[singular_me]

The proclamation is unequivocal, and comes early on in Proudhon’s career. In his first major work, What is Property?, Proudhon lays out his still scandalous argument that “Property is theft,” and proudly proclaims himself an anarchist in an exchange with a fictitious interlocutor....

So when you see him writing about the institution of private property–which is what essentially is his first major book What is Property?–the fact that he’s declaiming against the institution of private property ought not to be a surprise at all. The institution of private property was fantastic if you have property. If you have none, then it instantly becomes a question of social justice. So his peasant background really shaped the way he read that debate around private property, essentially arguing that it was impossible by natural law standards and the only way we could have an institution of private property was for the state to enforce it. So this is where his anarchism starts. It’s a duel-critique of capitalism, structured around the institution of private property, and the state as that body which sustains this system of iniquity...

What he said about anarchism, the political anarchism and the positive anarchism that he was promoting, was that it was self-government. That it was rule by reason alone, that it was the opposite of governmentalism. And he defined governmentalism as ‘external constitution.’ All that really means is that if there if are two people attempting to govern themselves the tools that are available to them if they are anarchists are what they bring within themselves without any sort of external standard, any a priori governmental system. There’s just this encounter between two people who are considered equal before one another because we don’t have a government, and we don’t have any of the things that make government which would establish any political difference between them.


An Introduction to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre Joseph Proudhon was born on the 15th of January, 1809, in France

TRANSCRIPT: http://www.corbettreport.com/proudhon/

Published on Feb 22, 2014

In this inaugural edition of The Well-Read Anarchist podcast, we explore the life and work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. From his humble origins to his bold proclamation of anarchism to his brief political career, his imprisonment and exile, and his posthumous banishment to the fringes of the canon, we take a look at the thoughts and ideas of the first self-proclaimed anarchist. Joining us to do this are Shawn Wilbur, an independent scholar and Proudhon translator, and Dr. Alex Prichard, a lecturer in international relations at Exeter University and author of Justice, Order and Anarchy: The International Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yXOJjTzvS4

[Jewboo]

http://www.koco.com/image/view/-/18222004/medRes/1/-/jwuuh6/-/img-Police-House-sitter-shot-and-killed.jpg



It appears you have a conflict of interest with the two home "owners" you sit for.


:rolleyes: they know your views of property owners and private property?

[iOWNme]

An Introduction to Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
Pierre Joseph Proudhon was born on the 15th of January, 1809, in France

TRANSCRIPT: http://www.corbettreport.com/proudhon/

Published on Feb 22, 2014

In this inaugural edition of The Well-Read Anarchist podcast, we explore the life and work of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. From his humble origins to his bold proclamation of anarchism to his brief political career, his imprisonment and exile, and his posthumous banishment to the fringes of the canon, we take a look at the thoughts and ideas of the first self-proclaimed anarchist. Joining us to do this are Shawn Wilbur, an independent scholar and Proudhon translator, and Dr. Alex Prichard, a lecturer in international relations at Exeter University and author of Justice, Order and Anarchy: The International Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1yXOJjTzvS4


What he said about anarchism, the political anarchism and the positive anarchism that he was promoting, was that it was self-government. That it was rule by reason alone, that it was the opposite of governmentalism. And he defined governmentalism as ‘external constitution.’ All that really means is that if there if are two people attempting to govern themselves the tools that are available to them if they are anarchists are what they bring within themselves without any sort of external standard, any a priori governmental system. There’s just this encounter between two people who are considered equal before one another because we don’t have a government, and we don’t have any of the things that make government which would establish any political difference between them.


This is completely sane, rational and logical. Which is why i am an anarchist. The only place i have found reason logic and evidence to support how the world REALLY is.

I like really Corbetts stuff. I was not familiar with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, so this was a good listen, thanks for posting!

[singular_me]

hahaha... good try. Book... no I dont, that is maybe why I am fine with house sitting. In fact, a true anarchist should NOT force his/her views upon others. And this could be why property owners (un)consciously love anarchists in this very particular case.

Home ownership/property may be a challenging dilemma for many, but in ALL other areas, ownership is an obvious hoax (patents, copyrights, borders, etc). I think home ownership works best in war times, so people dont flee the areas and can get killed easier.


they know your views of property owners and private property?

[Santa]

http://propertyistheft.wordpress.com/what-i-believe-in/property-is-theft/

Property is theft

Perhaps the most basic, and paradoxically the most contentious, tenet of anarchism is its opposition to private property.

