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Notes on “What is Property?” (2019)

From Libertarian Labyrinth by Shawn P. Wilbur

These notes are from a group reading of the book on Reddit. While fragmentary, they do raise a number of questions that I haven’t had a chance to raise elsewhere. If nothing else, I’m archiving them to use in a future revision of Tucker’s translation.

CHAPTER ONE:

Think of this work specifically as a product of the French June Monarchy and as a prize essay, written as a kind of “open letter” to a panel of judges at the academy where he had been studying. It actually became a regular feature of many of Proudhon’s works that they took the form of extended “letters” to specific individuals: even the 6-volume De la justice dans la Révolution et dans l’Église has the form of an individual response. The form isn’t so well established here, but there is some of the same mix of heavy exposition and general chattiness involved.

Tucker’s translation is pretty good, although he adds some of the clunkiness of his own place and period, which can be equally jarring to modern readers. The translation was 50 years removed from the original—and now we’re more than 125 years removed from the translation. The only real problem with it is that Tucker sometimes flattened the prose a little, particularly at some moments when Proudhon was being a bit funny or even a bit naughty. Beyond that, I have only even found one truly mistranslated word.

Any thoughts on the epigraph?

Adversus hostem æterna auctoritas esto. / Contre l’ennemi, revendication est éternelle. / Against the enemy, revendication is eternal. (Law of the twelve tables.)

I need to look a bit more, but my recollection is Proudhon was fond of epigraphs that reflected what he considered his own role in producing a particular work. In that context, we might—with a chuckle—acknowledge that, with argument after argument after argument against property, Proudhon’s revendication—his recital of the claims against property—is damn near “eternal.”

But revendication seems like an interesting choice as a translation of auctoritas—which, as one of the roots of the English authority, seems like an interesting notion for Proudhon to invoke anyway.

But while I was looking into the original context of the epigraph, I noticed that one translation is: “Against a foreigner, the right of property is valid forever.” And that made me think immediately of the droit d’aubaine—Tucker’s “right of increase” or, probably more accurately, “right of escheat—which is so important in Proudhon’s analysis.

The group reading has inspired me to take a closer look at Tucker’s translation, with an eye toward revising it where necessary. And I notice that there are some passages where some formatting was lost in the English edition. If, for example, you compare the section that follows the line “But murmurs arise!” in the English edition with the same section (following “Que de murmures s’élèvent !”) in the original French, you can see that the next four paragraphs are clearly marked in the original as a dialogue, between Proudhon and potential readers, as he addresses likely objections, while the English lacks clear marking.

That matters, at least potentially, because it means that two of those paragraph are not supposed to represent Proudhon’s voice. And there are a lot of instances when Proudhon speaks in that voice of the potential reader, making objections that he will then refute. So it’s too bad when we lose clear indications of which voice we are getting.

I like the tone in the opening pages. Proudhon was frequently a controversialist and sometimes his works of constructive sociology would take the form of a more-or-less defiant response to some slight or attack. But here, in a work that is largely critical—“I build no system”—there’s a great deal of sympathy expressed for the reader. “My name, like yours, is TRUTH SEEKER…” No doubt this is partially the result of Proudhon’s relatively unknown status: in 1840, he is not yet addressing anyone in particular, while, almost immediately, he will be faced with a range responses that need to be addressed. But there is also something basic to Proudhon’s sociology on display here: a certain faith in progress and in the collective reason of human beings. It might seem strange to find him so non-defiant in a work attempting to expose “universal error,” but the final chapters of the work will give us a historical account of how error and progress are connected.

“L’homme se trompe parce qu’il apprend.”—Man errs because he is learning.

That’s probably one of my top-five favorite Proudhon quotes.

And it reminds me of another, from Philosophy of Progress:

What could a few lapses, a few false steps, detract from the rectitude of my faith, the goodness of my cause?… You will please me, sir, to learn for yourself what road I have traveled, and how many times I have fallen along the way. Far from blushing at so many spills, I would be tempted to boast of them, and to measure my valor by the number of my contusions.

