Karl Marx and the Anarchists Paul Thomas

part in keeping Stirner’s book in print (the date of the second edition,
1882, is significant) than Stirner’s ideas were to play in fuelling an
anarchist movement which he would doubtless have disowned.

Lobkowicz is quite right in suggesting, however, that it was Stirner
who indicated to Marx some of the pitfalls of Feuerbachian humanism,
forcing Marx to define his position not only against Feuerbach, but
also against Stirner himself. That Marx’s attack on Feuerbach in The
German Ideology was something of a volte-face in view of his earlier
near-adulation of Feuerbach has often been noticed - although the
suddenness of the transition has been exaggerated - and Lobkowicz
is, again, quite right in recognizing that it was none other than Stirner
who had impelled Marx into taking this new position. But to account
for the importance of ‘Saint Max’ merely along these lines will not do.
More is involved than just the indication of pitfalls; more is involved,
indeed, than ‘Saint Max’ itself (or ‘Saint Max’ himself). The important




point is that Marx, seeing the need to dissociate his position from that
(or those) of the Young Hegelians as a group, and in so doing to con-
front and reject the excesses of his own philosophical past, did much
more in The German Ideology than fully appreciate the force of Stirner’s
argument against the vapid anthropocentrism of Feuerbach. Marx’s
declaration of independence from Feuerbach’s influence was under
way, as we have seen in the last chapter, before The German Ideology
was embarked upon. Marx, it is true, was stung by Stirner’s accusation
that he was himself a ‘Feuerbachian’ foe of the individual; this accusation
was based not only on Marx’s use of Feuerbachian terminology (‘species-
being’ in particular) in ‘On the Jewish Question’ but also, much more
importantly, upon Marx’s assumption of what Stirner considered the
Feuerbachian mantle of ‘liberator of humanity’. To disavow Feuerbach
was one thing; to reply to this charge was something else again, since
the issue it brings in its train is one that on any reckoning transcends
Feuerbach’s presentation: that of individuality and communism. In
dismissing revolution and communism on the grounds that they in-
volved yet one more tyrannical, systematic form of regimentation,
Stirner had raised a spectre that had to be laid to rest.

Marx met Stirner’s accusation that communism as a means and as
an end is by its very nature irredeemably opposed to the individual
and his individuality by advancing several counter-arguments, not all
aimed merely at discrediting Stirner. He was driven to deny that his
position was in any way similar or reducible to those that any of the
Young Hegelians had put forward, to immunize, in other words, his
position against the accusations Stirner levelled against everyone else;
and what this denial entailed was another-a denial that the revolution-
ary injunctions he was concerned to put forward were resolvable into
earlier, purely moral or moralistic imperatives. Marx aimed in The
German Ideology not only ‘to debunk and discredit the philosophic
struggle with the shadows of reality, which appeals to the dreamy
and muddled German nation’, but also to demonstrate that his own
critique, far from condemning the present or its Young Hegelian
vindicators in the light of some abstract categories or principles, did
so on historical grounds - history serving to transcend and undercut
the pretensions of all purely philosophical critiques and abstract stan-
dards. This means that Stirner’s own criticisms of ‘fanaticism’ and the
empty moralism he associated with the school have some force as
applied to the Young Hegelians, whose revolutionism was indeed
bogus; this indeed is why it was important for Marx to distinguish
himself from them, publicly, brazenly and once and for all.

Marx was thus driven to insist in no uncertain terms that his own
critical analysis of capitalism and individuality, far from being abstract
or conceptual, was on the contrary embodied in what he called the
‘real movement’ of history. This is, of course, a large claim; the fullest


substantiation Marx gave it is not restricted within the pages of The
German Ideology but expanded upon throughout Marx’s later writings.
Yet the importance of The German Ideology in sketching out the
themes and setting the tone and terms of these later writings - and
indeed of raising many of their problems - ought not to be discounted.
Not the least important of these themes sounded for the first time in
The German Ideology were two connected themes that were to re-
sound through Marx’s later writings: the critical analysis of the division
of labour in capitalist society and the advancement of revolutionary
activity - political activity - as the only possible antidote to its un-
precedented and deleterious effects on the individual.

What has often been overlooked in earlier discussions is the fact
that it was Stirner who had forced both the issues, and the connection
between them, on to Marx’s attention, and that it was Stirner’s pre-
sentation of them that Marx - in the first instance, at least - set out to
meet. To begin with, Stirner had attacked ‘revolution’ as a ‘vocation’
and had asserted a kind of primordial, individual ‘rebellion’ in its
stead. That Stirner’s distinction is incoherent - as it surely is - constitutes
the least of Marx’s criticisms, since Stirner, carried away by his hatred
of ‘vocations’ and tasks, had overlooked something very basic indeed,
not only about revolution and communism but also about ‘vocations’
themselves.

... if... the workers assert in their communist propaganda
that the vocation, destiny, task of every person is to achieve
an all-round development of all his abilities... [Stirner] sees
in this only the vocation to something alien, the assertion of
the ‘Holy.’ He seeks to achieve freedom from this by taking
under his protection the individual who has been crippled by
the division of labour at the expense of his abilities and
relegated to a one-sided vocation ... which has been declared
his vocation by others. What is here asserted [by Stirner] in
the form of a vocation, a destiny, is precisely the negation of
the vocation that has hitherto resulted in practice from the
division of labour . . .⁹⁰

particularly, as we have seen, from the division of labour in its modern,
capitalist form which amounts to the ‘fixation of social activity’, the
negation and alienation of self-activity, properly so-called.

Here a difference of some substance emerges between Marx and
Stirner (and the Young Hegelians in general). What concerns Stirner
above all about revolution as a ‘vocation’ is what it has in common
with the state, inter alia', like the state, like all earlier systems of legality
and morality, like all anterior forms of political and social organization,
and like all tasks, vocations and ideologies that can be said to be collective




(in the sense of supra-individual), revolution devalues the individual
and appeals in the name of collectivity to self-abnegation and self-
sacrifice. Marx’s points against this perception are that it is too broad;
that Stirner’s argument by virtue of its broadness lacks specificity,
and fails even to distinguish the state from civil society; that in view
of this failure Stirner’s state-centredness is unwarranted and specious;
and that it misprizes the nature of revolution anyway. Marx’s account
for its part emphasizes not the political, moral and spiritual processes
of self-bondage, but the forcible denial of self-activity, conceived
expansively, that is engendered and sustained by the division of labour
in capitalist society; if individuality is denied, what denies it in the
first instance is not the state but the labour process, not the prospect
of revolutionary change but the division of labour whose effects com-
munism as an end and as a means would overcome once and for all.