In 1840, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon wrote What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government. This is considered one of the most influential works of anarchist philosophy and is the origin of the rallying cry “property is theft!” In it, Proudhon poses this question;

If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question: What is property! may I not likewise answer, It is robbery, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?

With this question in mind, I would like to expand upon the distinction between “private property” and “personal possessions” I made in What I believe in. In doing so, I would like to make particular reference to the “anarcho”-capitalists of the Austrian School of Economics.

Like most anarchists, I consider “anarcho”-capitalism to be an oxymoron, as by its very nature capitalism is not anarchic. An-caps have taken the dictionary definition of anarchy as “no government” and pasted it onto their ideology, utterly forgetting that anarchism is in fact a movement of philosophy and activism, with a long history and tradition, based upon principles of libertarian socialism and opposed to all forms of hierarchy and domination, not just the state. Going further, I would even suggest that an-caps do not want to dismantle the machinery of the state, but merely privatise it.

Murray Rothbard, for an “anarcho”-capitalist, is brilliant at inadvertently demonstrating the genuine end of his movement. The dilemma he posed was this: what if a King, responding to the threat of a strong right-wing “libertarian” movement, “employ[s] a cunning stratagem,” where he “proclaims his government to be dissolved, but just before doing so he arbitrarily parcels out the entire land area of his kingdom to the ‘ownership’ of himself and his relatives.” Rather than taxes, his subjects now pay rent and he can “regulate the lives of all the people who presume to live on” his property as he wishes. A king by another name – landlord. Rothbard’s next remarks highlight precisely how close the parallel is:

Now what should be the reply of the libertarian rebels to this pert challenge? If they are consistent utilitarians, they must bow to this subterfuge, and resign themselves to living under a regime no less despotic than the one they had been battling for so long. Perhaps, indeed, more despotic, for now the king and his relatives can claim for themselves the libertarians’ very principle of the absolute right of private property, an absoluteness which they might not have dared to claim before.

This glaring contradiction is again demonstrated by Rothbard when he correctly identifies the state as illegitimate because it “arrogates to itself a monopoly of force… over a given area territorial area” and yet then defends private property because “[o]bviously, in a free society, Smith has the ultimate decision-making power over his own just property, Jones over his, etc.” In both cases the get out clause, the only difference Rothbard can cite between the State and private property, is that the latter was acquired “justly.”

So, what makes property just? According to “anarcho”-capitalists and right-”libertarians,” the Homestead Principle:

Though the earth and all inferior creatures be common to all men, yet every man has a “property” in his own “person.” This nobody has any right to but himself. The “labour” of his body and the “work” of his hands, we may say, are properly his. Whatsoever, then, he removes out of the state that Nature hath provided and left it in, he hath mixed his labour with it, and joined to it something that is his own, and thereby makes it his property.

Even to me, this sounds utterly reasonable. However, that is because it doesn’t sound like capitalism. In the above paragraph, we have an eloquent justification for worker-ownership of the means of production, for each community holding its land in common, and for the rejection of any claims by a landlord or employer to property on which others toil. From whence, then, does he get the justification for private property in the capitalist sense of the word?

Simply, there is no requirement under the homesteading principle that a resource is in regular use for the proprietor to retain it, only that it has been transformed once through labor. After this, the propertarian may transfer ownership to someone else, discard, or rent the property with no stipulations on any further labour input. But is that not how states came into being? The concept of nationhood arose prior to the state, and it was the rise of feudalism which used the labour of those nations to develop the lord’s or king’s “property” (dominion). The king, lord, or baron, as the propertarian, gained property through accumulation of wealth and power and the use of such to gain dominion over a land. Yet again, Rothbard’s own words speak against “anarcho”-capitalist thought:

If the State may be said to properly own its territory, then it is proper for it to make rules for everyone who presumes to live in that area. It can legitimately seize or control private property because there is no private property in its area, because it really owns the entire land surface. So long as the State permits its subjects to leave its territory, then, it can be said to act as does any other owner who sets down rules for people living on his property.

Of course, he qualified this by saying that of course the state does not “justly” own its property but both the state and the capitalist in fact acquired property by “homesteading,” however he might have used the term to (falsely) differentiate “just” private property from illegitimate state property. Returning to Proudhon in 1840, we find the Homstead Principle already effectively refuted;

If the liberty of man is sacred, it is equally sacred in all individuals; that, if it needs property for its objective action, that is, for its life, the appropriation of material is equally necessary for all . . . Does it not follow that if one individual cannot prevent another . . . from appropriating an amount of material equal to his own, no more can he prevent individuals to come. … The purchaser draws boundaries, fences himself in . . . Here, then, is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no one has a right to step, save the proprietor and his friends . . . Let [this]. . . multiply, and soon the people . . . will have nowhere to rest, no place to shelter, no ground to till. They will die at the proprietor’s door, on the edge of that property which was their birthright; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, ‘So perish idlers and vagrants.’

