Property is theft!
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Property is theft! (French: La propriété, c'est le vol!) is a slogan coined by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his 1840 book What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government.
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 . . . 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?
—Proudhon, What is Property?
(This translation by Benjamin Tucker renders "c'est le vol" as "it is robbery," although the slogan is typically rendered in English as "property is theft.")
By "property," Proudhon referred to the Roman law concept of the sovereign right of property—the right of the proprietor to do with his property as he pleases, "to use and abuse," so long as in the end lie submits to state-sanctioned title:
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?
—Proudhon, What is Property?
Proudhon contrasted the supposed right of property with the rights (which he considered valid) of liberty, equality, and security, saying: "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. The rich man’s right of property, on the contrary, has to be continually defended against the poor man’s desire for property." He further argued that the right of property contradicted these other rights: "Then if we are associated for the sake of liberty, equality, and security, we are not associated for the sake of property; then if property is a natural right, this natural right is not social, but anti-social. Property and society are utterly irreconcilable institutions."
Though Proudhon rejects the right of property per se, he also argues that the state of possession as it is (or was) could not be justified even by supposing this right. Here he feigns to bring a legal claim against society, in a style mocking legal rhetoric:
In writing this memoir against property, I bring against universal society an action petitoire [a legal claim to title]: I prove that those who do not possess to-day are proprietors by the same title as those who do possess; but, instead of inferring therefrom that property should be shared by all, I demand, in the name of general security, its entire abolition. If I fail to win my case, there is nothing left for us (the proletarian class and myself) but to cut our throats: we can ask nothing more from the justice of nations; for, as the code of procedure (art 26) tells us in its energetic style, the plaintiff who has been non-suited in an action petitoire, is debarred thereby from bringing an action possessoire. If, on the contrary, I gain the case, we must then commence an action possessoire, [a legal repossession] that we may be reinstated in the enjoyment of the wealth of which we are deprived by property. I hope that we shall not be forced to that extremity; but these two actions cannot be prosecuted at once, such a course being prohibited by the same code of procedure.
—Proudhon, What is Property? (emphasis added)
Proudhon claims that his treatise "shall prove beyond a doubt that property, to be just and possible, must necessarily have equality for its condition." He used the term mutuellisme (mutualism) to describe his vision of an economy in which individuals and democratic workers associations could trade their produce on the market under the constraint of equality.
[edit] Similar phrases
Brissot de Warville had previously written, in his Philosophical Researches on the Right of Property (Recherches philosophiques sur le droit de propriété et le vol), "Exclusive property is a robbery in nature."[1] Karl Marx would later write that Proudhon had taken the slogan from Warville,[2] although this is believed not to be true.[3]
Saint Ambrose taught superfluum quod tenes tu furaris (the superfluous property which you hold you have stolen).[1]
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote: "In the last analysis all property is theft."[1]
[edit] See also
- What is Property?
- Mutualism (economic theory)
- Libertarian socialism
- Property
- Sovereignty
- Bundle of rights
[edit] References
- ^ a b c William Shepard Walsh, Handy-book of Literary Curiosities, p. 923
- ^ Karl Marx, Letter to J. B. Schweizer, from Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume 2, first published in Der Social-Demokrat, Nos. 16, 17 and 18, February 1, 3 and 5, 1865
- ^ Robert L. Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.J. Proudhon, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 46-48.