The difference between revolution and Stirner’s rebellion is not,
as Stirner thinks, that the one is a political and social act while
the other is an egoistical act, but that the former is an act while
the latter is no act at all. .. If Stirner had studied the various
actual revolutions and attempts at revolution . . . [if,] further,
he had concerned himself with the actual individuals... in
every revolution, and their relations, instead of being satisfied
with pure Ego .. . then perhaps he would come to understand
that every revolution, and its results, was determined by these
relations, by needs and that the ‘political and social act’ was in
no way in contradiction to the ‘egoistical act.’⁹¹

Marx’s point here is not just the more or less familiar one that ‘in
revolutionary activity the changing of self coincides with the changing
of circumstances’ (though it certainly involves this belief); what under-
lies it, however, is a way of conceptualizing the individual self that is
radically at variance with Stirner’s. Marx’s is expansive and dynamic,
while Stirner’s is restrictive and static. At the root of Marx’s criticisms
of Stirner’s Young Hegelian variant of all the shortcomings of solipsism
we find a conception of individuality that differs radically not only
from the individualism that animates capitalist society but also from
Stirner’s ‘ego’ which is, finally, nothing but a kind of residuum, what
is left after various layers of consciousness have been stripped away.
Marx’s accusation that on Stirner’s logic the ‘ego’ must be nothing
more than a conceptual category, and the truculent egoist must have
but a hollow, purely conceptual existence, was not advanced simply to
score a point, but as part of a more general argument. Stirner’s assertion
of ‘peculiarity’ (Eigenheit), by turning into yet another essence, has the
effect of catapulting him back among the Young Hegelians, whose
milieu is where he really belongs; but this is the least of it. Stirner’s




assertion of the peculiarity of the individual, besides being abstract
and solipsistic, is also quite literally beside the point if it is put forward
at a time when what might really distinguish one person from another
or others is in the process of being cut from under him, at a time when
personal powers are not, and cannot be, apprehended as social powers.
The forces that oppose individuality - once individuality is conceived
properly, as a potential, a capacity that has its conditions of emergence
- are not conceptual forces opposing some fictitious core of being (or
‘essence’) but the real ones that, by striking at self-determination and
self-activity, strike by the same token at freedom. As Marx was later
to put it, in language that strikingly recalls that of The German Ideology,

although at first the development of the capacities of the human
species takes place at the cost of the majority of human individuals
and even classes, at the end it breaks through this contradiction
and coincides with the development of the individual: the higher
development of individuality is thus only achieved by an historical

92

process.

What li^s behind this characteristic Marxian claim is a set of issues and
themes, developed initially in The German Ideology and with greatest
resonance in its unjustly neglected central section, ‘Saint Max’: indi-
vidualism, individuality, vocation, labour, self-activity, freedom, self-
determination, communism. All are key words in the Marxian lexicon;
all were raised in the course of Marx’s attack on Stirner. What makes
‘Saint Max’ central to The German Ideology also makes it central to
Marx’s writings as a whole; Stirner, despite himself, takes us to the
heart of the Marxian enterprise.


CHAPTER 4

Marx and Proudhon

Proudhon: the excommunicant of the epoch

To be governed is to be kept under surveillance, inspected,
spied upon, bossed, law-ridden, regulated, penned in,
indoctrinated, preached at, registered, evaluated, appraised,
censured, ordered about by creatures who have neither the
right, nor the knowledge, nor the virtue, to do so. To be
governed is to be at each operation, at each transaction, at
each movement, marked down, recorded, listed, priced, stamped,
measured, assessed, licensed, authorized, sanctioned, endorsed,
reprimanded, obstructed, reformed, rebuked, chastised. It is,
under the pretence of public benefit and in the name of the
general interest, to be requisitioned, drilled, fleeced, exploited,
monopolized, extorted, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then at the
slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be squelched,
corrected, vilified, bullied, hounded, tormented, bludgeoned,
disarmed, strangled, imprisoned, shot down, judged, condemned,
deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed, and to top it off, ridiculed,
made a fool of, outraged, dishonoured. That’s government, that’s
its justice, that’s its morality!

Proudhon, Idee generate de la revolution au XIX^e siecle¹

The writings of Proudhon (by far the most intelligent explorer of
the idea of ‘anarchy’ in modern times) are a prolonged condem-
nation of a state understood in terms of purposive association,
which he identifies as ‘une uniformite beate et stupide, la
solidarite de la sottise.’ He describes his concern as ‘Trouver un
etat de l’egalite sociale qui soit ni communaute, ni despotisme,
ni morcellement, ni anarchie, mais liberte dans l’ordre et
independence dans l’unite’ . .. not a bad specification of the
civil condition.

Michael Oakeshott, On Human Conduct²




Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-65) was an anarchist theoretician of a
very different stripe from his near contemporary Max Stirner (1806-
56). The theoretical differences between the two centre around some-
thing to be discussed at greater length in due course: they stem from
Proudhon’s obsessive desire for order in society, an order which he
believed the state, an illegitimate, factitious and self-styled monopol-
ization of the means of violence, undercut rather than expressed.
That Proudhon and Stirner would abolish the state for opposite reasons
makes it virtually certain that Proudhon would have disagreed with
Stirner even more fervently than he disagreed with (apparently) every-
one else. But the fact that he never bothered to do so underlines more
than Proudhon’s lack of concern for most things beyond the borders
of France; it also indicates a more obvious difference, one of bearing,
between his doctrine and Stirner’s thought. Like his fellow Young
Hegelians, with their somewhat misleading talk of the ‘French Feuer-
bach’, Stirner was acquainted with Proudhon’s ideas (which he criticized
in passing); Proudhon, who could have heard about Stirner from Marx,
from Bakunin, or from Karl Grim at the height of whatever reputation
Stirner enjoyed during his lifetime, never discusses his ideas, even to
refute them.