So, although “the liberty and security of the rich do not suffer from the liberty and security of the poor; far from that, they mutually strengthen and sustain each other” we see that “the rich man’s right of property, on the contrary, has to be continually defended against the poor man’s desire for property.” The very notion of private property renders, for example, travellers’ camps “illegal.” Nor are they the only ones who, in the propertarian system, must contest for the “legality” of their homes or die freezing in the streets / steal from and kill others to survive because they have no home. Private property, by its very definition, needs to be enforced. Whether a state or its private equivalent in protection and security companies, the private propertarian needs someone to act against trespassing – a “crime” which, as it involves no victims, no violence, no loss of safety or liberty, should not even exist.

The anarchist’s argument with private property, then, is that it is exploitative, it is coercive, and it entrenches the class system whereby the few live in privilege whilst the great many face poverty and deprivation. As the writers of An Anarchist FAQ put it, “social relations between capitalists and employees can never be equal, because private ownership of the means of production gives rise to social hierarchy and relations of coercive authority and subordination.”

The an-caps contend this by defining coercion as the purely overt threat or use of physical force, ignoring economic coercion and the restriction of choice through the environment of property domination. To them, then, there is no coercion in the relationship between landlord and tenant or employer and employee. Instead, they see it is a voluntary and mutually beneficial transation.

Whilst it is true that the tenant or employee does benefit from their transaction – they now have a roof over their head or a way to provide for themselves and their family – this does not mean the transaction is non-coercive. There is no equal footing in the relationship, especially when it comes to potential loss. The landlord or employer can afford to reject a potential tenant or employee – he can always find others in such an event. But the tenant or employee has no choice.

Even if it is not that one, he must submit to some landlord or employer. If not, he is left homeless or jobless. The threat is there: work or starve, rent or be without shelter. These are choices, yes, but the choice is akin to the mugger’s “give me money or die,” not to the ice cream vendor’s “raspberry or vanilla.” Likewise, it is also true that the threat is not made by the employer or landlord themselves, but the threat nonetheless remains, created by the very system of private property they operate in. Not all heads of state are despots or tyrants, and some can even have the very best of intentions, but that does not negate the fact that the system itself is one of dominion and servility. Once again, What Is Property sums up this position perfectly;

The proprietor, the robber, the hero, the sovereign — for all these titles are synonymous — imposes his will as law, and suffers neither contradiction nor control; that is, he pretends to be the legislative and the executive power at once . . . [and so] property engenders despotism . . . That is so clearly the essence of property that, to be convinced of it, one need but remember what it is, and observe what happens around him. Property is the right to use and abuse . . . if goods are property, why should not the proprietors be kings, and despotic kings — kings in proportion to their facultes bonitaires? And if each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property, absolute king throughout his own domain, how could a government of proprietors be any thing but chaos and confusion?

[mick silver]

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph (1809-1865)


Proudhon was from humble origins but had become a well-known French social theorist during the 1840s. A printer by trade, he was an exponent of mutualist socialism, a sociopolitical creed that may also be called anarchism. His most famous book was his second one, Qu'est-ce que la propriété? (1840) (he polemically responded that "it is theft"), but before 1848 he also had published De la célébration du Dimanche (1839), De la création de l'ordre dans l'humanité (1843) and Système des contradictions économiques, ou philosophie de la misère, (in 2 volumes, 1846). A persistent critic of the French July Monarchy, he was nonetheless surprised by the outbreak of hostilities in Paris in February 1848. In his correspondence, he recounted his participation in the February uprising and the composition of what he termed "the first republican proclamation" of the new republic. The same correspondence indicates, however, that Proudhon had misgivings about the new government because it was pursuing political reform at the expense of socioeconomic reform, which Proudhon considered basic. ,,, http://www.ohio.edu/chastain/ip/proudhon.htm

[Santa]

In the Confessions d'un revolutionnaire Proudhon further explained his use of the phrase: Property is theft

"In my first memorandum, in a frontal assault upon the established order, I said things like, Property is theft! The intention was to lodge a protest, to highlight, so to speak, the inanity of our institutions. At the time, that was my sole concern. Also, in the memorandum in which I demonstrated that startling proposition using simple arithmetic, I took care to speak out against any communist conclusion.