But it is a psychological fact none the less true, and one to which the philosophers have paid too little attention, that habit, like a second nature, has the power of fixing in the mind new categorical forms derived from the appearances which impress us, and by them usually stripped of objective reality, but whose influence over our judgments is no less predetermining than that of the original categories. Hence we reason by the eternal and absolute laws of our mind, and at the same time by the secondary rules, ordinarily faulty, which are suggested to us by imperfect observation. This is the most fecund source of false prejudices, and the permanent and often invincible cause of a multitude of errors. The bias resulting from these prejudices is so strong that often, even when we are fighting against a principle which our mind thinks false, which is repugnant to our reason, and which our conscience disapproves, we defend it without knowing it, we reason in accordance with it, and we obey it while attacking it. Enclosed within a circle, our mind revolves about itself, until a new observation, creating within us new ideas, brings to view an external principle which delivers us from the phantom by which our imagination is possessed.

You might be forgiven for thinking that the substance of this was Stirner-inspired, despite differences of style, except, of course, that it predates The Unique. But perhaps the long and complicated history of ties between mutualism and egoism is not entirely inexplicable.

CHAPTER 2:

This double definition of property — domain and possession — is of the highest importance; and it must be clearly understood, in order to comprehend what is to follow.

The first short section (“Definitions” in the French edition) sets up a tension (perhaps one of Proudhon’s famous antinomies or contradictions?) between domain and possession. And there’s the complicated metaphor about the rights (jus in re and jus ad rem) and the two legal claims (possessoire and pétitoire), which presumably tells us how to think about the relationship between property (narrowly defined) and possession. That’s something we need to understand moving forward.

And then there’s a little problem in the translation at the end of the next to last paragraph, where things get paraphrased. The French is:

J’espère que nous ne serons pas forcés d’en venir là ; mais ces deux actions ne pouvaient être menées de front parce que, selon le même Code de procédure, le possessoire et le pétitoire ne seront jamais cumulés.

How do folks understand the significance of this first section?

One of the things it seems useful to underline as we’re moving forward is the distinction that Proudhon makes between a right to the products of labor, which demands access to natural resources, and a right to property in the land itself. The argument against the latter is pretty strong here, which ought to lead us to believe that—whatever may happen to Proudhon’s practical proposals by the early 1860s—his consistent theoretical position denies property on the basis of occupation, with “possession” involving little beyond mutual respect for general access and individual projects. That leaves “occupancy-and-use property” in sort of an awkward position, unless we are willing to take on more of Proudhon’s later thought—including something like what I’ve called “resultant anarchy.”

This was a period in which many of the arguments against the “natural right” of property took this sort of form. Thomas Skidmore’s 1829 work, The rights of man to property : Being a proposition to make it equal among the adults of the present generation: and to provide for its equal transmission to every individual of each succeeding generation, on arriving at the age of maturity, starts in the form of an exposition of “natural rights”—which leads to a proposal for agrarian re-division of all property. (Skidmore was, btw, one of the major players in the early land reform movement in the US and rubbed elbows with quite a few of the early anarchistic reformers.)

CHAPTER 3:

This is one of the most important chapters in the book. The concept of collective force he introduces in §5 might be the most important element of his sociology. But the argument of the chapter is long and complex, with a number of premises granted along the way, for the sake of argument, only to be refuted in another section—which is why we’ll spend a little more time with it. Just remember the subject of the chapter: “Labor as The Efficient Cause Of The Domain Of Property” and the conclusion in § 8: “That, from the Stand-point of Justice, Labor destroys Property.” If, in the middle sections, he seems to be arguing in favor of some kind of labor-based property, you might look to see if he is playing devil’s advocate for the moment.

Being unable, at this time, to enter upon a detailed discussion of the Code, I shall content myself with examining the three arguments oftenest resorted to in support of property. 1. Appropriation, or the formation of property by possession; 2. The consent of mankind; 3. Prescription. I shall then inquire into the effects of labor upon the relative condition of the laborers and upon property.

Proudhon is pretty good at giving us itineraries, so we are less likely to lose sight of where we’re headed, even if the argument does twist and turn a bit.

He also makes a bit part of his project clearing up what he takes to be confusions in the thinking of property’s defenders, starting, in this chapter, with Say, one of the biggest guns among the economists. When he says:

We do not ask why the earth has been appropriated to a greater extent than the sea and the air; we want to know by what right man has appropriated wealth which he did not create, and which Nature gave to him gratuitously.

he is responding to a characteristic naturalization of private property, without a clear case being made for any right of appropriation. And this is one of the places where capitalist and non-capitalist property theory frequently differ. We frequently see capitalists assert—often without acknowledging it—various kinds of permission to engage in behavior that is simply not prohibited, as if some kind of legal order always applied.