This points to a considerable difference in reputation and influence.
Stirner is best known for one book, The Individual and his Own (though
he wrote others that remained obscure). Proudhon, on the other hand,
was a voluminous writer. His collected works run, in various editions,
into a bewildering number of volumes, to which it is today customary
to add fourteen volumes of correspondence as well as five volumes of
notebooks (the Carnets')', he was an accomplished, if long-winded,
publicist and controversialist as well as the author of a series of well-
known books on more general themes.³ Stirner lived a life of obscurity,
punctuated only once by the kind of flare-up of notoriety that attended
the appearance of all of Proudhon’s best-known books. During Stirner’s
lifetime he had almost no followers - he was, as Daniel Guerin says, a
sans-famille,⁴ and attracted little subsequent attention after the Young
Hegelian flurry that greeted his book in 1845; even his posthumous
disciples were (in a sense appropriately) few and far between. Proudhon
was very different. He was celebrated to the point of notoriety through-
out most of an eventful life, the main incidents of which Proudhon, an
able if self-dramatizing publicist in his own cause, made sure were well
known. Even though humility was alien to his nature, Proudhon ad-
mitted his temperamental inability and unwillingness to lead a move-
ment and he left in his wake no established body of followers; yet his
wake was considerable and his influence, indirect as well as direct,
enormous. He was, in the fullest sense of the word, a public figure,
a status in which he gloried. His doctrine had many adherents, even
though - or perhaps precisely because - it was sometimes incoherent




and always open-ended, to the point, at times, of sheer inconsistency.
Any linear application of so resolutely unprogrammatic a corpus as
Proudhon’s untidy doctrine would be impossible; yet his doctrine has
connotations as well as denotations that were nothing if not effective
in speaking to generations of French working men in an idiom that
seemed, and was, authentic and powerful.

Proudhon himself influenced these working men by his example
as well as his precepts; he was not, and did not seek to be, a spell-
binding orator capable of moving masses, but he was an exemplar,
the symbol and prototype of the ‘free man’, as his friend Herzen
recognized. Proudhon did not always act admirably, but he was never-
theless enormously, if not universally, admired. Herzen, as ever, does
much to explain why; he characterized the year 1849 in France as
follows:

The year which has passed, to end worthily, to fill the cup of
moral degradation, offered us a terrible spectacle: the fight of a
free man against the liberators of humanity. The words, the
mordant scepticism, the fierce denial, the merciless irony of
Proudhon angered the official revolutionaries no less than the
conservatives. They attacked him bitterly, they defended their
traditions with the inflexibility of legitimists, they were
terrified of his atheism and his anarchism, they could not
understand how one could be free without the state, without
a democratic government. In amazement, they listened to the
immoral statement that the republic is for man, not man for
the republic .. .^s

Proudhon’s marked hostility to even (or sometimes especially) revol-
utionary political action, a hostility expressed in the name of freedom,
could not, one suspects, be better put - except by Proudhon himself.
It is in this hostility that Proudhon’s persona and the resilience of his
doctrine come together. What Proudhon stood for, and what Proudhon-
ism - which was never a school of thought, like Marxism, nor yet
merely a temperamental affinity or cast of mind among those looking
to Proudhon as an exemplar - meant, was above all else an attitude to
politics that conspicuously included revolutionary politics, an insistence,
which could be steadfast and imperturbable or truculent and exasper-
ating, on abstention from the political fray, from the dogmas and
doctrines and in-fighting, from the party lines and creeds, shifts and
alliances of those who took it upon themselves to personify la Nation,
the Revolution, or progress. Political activity is class collaboration,
pure and simple; to resort to electioneering is fatally to accept the
rules of a game that need to be changed, the game itself scrubbed out.
Proudhon believed fervently - all Proudhon’s beliefs were fervent




- in the salvation of working men, by their own efforts, through econ-
omic and social action alone. He urged that the state, whatever its form
or pretensions, be defeated, hands down, but not on its own ground,
not (usually) by means of any kind of activity that could be termed
political. To fight on the terrain of the state is to cede advantage to
the state and those who would use it; instead, Proudhon advocated,
and to a considerable extent inspired, the undercutting of this terrain
from without, by means of autonomous working-class associations
and organizations of the kind that owed nothing to the state. The
point was not to conquer political power but to deny it its medium
of existence, for political power in Proudhon’s eyes corrupts and
contaminates those who use it, or are fixated by or upon it. Working-
class separatism from the prevailing system of rewards and expectations
leads in Proudhon’s thought to the reconstitution of social order by
non-political means - not according to any political instrumentalities
or means but instead according to the organization of labour.

Proudhon’s thought is notoriously difficult to summarize, but it is
possible to identify themes that were developed with some consistency
from book to book, and which were to give Proudhonism its immense
resiliency even after the death of Proudhon himself, in the French
labour movement. His central idea was that society should be organized
not for politics and war but for work; for only work, considered as a
kind of esprit general, could and would make possible a moral order in
society that would sustain itself without coercion and without the kind
of parasitism on the efforts of others that Proudhon thought dominated
present society, in political and economic life alike. What he thought
most needed to be overcome was what today would be called a con-
juncture, a conjuncture between the unlimited accumulation of capital,
on the one hand, and the accumulation and monopolization of political
power, on the other. The two processes were linked since the state
could then be used as an instrument to deprive the many of their
property for the sake of the few into whose hands it fell. Proudhon
believed this process of concentration and monopolization to be self-
sustaining, unless checked; and it could be checked only by extra-
political means. Social order may be constituted, in Proudhon’s view,
not according to any political instrumentality - political power and
government were always the enemy - but according to an altogether
different and separable social principle, on the basis, that is, of labour.
The reconstruction of society along ‘industrial’ lines is an idea that
may owe something to Saint-Simonism, but there is a crucial difference
not only of personnel (Proudhon would conspicuously not include
the methodical capitalist among the industrious classes, les industriels)
but also of scale: the agency of social regeneration was to be the small
workshop, the atelier, and the face-to-face relationships among men it
involved, relationships which were to provide what Proudhon in his




later writings termed the ‘mutualist’ paradigm for social and moral
renewal. The ‘federalism’ that according to Proudhon was to be built
upon this mutualist base meant that free, decentralized initiative would
be the condition as well as the result of the social and moral cohesion
that were to sustain the new order. Such federalism was, indeed,
ultimately to apply not only to relations within the French nation but
also to international relations (not, of course, to relations among
states).