In the System of Economic Contradictions, having recalled and confirmed my initial formula, I added another quite contrary one rooted in considerations of quite another order—a formula that could neither destroy the first proposition nor be demolished by it: Property is freedom. [...] In respect of property, as of all economic factors, harm and abuse cannot be dissevered from the good, any more than debit can from asset in double-entry book-keeping. The one necessarily spawns the other. To seek to do away with the abuses of property, is to destroy the thing itself; just as the striking of a debit from an account is tantamount to striking it from the credit record."

[mick silver]

Mutualism, as a variety of anarchism, goes back to P.J. Proudhon in France and Josiah Warren in the U.S. It favors, to the extent possible, an evolutionary approach to creating a new society. It emphasizes the importance of peaceful activity in building alternative social institutions within the existing society, and strengthening those institutions until they finally replace the existing statist system. As Paul Goodman put it, "A free society cannot be the substitution of a 'new order' for the old order; it is the extension of spheres of free action until they make up most of the social life."



Other anarchist subgroups, and the libertarian left generally, share these ideas to some extent. Whether known as "dual power" or "social counterpower," or "counter-economics," alternative social institutions are part of our common vision. But they are especially central to mutualists' evolutionary understanding.

Mutualists belong to a non-collectivist segment of anarchists. Although we favor democratic control when collective action is required by the nature of production and other cooperative endeavors, we do not favor collectivism as an ideal in itself. We are not opposed to money or exchange. We believe in private property, so long as it is based on personal occupancy and use. We favor a society in which all relationships and transactions are non-coercive, and based on voluntary cooperation, free exchange, or mutual aid. The "market," in the sense of exchanges of labor between producers, is a profoundly humanizing and liberating concept. What we oppose is the conventional understanding of markets, as the idea has been coopted and corrupted by state capitalism.

Our ultimate vision is of a society in which the economy is organized around free market exchange between producers, and production is carried out mainly by self-employed artisans and farmers, small producers' cooperatives, worker-controlled large enterprises, and consumers' cooperatives. To the extent that wage labor still exists (which is likely, if we do not coercively suppress it), the removal of statist privileges will result in the worker's natural wage, as Benjamin Tucker put it, being his full product.

Because of our fondness for free markets, mutualists sometimes fall afoul of those who have an aesthetic affinity for collectivism, or those for whom "petty bourgeois" is a swear word. But it is our petty bourgeois tendencies that put us in the mainstream of the American populist/radical tradition, and make us relevant to the needs of average working Americans. Most people distrust the bureaucratic organizations that control their communities and working lives, and want more control over the decisions that affect them. They are open to the possibility of decentralist, bottom-up alternatives to the present system. But they do not want an America remade in the image of orthodox, CNT-style syndicalism.

Mutualism is not "reformist," as that term is used pejoratively by more militant anarchists. Nor is it necessarily pacifistic, although many mutualists are indeed pacifists. The proper definition of reformism should hinge, not on the means we use to build a new society or on the speed with which we move, but on the nature of our final goal. A person who is satisfied with a kinder, gentler version of capitalism or statism, that is still recognizable as state capitalism, is a reformist. A person who seeks to eliminate state capitalism and replace it with something entirely different, no matter how gradually, is not a reformist.

"Peaceful action" simply means not deliberately provoking the state to repression, but rather doing whatever is possible (in the words of the Wobbly slogan) to "build the structure of the new society within the shell of the old" before we try to break the shell. There is nothing wrong with resisting the state if it tries, through repression, to reverse our progress in building the institutions of the new society. But revolutionary action should meet two criteria: 1) it should have strong popular support; and 2) it should not take place until we have reached the point where peaceful construction of the new society has reached its limits within existing society.



http://www.mutualist.org/imagelib/sitebuilder/layout/spacer.gif

[Ponce]

I am a very loving peacefully good nature dumb Cuban refugee who only likes to count his rolls of tp every day, just stay the hell away from my land patented private property.............peace brother :)

V

[singular_me]

are you familiar with that site?



Statement of Purpose: Voluntaryists are advocates of non-political, non-violent strategies to achieve a free society. We reject electoral politics, in theory and in practice, as incompatible with libertarian principles. Governments must cloak their actions in an aura of moral legitimacy in order to sustain their power, and political methods invariably strengthen that legitimacy. Voluntaryists seek instead to delegitimize the State through education, and we advocate withdrawal of the cooperation and tacit consent on which State power ultimately depends. http://voluntaryist.com/


This is completely sane, rational and logical. Which is why i am an anarchist. The only place i have found reason logic and evidence to support how the world REALLY is.

I like really Corbetts stuff. I was not familiar with Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, so this was a good listen, thanks for posting!