§ 1. — The Land cannot be Appropriated.

Who is entitled to the rent of the land? The producer of the land, without doubt. Who made the land? God. Then, proprietor, retire!

But the creator of the land does not sell it: he gives it; and, in giving it, he is no respecter of persons. Why, then, are some of his children regarded as legitimate, while others are treated as bastards? If the equality of shares was an original right, why is the inequality of conditions a posthumous right?

Where could a natural right of appropriation come from? There is no transaction with God/nature and no clear legislation prior to human legislation (which, Proudhon says, largely just assumes the right to individual, monopolizing appropriation.)

Perhaps the closest we have to an argument for a natural right to appropriation is found in Locke’s famous account—provided the provisos are left intact. But the reason that account works is precisely because the provisos ensure some kind of equality. Individuals may individually appropriate land, provided “enough and as good” is left for everyone else. In his analogy, they may take a “good draft of water, provided a “whole river” is left for others. But, honestly, it isn’t even clear that individual human-scale appropriation is possible in complex, technologically advanced societies.

§ 2. — Universal Consent no Justification of Property.

In the extract from Say, quoted above, it is not clear whether the author means to base the right of property on the stationary character of the soil, or on the consent which he thinks all men have granted to this appropriation. His language is such that it may mean either of these things, or both at once; which entitles us to assume that the author intended to say, “The right of property resulting originally from the exercise of the will, the stability of the soil permitted it to be applied to the land, and universal consent has since sanctioned this application.”

However that may be, can men legitimate property by mutual consent? I say, no. Such a contract, though drafted by Grotius, Montesquieu, and J. J. Rousseau, though signed by the whole human race, would be null in the eyes of justice, and an act to enforce it would be illegal. Man can no more give up labor than liberty. Now, to recognize the right of territorial property is to give up labor, since it is to relinquish the means of labor; it is to traffic in a natural right, and divest ourselves of manhood.

But I wish that this consent, of which so much is made, had been given, either tacitly or formally. What would have been the result? Evidently, the surrenders would have been reciprocal; no right would have been abandoned without the receipt of an equivalent in exchange. We thus come back to equality again, — the sine qua non of appropriation; so that, after having justified property by universal consent, that is, by equality, we are obliged to justify the inequality of conditions by property. Never shall we extricate ourselves from this dilemma. Indeed, if, in the terms of the social compact, property has equality for its condition, at the moment when equality ceases to exist, the compact is broken and all property becomes usurpation. We gain nothing, then, by this pretended consent of mankind.

That’s the whole section. It is, among other things, a rejection of a certain kind of voluntaryism, which would attempt to sanction inequality through consent. Then there is a fairly offhand comment about the impossibility of renouncing labor—and here we should probably note that labor was, for Proudhon (as for various anarchist proponents of integral education) the primary site for education.

Tucker takes some slight liberties with the second paragraph:

Quoi qu’il en soit, les hommes pouvaient-ils légitimer la propriété par leur mutuel acquiescement ? Je le nie. Un tel contrat eût-il pour rédacteurs Grotius, Montesquieu et J.-J. Rousseau, fût-il revêtu des signatures du genre humain, serait nul de plein droit, et l’acte qui en aurait été dressé, illégal. L’homme ne peut pas plus renoncer au travail qu’à la liberté ; or, reconnaître le droit de propriété territoriale, c’est renoncer au travail, puisque c’est en abdiquer le moyen, c’est transiger sur un droit naturel et se dépouiller de la qualité d’homme.

But the sense isn’t changed much. The contract would be null and void by right and the deed based on it would be without lawful foundation. And the alternative is a renunciation of labor by which we would strip ourselves of the capacity to be human.

The third paragraph then makes the kind of rhetorical move Proudhon uses a lot in this chapter. Having first attacked universal consent as a mechanism of sanction, he turns around and says that, even without any claim to sanction property, the “contract” supposed by those who appeal to universal consent would have led to equality (rather than the inequality actually fostered by property.)

§ 3. — Prescription gives no Title to Property.