What runs through these various Proudhonian themes and gives them
a certain consistency is a marked hostility to determinism. Proudhon
believed in a code of practical morality according to which the emerg-
ence of future society and its new principle of order was not at all a
matter of ineluctable historical necessity but, instead, altogether a
matter of moral awakening. Proudhon’s animus against historical
necessity and determinism was such that most of his writings contain
nothing that could be termed a philosophy of history at all; perhaps
sensing its lack, Proudhon did eventually endeavour to provide one in
his later works, but this effort was in the nature of an ex post facto
manoeuvre to bind together elements that originally owed nothing
to any philosophy of history, and everything to a set of ideas about
morality. Proudhon does not reject morality as a prejudice men would
best slough off, in the manner of Stirner (or, sometimes, Bakunin); nor
does he pin his hopes for morality on to the emergence of some ‘new’,
post-revolutionary man. Proudhon’s morality is more straightforwardly
a ripening of what is best in men as they are, the permanent sub-stratum
of values that includes self-respect, honesty, decency, rectitude and
individual responsibility. Not all men, of course, exhibit these moral
qualities; capitalists, proprietors, monopolists and their political lackeys,
indeed, cannot exhibit them. The only people in society who can
embody these characteristics in their day-to-day intimate activity are
those who do not depend upon expropriating others: the workers.
From this proposition Proudhon infers, somewhat shakily, that work
of a direct and non-exploitative kind itself has a moral character;
indeed Proudhon steadfastly refused to characterize work negatively,
even under capitalist conditions. It is always, even under the least
promising of circumstances, in and of itself an act of moral affirmation.⁶

What this means is that workers, in undertaking their long-term task
of seceding from capitalism and bourgeois democracy, according to
Proudhon enjoyed at the outset one pronounced advantage: that of
simply being workers, able to exclude non-workers from their ranks.
What underlies Proudhon’s unrelenting advocacy of working-class
separatism is not just the fact of social division; he was not sirhply
attempting to make a virtue out of the necessity this enforced separation
implied. What also underlies it is the value of labour itself. Proudhon,
who even coined the term demopedie to signify its educational value,




believed fervently in the expansive potential as well as the redemptive
value of labour, to the point of holding that anything unconnected
with it was somehow evil. If power corrupts, labour ennobles. Proud-
hon’s System of Economic Contradictions - which Marx was to attack
in The Poverty of Philosophy - defined work as ‘the great matrix of
civilization’ (‘la grande matrice de la civilisation’);⁷ work was indeed,
in the words of James Joll, Proudhon’s ‘basic ethical standard’⁸ which
Proudhon himself was not above describing as ‘une volupte intime’⁹ -
an interesting choice of words for one who was the first to condemn
luxury and leisure because they lead, inexorably, to idleness and vice.
His followers were in this respect no different: the strongly Proudhonist
Paris delegates to the Geneva Congress of the First International in
1866, the year after Proudhon died, brought with them to Switzerland
a programme the second article of which began, ‘le travail est grand et
noble, c’est la source de toute richesse et de toute moralite’.¹⁰

It is on the basis of this kind of thinking that Proudhon himself
urged the view, against the Saint-Simonians as well as against Louis
Blanc, that collective productive action, of the type denied to all but
the worker, the ouvrier, and collective productive action alone carries
within itself the principle necessary for the recasting, the root-and-
branch reconstitution, of society’s order. This recasting of an order
that, though latent, was by the same token potential, would have to
proceed from below and from within to be legitimate. This new but
implicit principle of order would not exist and thrive as the state and
capital most assuredly do exist and thrive, at the expense of the indi-
vidual, at the cost of decentralized individual initiative. What Proudhon
advocated in the name of anarchy was very different from what Stirner
had advocated in the name of resurgent egoism. Proudhon urged not
absence of authority but a ‘recomposition of authority’ that would
sometimes by-pass and always undercut the state and capital without
destroying order in society. Proudhon’s last book, The Political Capacity
of the Working Gasses (De la capacite politique des classes ouvrieres)ⁿ
argued at length that the state could not generate any social order
worthy of the name and for this reason was by its very nature degener-
ative rather than regenerative. The argument that the state was not and
could not be a cause generatrice was a summation of much that Proud-
hon had said before, not least in opposition to the Jacobin formula
‘everything for the people, but everything by the state’ (‘tout pour le
peuple mais tout par l’etat’), a formula that was itself, not surprisingly,
powerful among the nineteenth-century French Left, particularly in
the hands of Louis-Auguste Blanqui, another of Proudhon’s betes
noires. The argument Proudhon advanced against Blanquism, Jacob-
inism and state socialism of all persuasions was that the state existed
at one remove from the society it had set itself up to regulate and
superintend; that its existence and perpetuation were borrowed and


supemumary; and that the forces sustaining and multiplying its inauth-
entic power {puissance) could only be reinforced by any Jacobin
uprising, any ‘revolutionary’ coup de main or emeute. The point was to
undercut these forces once and for all. Not only Jacobinism but any
properly revolutionary movement would in Proudhon’s opinion merely
prolong the action, accelerate what he called the mouvement, of the
state - the state which, whatever its form or credentials, always became
the instrument of the propertied and, as such, always remained external
to social forces (as ‘la constitution exterieure de la puissance sociale’)
and was always an alienation of collective forces (‘alienation de la
force collective’),¹² forces which in its absence would breathe life,
justice and order into society.

Any resemblance between Proudhon and Marx on this point is more
apparent than real. What those who regard Proudhonism as even a
debased form of Marxism overlook in this connection is the fact that
the state according to Proudhon is not only by its very nature bound
to maintain hierarchy, multiply laws, suppress liberties and deprive
people of their property but is also uniquely favourably placed to do
so. It is no mere instrument; it can dictate to society so long as society
itself refrains from sweeping it out of existence. ‘Liberty’ and ‘govern-
ment’ were to Proudhon quite simply zero-sum alternatives, posed
starkly for men (‘ou point de liberte, ou point de gouvernement’).¹³
The state was necessary to the accumulation of capital by virtue of its
character as

an instrument designed to dispossess the majority for the benefit
of a small minority, a legalized form of robbery, which
systematically deprived the individual of his natural right to
property by giving to the rich sole control of social legislation
and financial credit, while the petite bourgeoisie was helplessly
expropriated.¹⁴

Proudhon’s outrage at the paradox that this entire process took place
under the aegis of free, liberal institutions sanctified by the French
Revolution perhaps accounts for his own taste for paradoxical formu-
lations (property is theft, God is evil, citizenship denotes deprivation
of rights) which pepper his writings and given them an arresting, pro-
vocative character. But be this as it may, the reader does not encounter
in Proudhon’s writings anything approaching Marx’s perception, out-
lined in ‘On the Jewish Question’ and elsewhere, that capitalism, for
all its negative features, nevertheless denotes progress; that ‘political
emancipation’, for all its deceptiveness, is nevertheless a precursor -
in a radically unsubstantiated form - of ‘human emancipation’. As
far as Proudhon was concerned, matters were very much more straight-
forward. The modern state, whatever its ‘revolutionary’ credentials, is




the unambiguous enemy of justice and order alike; claims that it might
be used to effect justice and order were simply insidious, and to be
rejected on principle.

The question remains how, given the polar opposition that obtains
between the two, ‘liberty’ is to be made to succeed ‘government’, how
le regime proprietaire is to be undercut. Proudhon’s answer is to stress
the need for and nobility of voluntary individual effort by members of
the proletariat who should set up and sustain their own, autonomous
counter-institutions, instead of allowing themselves fatally to be misled
by Jacobins, republicans and revolutionaries of various stripes (not to
mention reformist state socialists like Louis Blanc). These authentic,
spontaneously generated institutions, which were to include mutual aid
funds and workers’ credit societies, but not trade unions (since Proud-
hon regarded strikes as violent and barbarous), would work as it were
against the grain of bourgeois society, in opposition to its esprit general
of the accumulation of capital and political power, because work itself
as a redemptive agency can bind together workers in an organic manner
that is denied in principle and in practice to members of the bourgeoisie
who cannot by the very nature of their class even aspire to such an
organic unity. The bourgeoisie in this view, unlike the working class,
can be no more than an agglomeration of disconnected singulars, each
of whom works in his own, self-defined interest and relates to his
‘fellows’ only by competing with them. Despite the uniquely proletarian
principle of social collectivity, Proudhon believed that only moral
renewal at the level of the individual could provide the impetus, the
wherewithal, for social renewal. The necessity - a moral necessity -
for voluntary individual change, a kind of singular moral resurgence,
underlies all Proudhon’s central, practical proposals. His at times
fanatical voluntarism and fierce egalitarianism stand behind his advocacy
of free, mutual exchange as the animating principle of a self-sustaining,
pluralist system having no need for the state or the capitalist, the
functionary or the financier.

The individual self-moralization that this task presupposes and is to
sustain must be of a type that would exclude all outside, doctrinaire,
collectivist regimentation of the emergent labour movement; the move-
ment must, according to Proudhon, carve out for itself its own morality,
its own identity. It must use and rely upon its own resources and must
contaminate itself as little as possible with any resources that have been
used (or could be used) by its enemies. The resources thus declared out
of bounds on principle include not only economic resources - trade
unionism of the type that might lead to strikes, for example-but also
all manner of political instrumentalities - those having to do with the
state as well as the Stock Exchange, with government as well as the
banks, with parliamentarism as well as proprietorship, and, not least,
with revolution as well as most versions of reform. What is normally to




be a politically abstentionist, and is always to be a separatist, workers’
movement is to progress along, and cleave to, its own lines to the final
goal - a goal to be understood not as an end but as a beginning - of
justice, order, mutualism and federalism.

Proudhon was above all else a moralist, as Max Stirner in his bizarre
but acute way had recognized; indeed, in his capacity as moralist - a
moral man to his admirers, a moralistic man to his detractors - Proudhon
would happily have admitted to being one of Stirner’s ‘taskmasters’
outlining a ‘vocation’ to the individual, a vocation, moreover, of a
distinctly non-revolutionary kind. Stirner, had he been better acquainted
with it, would have found much to object to in Proudhon’s concept of
justice, a concept as central to his thought as it was many-sided. His
discussions of justice, like his discussions of so much else, are often
confusing as well as complicated, although some, at least, of the con-
fusion these discussions engender can be cut through, if not entirely
dissipated, if we remember that the root and foundation of justice
according to Proudhon is a moral force inherent in the individual from
which a ‘natural’ balance of forces in society can emerge, under the
right conditions. These conditions are of two kinds. The first is that
obstacles to the emergence of justice - particularly, of course, the
state - be removed; the second concerns the manner of their removal,
which is to be neither violent nor revolutionary. Instead, what is a
moral necessity - that of making order in society legitimate - demands
moral means. The moral force within the individual, if it has not
already been rendered inoperative by the accumulation of capital or
the pursuit of political power, is to issue in what might best be de-
scribed as a personal and social stock-taking, in what Proudhon himself
called a ‘prise de conscience’¹⁵ - Proudhon was no determinist - since
this outcome is to result from each individual’s sense of right and wrong,
his good faith (bonne foi), provided of course that these qualities had
not been eroded by capitalism, parasitism or politics. There is an
important sense in which, his own later protestations to the contrary
notwithstanding, Proudhon’s notion of ‘justice’ is not really ‘meta-
physical’ at all. It is immanent, not transcendent; it implies, in social
terms, a modest, non-exploitative, frugal existence, an aisance, for
everyone, on the basis of which would arise mutual self-respect and
recognition of the dignity of the other. This more attractive side of
Proudhon’s thought - and in fairness it must be said that there are
other sides - calls to mind the thought of writers (Camus, Orwell)
who in other respects are quite unlike him. One of the reasons why
Proudhon disliked the state, the church, the banks, capital and other
‘extrinsic’ agencies of control is that all of them deny and feed upon
the self-respect and mutuality on which justice in society would have
to be based.