The section on prescription is interesting, but the argument is fairly simple: no rights that can’t be established on a more principled basis can be established merely by the passing of time, the indifference of others, etc.

§ 4. — Labor — That Labor has no Inherent Power to appropriate Natural Wealth.

The argument that begins in §4 really occupies most of the rest of the chapter, with some potentially confusing twists and turns along the way, so this is the point in the reading that we need to pay a little extra attention. Fortunately, Proudhon gives us another of his itineraries:

We shall show by the maxims of political economy and law, that is, by the authorities recognized by property, —

  1. That labor has no inherent power to appropriate natural wealth.
  2. That, if we admit that labor has this power, we are led directly to equality of property, — whatever the kind of labor, however scarce the product, or unequal the ability of the laborers.
  3. That, in the order of justice, labor destroys property.

This is the argument that really takes up the rest of the chapter, § 4, § 5–7 and § 8, respectively.

§ 4 is much like the preceding sections, attacking the logic of the arguments in favor of labor as a means of appropriation. For example:

To say that property is the daughter of labor, and then to give labor material on which to exercise itself, is, if I am not mistaken, to reason in a circle. Contradictions will result from it.

And it doesn’t take much prodding of that logic to find that some governmental authority is simply assumed by it, on the basis of which all the problems faced by any particular “right” of initial appropriation are brushed away. So Proudhon comes to some preliminary conclusions, before venturing into somewhat deeper water:

Man has created every thing — every thing save the material itself. Now, I maintain that this material he can only possess and use, on condition of permanent labor, — granting, for the time being, his right of property in things which he has produced.

This, then, is the first point settled: property in product, if we grant so much, does not carry with it property in the means of production; that seems to me to need no further demonstration. There is no difference between the soldier who possesses his arms, the mason who possesses the materials committed to his care, the fisherman who possesses the water, the hunter who possesses the fields and forests, and the cultivator who possesses the lands: all, if you say so, are proprietors of their products — not one is proprietor of the means of production. The right to product is exclusive — jus in re; the right to means is common — jus ad rem.

Things to note:

What Tucker translates as “means of production” is actually just instruments in the French. The sense is pretty much the same, but obviously “means of production” has other associations that might or might not be helpful here.

Proudhon uses the term “property” in a couple of slightly different ways in this passage. Obviously “property in product” (la propriété du produit a relationship of ownership with the product of one’s own labor), — “if we grant so much” — have at least slightly different conditions of appropriation and different consequences than la propriété de l’instrument. And the difference is related to that distinction from Chapter 2 — jus in re vs. jus ad rem. The Wikipedia links are useful if you want to try to work out exactly what Proudhon is on about. The first article describes jus in re in terms of enjoyment and the second article gives us this clarification:

The disposition of contemporary civil law jurists is to use the term jus ad rem as descriptive of a right without possession, and jus in re as descriptive of a right accompanied by possession. Or, in a somewhat wider sense, the former denotes an inchoate or incomplete right to a thing; the latter, a complete and perfect right to a thing.

Ultimately, of course, perhaps the most important thing for us, moving forward, is the qualification: “property in product, if we grant so much…” We are about to enter a fairly complicated series of arguments in which points are granted precisely for the purpose of showing that they lead to conclusions other than those claimed by the partisans of property. § 5 begins by backtracking and granting, for the sake of argument, the point presumably refuted in § 4.

Admit, however, that labor gives a right of property in material. Why is not this principle universal?…

§ 5. — That Labor leads to Equality of Property.

Let us grant [Accordons], however, that labor gives a right of property in material. Why is not this principle universal?…

We begin with a concession for the sake of argument—but it is precisely the thing we know the chapter intends to disprove. And the first question is why some labor seems to grant property in land, but not all labor. That is followed by a question about why labor to maintain value would be different from labor to create value.

Proudhon just keeps poking at inconsistencies.

But he’s also going to push this premise that he has granted for the sake of argument as far as he can. If things were consistent, he suggests, the consequences might be surprising:

Admitting, then, that property is rational and legitimate, — admitting that rent is equitable and just, — I say that he who cultivates acquires property by as good a title as he who clears, or he who improves; and that every time a tenant pays his rent, he obtains a fraction of property in the land entrusted to his care, the denominator of which is equal to the proportion of rent paid. Unless you admit this, you fall into absolutism and tyranny; you recognize class privileges; you sanction slavery.