Only when the spontaneous balance of authentic economic and




social forces had replaced property, hoarding, monopoly and parasit-
ism (Taccaparement proprietaire’, as Proudhon, sounding like the
sans-culottes of the French Revolution, sometimes called it) would
the inherent order of society make political, economic, financial
and religious institutions of this type redundant. The point is that
these should come to seem unnecessary and outmoded, that they
should appear even to those manning their various apparatuses to have
been rendered superfluous, to have been overtaken by events; this
means that Proudhon’s programme, whatever other problems it may
encounter, is certain to take some time. This prospect left Proudhon
generally unperturbed; if the goal is distant and long-term, if the
means to it are protracted and (again generally) unimpeachably gradual-
ist, the advantage is - or so Proudhon fondly believed - firmly on the
side of the workers. Work, after all, implied and contained within
itself the unique, aboriginal and organic principle of individual as well
as collective life, whereas the state, capital, the banks and the church
expressed only the mechanical, the formal, the inessential and the
unnecessary. The power of these institutions, Proudhon insisted, not
always too hopefully, can be undercut and circumscribed, but not by
institutional means; what is crucial is that those doing the undercutting
should in no way be tempted to take their cue from their enemies.
They should act as an example to others, and not let others act as an
example to them.

The state, in particular, cannot be uprooted, even once its branches
have withered, if it is challenged on its own, authoritarian grounds.
Political power and that of capital, these two being cognate and in-
creasingly inseparable, cannot be used to emancipate labour; any
worthwhile ‘organization of labour’, declaimed Proudhon (thinking
no doubt of Louis Blanc) should be autonomous and bring about
the downfall of political power and capital from without (‘Quiconque,
pour organiser le travail, fait appel au capital et au pouvoir, a menti
parce que l’organisation de travail doit etre la decheance du capital
et du pouvoir’).¹⁶ Proudhon’s opposition to politics was apparently
all-embracing; all politics, of whatever persuasion, corrupt their prac-
titioners. ‘Give power to a St Vincent de Paul’, he once protested,
‘and he will become a Guizot or a Talleyrand.’¹⁷ Such protestations -
‘to indulge in politics is to wash one’s hands in dung’¹⁸ - speak to a
marked obsessiveness about politics, which did not pass unnoticed by
Proudhon’s contemporaries. They also speak to a certain lack of con-
sistency, since Proudhon, as we shall see, was in practice prepared to
suspend (if not reject outright) his belief in political abstentionism,
often with surprising results.

What he was never prepared to suspend, however, was his forthright
anti-communism and fervent opposition to revolutionary doctrine.
This steadfastness helps account for George Sand’s characterization of


Proudhon as ‘socialism’s greatest enemy’.¹⁹ Sand had in mind more
than Proudhon’s opposition to communism, however; her character-
ization, which, while it was unkind, was no more unkind that Proud-
hon’s characterizations of those he considered his enemies, referred
also to Proudhon’s well-marked truculence, arrogance and (at times)
sheer bloody-mindedness - qualities he was prepared to bring to bear
on his rivals, who were according to his own accounts legion, in appar-
ently any available fray. Proudhon’s willingness to enter the lists
against these rivals was tinged with a certain vanity - the obsessive
vanity of the autodidact, his rivals were wont to term it, jealous to the
point of spitefulness and pettiness of anyone who so much as appeared
to chip away at Proudhon’s own originality as a thinker and a public
figure. Proudhon, indeed, as George Sand recognized, did not always
cut an admirable figure. His contemporaries - those, that is, who were
not inclined to worship at the shrine - were well aware of a dark side
that Proudhon often openly displayed. His thought has a frankly
reactionary, prejudicial aspect, and his unsavoury prejudices would
have been difficult to ignore, thanks to his well-marked taste for
controversy and talent as a controversialist.

There are several senses in which Proudhon might appear to have
provided Marx with an easy target (although Marx, as we shall see,
indulged in attacks that misfired and had frequent occasion to regret
Proudhon’s influence - which was considerable - throughout his career
as a revolutionist). Putting to one side Proudhon’s tendency to write
more voluminously than coherently, a tendency that was not unlimited,
we are faced in his writings with an untrammelled hostility to hierarchy,
and an always marked, sometimes cloying nostalgia for a society of
small peasant proprietors and artisans, of masters and journeymen and
apprentices, a society whose paradigm was the face-to-face contract
and the ‘good faith’ it required. Nostalgia - which is so often the under-
study of utopianism - in Proudhon’s case often takes centre stage.
Proudhon’s undoubted radical individualism-a ‘social individualism’,²⁰
as George Woodcock quite rightly calls it, quite unlike the egoistic
individualism of Stirner - was certainly radical in the sense of being
drastic (though there are limits even to this qualification); but it was
also tempered by an equally marked emphasis on values that are nor-
mally considered the mainstay of conservatism, even reaction. His
emphasis on order, family, labour (ordre, famille, travail) actually
brings to mind the Vichy slogan; only patrie is absent (and even this,
if it were to be interpreted with reference to language, nationalism
and culture, and not with reference to the state, could readily enough
be included). ‘Respect to [Proudhon’s] memory’, apologizes Daniel
Guerin, disingenuously, ‘inhibits all but a passing reference to his
“salute to war,” his diatribes against women, or his fits of racism.’
Guerin’s inventory is less than exhaustive - more hostile commentators


have been less restrained - but even he admits that the conclusion to
Proudhon’s Justice in the Revolution and the Church (1858) is ‘far
from libertarian’.²¹ James Joll’s timely admission that ‘Proudhon is
hard to fit into the tradition of “progressive” liberal political thought’²²
is understatement indeed. Marx himself, it transpires, was not quite
right in saying, in The German Ideology, that Stirner ‘takes as com-
munism the ideas of a few liberals tending towards communism’;²³
for Proudhon was anything but liberal. George Lichtheim concluded
that

Proudhon, with his tolerance for Louis Bonaparte, his
Anglophobia and anti-Semitism, his defence of Negro slavery
[Proudhon publicly sided with the South during the Civil
War in the United States, on the grounds of opposition to
‘centralization’], his contempt for national liberation
movements, and his patriarchal notions about women and
family life, does not make a suitable model for present-day
libertarians.²⁴

Proudhon, for these and other reasons (not the least of them being
his own impatience), sometimes invites impatient responses. Lichtheim’s
inventory is impatient to the point of not even being exhaustive - he
could have added Proudhon’s beliefs that strikes were ‘barbaric’ and
his opposition to national educational schemes on the grounds that
education, like women, should be kept in the home. Iichtheim’s slight-
ing reference to Proudhon’s attitude to movements of national indepen-
dence is too glib; the reason why Proudhon opposed such movements
in Italy, Poland and Hungary - apart from a tendency to judge foreign
affairs quite uncritically, but equally guilelessly, from the point of
view of France’s national interest (Jaur£s was to say in L’Armee nou-
velle that Proudhon was so completely French that he wished to prevent
the formation of new nations on France’s frontiers) - is that he con-
sidered these movements to be led by centralizers like Mazzini, or
aristocrats and financiers whose actions could scarcely be expected to
benefit the peasant and the small proprietor.

As to Proudhon’s other prejudices - apart, that is, from Marx’s
standard jibe that he was a ‘petty bourgeois’ which we shall have
occasion to examine in its proper place - one point, in particular,
does need to be made. Victor Considerant described Proudhon as
‘that strange man who seemed determined that none should share
his views’;²⁵ his characterization is a telling one, but not because
Proudhon’s views and prejudices were not shared by others. Proudhon’s
attitudes on many questions, as Joll suggests, remained those of a
‘puritanical’ young man from the provinces let loose in Paris and
shocked by the extravagance, luxury, decadence and corruption he




found there. These, however, were the tip of the iceberg, as Proudhon
himself was not slow to indicate; what existed beneath them were the
false values of capitalists, state functionaries and financiers - all those
who lived off the labour and property of others. In response to this
corruption, Proudhon’s writings are ridden with a certain backward
looking regard and respect for the vanishing (and often imagined)
virtues of a simpler society, although it is easy to make too much of
his more reactionary side: the idea that this whole view of the world
(a view which was, like most others, stamped to some extent by its
origins) remained rural and agrarian is an exaggeration. And while
Proudhon retained throughout his life some prejudices that were
characteristic of his peasant forbears, we should allow that he ex-
pressed these sentiments most viciously in his private notebooks which
were not published until after his death (as the Carnets). The really
uncomfortable thought is that to the extent that they did surface or
were implicit in his published writings, these prejudices (which fall
somewhere between the sans-culotte and the Poujadist) may help
account for Proudhon’s popularity and influence.

The most significant of them for our purposes is, properly, not a
prejudice but a characteristic - the very characteristic to which Con-
siderant called attention. Proudhon’s hostility to system was not
restricted to his depictions of political authority and economic power
but also permeated the very structure of his writings. While it is possible
to discern themes that Proudhon developed throughout these writings
- separatism, political abstentionism, demopedie, order, justice, mutual-
ism, federalism, horror at all but verbal violence, and a distinctive
anti-communism - no one would claim that these are developed accord-
ing to any discernible intellectual system or method. Proudhon was
never plagued by consistency. Denis Brogan observes, quite accurately,
that ‘Proudhon had always a weakness for analogy, not as illustration
but as argument’;²⁶ like Stirner, Proudhon also exhibited a weakness
for a priori and syllogistic argumentation as well as for etymological or
even philological plays upon words. He could write well, and even his
critics tend to salute his taste for the arresting paradox, for ironies
which he would insist were part of the world he was describing, not of
the language he used to describe it. Yet he can be infuriating to read:
he scorned intellectual system as a matter of principle and, rather than
even trying to produce what could be considered a definitive, orderly
statement of his main views on anything, ‘presented the public with a
running analysis of his mental processes [and] thought aloud in print,
giving full rein to irony, invective, metaphor and every kind of passion,
as his feelings dictated’,²⁷ without hesitating to correct himself as he
went along. One might even conclude that this very quality of intellec-
tual free association characterizes not only every single book or polemic
but even his writings as a whole. Each individual piece of writing tends




to present an iconoclastic opening designed to jump out of the pages
and catch the reader’s attention - ‘property is theft’ (la propriete, c’est
le vol’) is an example - but this initial shock effect is then whittled
down (Proudhon’s writings are full of digressions, reservations, em-
broideries) until his peculiar idea of moderation and good sense comes
to prevail at the end. As Marx’s so-called ‘obituary’²⁸ of Proudhon
seems to imply, much the same could be said of Proudhon’s works
considered as a series; the iconoclasm, or eclecticism, of What is Prop-
erty? (as well as its first paragraph) is not sustained throughout his
subsequent writings, but gradually toned down and progressively
abandoned.

What Proudhon meant by his much maligned formula that ‘property
is theft’ is important to his economic theorizing, and demands some
explanation. The obvious objection to it has been well put by Avineri:
that property cannot be called theft unless a system of property exists
prior to the occurrence of the thievery. Proudhon’s aphorism thus
‘either implies infinite regression or is a petitio principi. Proudhon
seems to invalidate the legitimacy of property by an assumption of the
legitimate existence of property’.²⁹ Indeed he does; his rejoinder
would be that he was concerned to contrast in his formula one kind
of private property with another, to polarize exploitative and non-
exploitative types of property. Proudhon never really disapproves of
personally acquired property that can be seen as a direct extension of
the being of the property owner. Property to be legitimate should be
an extension of the self of the owner that does not invalidate or make
impossible similar efforts on the part of others. It should in other words
be both cause and consequence of a rough equality among men, instead
of being what it is, under what Proudhon called ‘le regime proprietaire’,
an index and manifestation of inequality and exploitation. What
needs to be remembered above all is that Proudhon’s animus against
property resolves itself in the last analysis into a hatred of unearned
income, of ‘revenus sans travail’, of loyer, and rentes and interets, in
all the multitudinous senses these terms could have in nineteenth-
century France. It was ‘le droit d’aubaine’, the ‘right’, that is to say,
which is given by property to the proprietor to levy tolls on others,
that according to Proudhon made possible the ‘theft’ (‘le droit de vol’)
he so loathed. Proudhon’s understanding of ‘le droit d’aubaine’, which
after the French Revolution had not passed away from the face of the
earth - this statement is to be taken literally as well as metaphorically
- was accordingly an expansive one; recourse to an historical Larousse
is necessary as a guide through his definition of it (‘le droit en vertu
duquel le seigneur “prend, suivant sa circonstance, et l’objet, tour a
tour les noms de rentes, fermage, loyer, interfit de l’argent, benefice,
aigo, escompte, commission, privilege, monopole, prime, cumul,
sinecure, pot-au-vin” ’).³⁰ The important point is that all these are ways




of depriving people of their (legitimate) property and that their scope
and scale had increased, not diminished, in the nineteenth century not
so much despite the French Revolution as because of its sanctification
of the right to (illegitimate) property.³¹ Proudhon, with his acute
sense of ‘the Revolution betrayed’ (but still, like justice, implicit)
regarded the post-Revolutionary regime proprietaire as being founded
on a carte blanche for expropriation and dispossession.