Whoever labors becomes a proprietor — this is an inevitable deduction from the acknowledged principles of political economy and jurisprudence. And when I say proprietor, I do not mean simply (as do our hypocritical economists) proprietor of his allowance, his salary, his wages, — I mean proprietor of the value which he creates, and by which the master alone profits.

But he doesn’t necessarily remind us, over and over again, that we are in the midst of a hypothetical, so sometimes we get a very strong statement that looks like perhaps he has shifted course. For example:

This is my proposition: The laborer retains, even after he has received his wages, a natural right of property in the thing which he has produced.

And this is the sort of thing that gets quoted out of context—and that’s how rumors get started

In any event, while the proposition is perhaps being advanced just to be disproved in its turn, the explanation of why it would be true gives us Proudhon’s theory of collective force.

§ 5. — That Labor leads to Equality of Property [continued]

We’re getting to the theory of collective force, which, again, is one of the most important elements in all of Proudhon’s sociology, from these early writings all the way through to his final works.

He has just proposed that—assuming we grant the power of labor to appropriate—a “laborer retains, even after he has received his wages, a natural right of property in the thing which he has produced.” And that probably sounds a bit unlikely, given that those wages are presumably compensation for his individual labor. Of course, Proudhon has already distinguished between a couple of different kinds of rights, but the argument keeps becoming more complex (which needn’t bother us too much, since we know that eventually, “labor destroys property.”)

Here’s an important part of the next step in the analysis:

Divide et impera — divide, and you shall command; divide, and you shall grow rich; divide, and you shall deceive men, you shall daze their minds, you shall mock at justice! Separate laborers from each other, perhaps each one’s daily wage exceeds the value of each individual’s product; but that is not the question under consideration. A force of one thousand men working twenty days has been paid the same wages that one would be paid for working fifty-five years; but this force of one thousand has done in twenty days what a single man could not have accomplished, though he had labored for a million centuries. Is the exchange an equitable one? Once more, no; when you have paid all the individual forces, the collective force still remains to be paid. Consequently, there remains always a right of collective property which you have not acquired, and which you enjoy unjustly.

Where does the “collective right of property” come from? Proudhon accepts that perhaps whatever rights might arise from individual labor could be compensated with a wage. The problem is that we are not dealing with strictly individual labor. There remains a power to produce that is directly attributable to the fact that laborers are working together—a collective force—which increases the production of products and increases whatever power to appropriate we may grant (for the sake of argument) to labor. If labor—or labor not otherwise compensated—is granted that power of appropriation (if it is “the efficient cause of the domain of property”), then the workers do indeed still have a claim that must be addressed. Again:

…when you have paid all the individual forces, the collective force still remains to be paid. Consequently, there remains always a right of collective property which you have not acquired, and which you enjoy unjustly.

Now, the capitalist has an answer—and really a series of answers—for why they have a right to the fruits of collective force. They will either claim that no collective force is possible without the intervention of capitalist management, or they will rely on the fiction of the productivity of capital, or they will appeal to what Proudhon calls a droit d’aubaine (what Tucker calls the “right of increase,” but we should probably recognize as a “right” of escheat.) Chapter IV addresses the aubaines. § 6 and § 7 tackle some of the arguments made in favor of special compensation for managerial or entrepreneurial labor.

Property and Theft: Proudhon’s Theory of Exploitation” is a short, but perhaps helpful post on the theory of collective force.

§ 6. — That in Society all Wages are Equal.

“To each according to his capital, his labor, and his skill.” [“utopian socialist” formula]

The opening discussion regarding the Fourierist/Saint-Simonian “to each…” formula is, I think, interesting. Proudhon showed skepticism toward a lot of the familiar variations on the “from each… to each…” formulas on which we often rely. But, despite this section being fairly well-known, it may come as some surprise that Proudhon takes some time to refute the notion that the amount of compensation for associated labor should be governed by the amount of labor.

We have a chapter heading that needs to be unpacked a bit: “That in society all wages are equal.” For Proudhon, “society” is closely associated with “equality.” There are places in the argument where they are nearly synonyms. And there is some distinction to be made between “social” labor, for which “society” pays a “wage” in the general division of products and labor that is in some important sense not “social.”