That these terms, expropriation, theft and the like are moral as well
as economic in their bearing gives us the essential clue to the nature of
Proudhon’s economic theorizing. From a strictly economic point of
view, his theorizing lays itself open to the kind of harsh treatment
Proudhon received from Marx; yet Proudhon’s own point of view was
never strictly economic, and always largely moral. We might say that
he let his well-marked sense of moral outrage run away with him, in
the realm of ‘political economy’ as elsewhere. When he writes about
exploitation, about contract, about value, he guilelessly makes use
of the double signification of these terms (and terms like them), and
fails clearly to distinguish economic value, for instance, from moral
worth. This might be a result of sheer naivete, and it might also be a
matter of a none too carefully calculated, but none the less extremely
powerful, rhetorical effect. For however badly judged it may be as
economic theory, it was never intended to convince economists, whose
writings Proudhon regarded as exercises in obfuscation and deliberate
over-complication. It was aimed, fairly and squarely, at those who for
good reasons of their own would be inclined to believe, with Proudhon,
that only direct, personal labour is productive and that, consequently,
capital and finance (which lead only to centralization, monopolization,
expropriation - in short, to I’accaparement proprietaire) cannot be so.

Proudhon’s theory of value is almost incredibly simple, in a disarming
way. The source of value, according to Ricardo (whose Principles of
Political Economy and Taxation had been translated into French in
1835) is labour; and the measure of labour, ceteris paribus, is time.
This means to Proudhon that what he calls the ‘constituted value’
(‘la valeur constitute’) of any product is quite simply an expression
of the amount of labour time embodied in it. Now if goods were to be
exchanged only according to the valeur constitute of each, they would
exchange justly; the distortion introduced in capitalist society by
supply and demand would simply evaporate, and labour would be the
measure of value once and for all. This in turn would mean that once a
price has been fixed for all products, according to the invariant standard
of value Proudhon thinks he has provided, the veils of mystification
and ‘contradiction’ which needlessly complicate the capitalist system
would fall away. Goods would then exchange straightforwardly ac-
cording to the principle that their direct producers be rewarded in
proportion to the labour they had expended in their production; and




this in turn would mean that the principle of exchange would be an
uncomplicated, self-evident equity and reciprocity. According to this
standard, producers would be able to enter into free, non-exploitative
contracts with one another and to exclude non-workers. Unearned
income, together with the exploitation of wage-earners it implies,
would at last lack its medium of existence. Producers would be able
to obtain credit without paying interest, provided that workers’ credit
banks providing interest-free loans (credit gratuit) were set up; these
would finally free the producers from the tyranny of the banks, of the
financial superstructure, and of interest payment (which was indeed a
real problem in an industrializing society with large numbers of landless
peasants and small proprietors, as Proudhon was acutely aware).

Proudhon, who attached great importance to the organization of
credit, put forward as his major institutional initiative the foundation
of agencies charged with the provision of credit gratuit. Although the
schemes he inspired or actually instigated misfired, Proudhon’s belief
in their necessity remained unimpaired, since they were to be the
mainstay of justice in society. Once men were freed from authoritarian
economic relationships, from the crushing burden of debt that was
their outcome, they would no longer pursue purely selfish ends; instead,
what Proudhon called the ‘collective reason’ would produce and under-
gird justice throughout society. Credit was Proudhon’s panacea, but to
write it off as such, instead of accounting for it, would be to overlook
what was in certain respects its most important feature: the limits
Proudhon places on what it can do. He believed that the moral regener-
ation of society and the individuals who make up society would not be
effected but merely facilitated by the provision of credit gratuit. Credit
made available freely would make possible the reform of society from
the bottom up, nothing more; it would remove material, financial
obstacles to the recasting of human relationships, de bas en haut, but it
would not in itself effect such a reconstitution. Everything depends on
individual moral renewal, in the absence of which any of Proudhon’s
more institutional devices or mechanisms - contract as well as credit -
would be of little avail.

With respect to contract, Marx, as we shall see, was to pounce with
some glee on Proudhon’s notion that free and equal exchange, of a
synallagmatic and commutative kind, could become the economic and
moral basis of a new and better society, and we shall examine his
criticisms in due course. What concerns us more immediately is the
contractual basis of Proudhonian mutualism. Proudhon’s in some
respects curious contractualism might be taken as an ironical footnote
to the long and distinguished history of ‘social contract’ theories of
the state, since according to Proudhon’s version the outcome of the
free imposition of mutual, equally and reciprocally binding obliga-
tions and engagements was to be not the state but its disappearance.




Proudhon believed that if contract, of a simple and direct kind, between
two parties, were made the paradigm of human relationships in general,
this move would be both cause and effect of the removal of illegitimate
political, as well as property, relationships. Free mutual exchange - of
goods that are free and equal in value, by people who are free and equal
in value, would secure a balance of interests in society so long as
neither state nor monopoly interfered. It has been pointed out that
many passages in Proudhon’s writings are hymns to contract excluding
government, that ‘not even Sir Henry Maine had a more lyrical con-
ception of contract than had Proudhon’;³² he believed that contract
by its very nature excluded government, just as government by its
very nature - a factitious and implicitly feudal nature - was the denial
of order in society. To Proudhon, whose ‘whole programme was con-
tained in the search for the union of anarchy and order’,³³ justice and
mutualism in society could be made manifest only by contractual
means, only by means that would undercut and render superfluous
the state, and would provide a genuinely moral as well as socially
generative principle that would owe nothing to the state.