In so far as laborers are associated, they are equal; and it involves a contradiction to say that one should be paid more than another. For, as the product of one laborer can be paid for only in the product of another laborer, if the two products are unequal, the remainder — or the difference between the greater and the smaller — will not be acquired by society; and, therefore, not being exchanged, will not affect the equality of wages. There will result, it is true, in favor of the stronger laborer a natural inequality, but not a social inequality; no one having suffered by his strength and productive energy. In a word, society exchanges only equal products — that is, rewards no labor save that performed for her benefit; consequently, she pays all laborers equally: with what they produce outside of her sphere she has no more to do, than with the difference in their voices and their hair.

There is, it appears, a social economy, in which products exchange for products among equals. It is within the context of that economy that association and interdependence seem to necessitate equality of compensation. In this economy of equals, each individual has a share of labor to contribute (and I think we can think about contribution very broadly and inclusively, rather than using the standards of our present societies, which have a hard time recognizing economic contribution if it doesn’t make a profit for some capitalist) and to interfere with the ability of others to “do their share” appears here as a kind of anti-social act.

There’s no fixed notion of what such an association or society is supposed to do—and we wouldn’t expect any sort of top-down determination of ends in an anarchist account—but we should probably recognize that the association is a kind of collective being, which produces the greater collective force and best serves the interests of the individuals involved when dynamic activity on the part of the members of the association is held in balance. Equal labor need not involve any equivalence in calories burned, hours worked, etc. We can probably come fairly close to “from each according to their abilities” as a standard for the social side of individual labor.

And then if some individuals are capable of and inclined to other sorts of exertion, they ought to be free to do so, as long as they don’t interfere with others’ ability to play their part in the association. But the most enthusiastic Stakhanovite doesn’t earn any additional “wage” from society as a result of their exertions.

Yes, life is a struggle. But this struggle is not between man and man — it is between man and Nature; and it is each one’s duty to take his share in it. If, in the struggle, the strong come to the aid of the weak, their kindness deserves praise and love; but their aid must be accepted as a free gift, — not imposed by force, nor offered at a price. All have the same career before them, neither too long nor too difficult; whoever finishes it finds his reward at the end: it is not necessary to get there first.

We know that Proudhon really believed that wages should indeed be equal in society, in part because he records in his notebooks the point at which he stopped insisting on it, not wishing to join the ranks of those whose social solutions were limited to formulas.

CHAPTER 4:

General Notes:

Chapter III ends with this summary and transition:

To conclude: —

The laborer, in his relation to society, is a debtor who of necessity dies insolvent. The proprietor is an unfaithful guardian who denies the receipt of the deposit committed to his care, and wishes to be paid for his guardianship down to the last day.

Lest the principles just set forth may appear to certain readers too metaphysical, I shall reproduce them in a more concrete form, intelligible to the dullest brains, and pregnant with the most important consequences.

Hitherto, I have considered property as a power of exclusion; hereafter, I shall examine it as a power of invasion.

We are moving from the first half of the discussion of the claim that property is theft (which is completed in the final chapter) and turning to the proposition that property is impossible. The two are obviously connected. We might think of the general “right” that Proudhon focuses on here as what is left when you eliminate all of the rationales for property already addressed. They were addressing rights to appropriate and accumulate in ways that still had some connection to arguments about “rights to the fruits of one’s own labor”—and they conferred, generally, what Proudhon calls a “power of exclusion.

As a bit of an aside, this characterization of property as both “theft” and a “power of exclusion” is probably the closest Proudhon comes in this work to repeating the claim made in The Celebration of Sunday that the Biblical injunction (“thou shalt not steal”) is actually an injunction against every form of “putting aside for oneself.) In that earlier formulation, “property is theft” wouldn’t be a paradox, “stolen concept,” etc., but simply a description of its origins. (There’s still, I think, some interesting work to be done on that earlier book.)

With that in mind, we might say that, so far, property has been the theft primarily of the “free gifts” of nature (appropriation of land and natural resources) and exploitation of a kind of collective product simply not accounted for in existing theories of production and compensation. To then shift to talk about invasion is really to up the ante and talk about the capitalist class more like highway robbers than people simply taking advantage of the existing system. That’s one of the reasons that it is useful to correct Tucker’s translation a bit.

AXIOME. La propriété est le droit d’aubaine que le propriétaire s’attribue sur une chose marquée par lui de son seing.

AXIOM: Property is the right of escheat that the proprietor assumes [literally attributes to themselves] over a thing marked by him with his signature [or legal mark].

And now consider the ways in which an examination of the “right” of escheat allows us to more completely integrate the critiques of capitalism and governmentalism in Proudhon’s thought.

The potential ironies, for us, are rather delicious. Proudhon is going to do his best to finally topple the last supports of property with an argument from axioms, which perhaps bears more than just a bit of resemblance to a familiar line about taxation and theft.

One last bit of context: We’ve seen some of the reasons that bits and pieces of What is Property? has seemed to support a wide range of readings, portraying Proudhon as essentially communist, essentially capitalist, and just about everything in between. There is certainly a lot of focus in our circles on conflating Proudhon’s economic thought with “mutualism,” defined (because it doesn’t actually seem to be communism) as “market anarchism” (or jettisoned because we don’t think that label makes sense.) So, just to stir that pot a little, maybe it’s useful to look at one of the places from the Second Memoir on Property where he talks about the droit d’aubaine in what ought to be an illuminating context.

I say that competition, isolation of interests, monopoly, privilege, accumulation of capital, exclusive enjoyment, subordination of functions, individualism in production, the right of profit or aubaine, the exploitation of man by man, and, to summarize all these species by what they have in common, that PROPERTY is the principal cause of misery and crime.

I will hopefully get far enough through the chapter notes to have occasion to mention it again, but some of my old commentaries on the book, and particularly “Varieties of Proprietors: Lovers, Husbands, and Mother Hens,” apply not just to the argument, but to the style and tone of this particular chapter.

Chapter IV, from the opening paragraphs:

If I show that property itself is impossible — that it is property which is a contradiction, a chimera, a utopia; and if I show it no longer by metaphysics and jurisprudence, but by figures, equations, and calculations, — imagine the fright of the astounded proprietor! And you, reader; what do you think of the retort?

Numbers govern the world — mundum regunt numeri. This proverb applies as aptly to the moral and political, as to the sidereal and molecular, world. The elements of justice are identical with those of algebra; legislation and government are simply the arts of classifying and balancing powers; all jurisprudence falls within the rules of arithmetic. This chapter and the next will serve to lay the foundations of this extraordinary doctrine. Then will be unfolded to the reader’s vision an immense and novel career; then shall we commence to see in numerical relations the synthetic unity of philosophy and the sciences; and, filled with admiration and enthusiasm for this profound and majestic simplicity of Nature, we shall shout with the apostle: “Yes, the Eternal has made all things by number, weight, and measure!” We shall understand not only that equality of conditions is possible, but that all else is impossible; that this seeming impossibility which we charge upon it arises from the fact that we always think of it in connection either with the proprietary or the communistic régime, — political systems equally irreconcilable with human nature. We shall see finally that equality is constantly being realized without our knowledge, even at the very moment when we are pronouncing it incapable of realization; that the time draws near when, without any effort or even wish of ours, we shall have it universally established; that with it, in it, and by it, the natural and true political order must make itself manifest.

It has been said, in speaking of the blindness and obstinacy of the passions, that, if man had any thing to gain by denying the truths of arithmetic, he would find some means of unsettling their certainty: here is an opportunity to try this curious experiment. I attack property, no longer with its own maxims, but with arithmetic. Let the proprietors prepare to verify my figures; for, if unfortunately for them the figures prove accurate, the proprietors are lost.

In proving the impossibility of property, I complete the proof of its injustice. In fact, —

That which is just must be useful;

That which is useful must be true;

That which is true must be possible;

Therefore, every thing which is impossible is untrue, useless, unjust. Then, — a priori, — we may judge of the justice of any thing by its possibility; so that if the thing were absolutely impossible, it would be absolutely unjust.

Property is physically and mathematically impossible.

Proudhon is going to tackle “The last resort of proprietors,” their opinion that “equality of conditions is impossible.” I think most of us are familiar with this sort of argument, sometimes accompanied by attempts at a priori proof. So we can perhaps take some pleasure in Proudhon’s attempt to turn the argument on its head. “What if,” he suggests, “it is actually property that is impossible—eliminating all chance that it could be either useful or just?”