Reading Proudhon and What is Property
NOTE: this is the first part of a series called “Deconstructing Anarchy.”
“As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy.”
― Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, What Is Property?
To arrive at ‘anarchy’. To stand before it, outside of it, to observe it as if it were an object, is to arrive at an absence. An absence of a sovereign. An absence of order. The absence of an order. And yet, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the first person to declare himself an anarchist, sees the exact opposite within anarchy. Instead, there are all the defining features of the Enlightenment and scientific progress: justice, equality, and order. How can this be so?
To answer that we must look at the so-called origin of the philosophical and political theory and practice of anarchism within the genealogical and dialectical history of the word. In other words, in this essay we will attempt to do a short deconstruction of anarchy as Proudhon describes it in his work What is Property: An Inquiry Into the Principle of Right and of Government (1843) where he wrote down and uttered the important ontological signification that has been repeated throughout the corpus of anarchism and in media through sneering lips: “I am an anarchist.”
The origin of ‘anarchy’ is traced through a cultural landscape that is uncertain and unstable. Before we can even approach the meaning of the word ‘anarchy’, we already run into trouble. Deep within lies a history of contradictions, caged by a single coherent sign. Historicity cannot be detached from these contradictions. History invented those contradictions. Appropriately, and not without the slightest touch of irony, these same contradictions ‘invented’ the anarchy within the world, within our collective political consciousness, and within ourselves.
History cannot be detached from the word ‘anarchy.’ The signifier is always pointing to another definition outside of itself, always in an unstable relationship with its binary opposition. That binary is order, authority. It is only through this fundamental and intrinsic opposition that anarchy can define itself as a sign in itself. From this, all else grows. One of the traces to ‘anarchy’ is the sign — the circle-A. There are other symbols for anarchism — the black flag, the black and red flag, the black bloc. For this investigation I want to look at circle-A, the universally recognizable sign graffitied on walls around the world.
The stable and self-contained sign of the circle-A. In this sign we have the opposition intact — the A being derived from anarchy or anarchism, and the O derived from Order from Proudhon’s quote: “la société cherche l’ordre dans l’anarchie.” Proudhon: the ‘first’ anarchist. The first to write down “I am an anarchist.” This act of writing “I am an anarchist” gets to a commanding question that has been at the heart of deconstruction theory: privileging logocentrism and tracing it as an origin. Proudhon is the first anarchist because he wrote ‘I am an anarchist’:
“Well! you are a democrat?” — “No.” — “What! you would have a monarchy.” — “No.” — “A constitutionalist?” — “God forbid!” — “You are then an aristocrat?” — “Not at all.” — “You want a mixed government?” — “Still less.” — “What are you, then?” — “I am an anarchist.” (272)
I am an anarchist. Proudhon first defines himself by what he is not. He is not a democrat, monarchist, or constitutionalist. He is that who opposes all of those political labels: an anarchist. He continues by identifying his source of opposition: the chief, the patriarch, and the ‘conformity of opinions’. Patriarchy and conformity are what originates the essence of royal legitimation. For Proudhon, the ascendance of science, rationality, and Enlightenment ideals are the basis for his anarchism, and, congruently, with his self-identification as an anarchist.
While he is often thought of as the original anarchist due to this identification, thinkers like David Graeber have argued convincingly non-hierarchical societies have existed in pre-modern times, which problematizes Proudhon’s distinction as the original anarchist. Proudhon, should, instead, be viewed as a link in a chain of signifiers that attaches the Aufklärung to anarchism. This coming anarchism in an age of Enlightenment makes sense because it was an epoch defined by doubt: doubt in God, doubt in the self, doubt in authority, and the privileging of science and reason as means to revolution. Suddenly, anarchism had to be linked with science, reason, and rationality, as a means to an end towards attaining a more enlightened politics — equality, fraternity, and liberty — through a more active spirit.
Proudhon should also be viewed as a link in the chain from primitivist anarchism and modern anarchism — the schools that came about from the advent of Bakunin and Kropotkin, and the ‘schools’ of anarchism: Mutualism, Anarcho-Communism, Anarcho-Syndicalism, Individualism, Cooperativism, etc. Proudhon is situated somewhere between Aufklärung and the ‘modern’, a statesman and an anti-statesman, a man at the precipice of the future of industrialism who was both courageous and prophetic enough to reject the effects of industry, and naive and regressive enough to accept the coming logos of that industry. When it comes to the Aufklärung, he is a ghost, haunting the margins of politics, but haunting nonetheless.
Freedom from oppression, therefore, can only be achieved through anarchy’s liberatory desire for no government, or an absence of authority. In this absence, the need for the property will disappear and society, in his approximation, will be liberated by the only form of justice. This liberation would fulfill the scientific end of Aufklärung. To doubt is to question everything and utilize the power of scientific rationality to free the self from all forms of injustice. Justice is the result of self-sacrifice and produces social equilibrium. This notion of self-sacrifice as attached to and as a form of justice has lived on with anarchism through the ages.
Speaking of foresight for the coming-anarchism, Proudhon, in a moment of clarity, goes on at length to define the term anarchy. This is a rare object, an artifact even, that points directly to an origin, a science, and a methodology of anarchism, which would be questioned, replicated, and reproduced by future writers like Kropotkin and Bakunin. Nowadays, most who dare to speak the term anarchy are only compelled to imagine the opposite of scientific rationality. Instead, it conforms to, once again, the Aufklärung concept of absolution and legitimation through totality and reasoning. Here, if you’ll forgive me, I’ll quote it at length:
Anarchy, — the absence of a master, of a sovereign — such is the form of government to which we are every day approximating, and which our accustomed habit of taking man for our rule, and his will for law, leads us to regard as the height of disorder and the expression of chaos […] Soon, undoubtedly, some one, jealous of the citizen militia, will say, “Everybody is king.” But, when he has spoken, I will say, in my turn, “Nobody is king; we are, whether we will or no, associated.” Every question of domestic politics must be decided by departmental statistics; every question of foreign politics is an affair of international statistics. The science of government rightly belongs to one of the sections of the Academy of Sciences, whose permanent secretary is necessarily prime minister; and, since every citizen may address a memoir to the Academy, every citizen is a legislator. But, as the opinion of no one is of any value until its truth has been proven, no one can substitute his will for reason, — nobody is king (277).
“Everybody is king” / “Nobody is king,” in quotations, a dialectical formulation with a “jealous citizen,” a phantom. In this dialectical formulation, which can only be assumed is with himself, Proudhon the Statesman and Proudhon the citizen, he turns from Statesman to Anti-Statesman. His synthesis is to turn, once again, to science, and his solution is technocratic anarchy, a government of statistics that stands in for the sovereignty of man. Sovereignty, for Proudhon, will be displaced, deferred, and de-institutionalized as a governmental form, only to be usurped by scientific rationality. Despite his identification of the monarch-patriarch Man-God as the sovereign to overthrow, readers should not read this as an attack on the patriarchy, as such. Proudhon held anti-feminist views and maintained that women were subservient to men, which received backlash from radicals at the time.
However, this phallogocentrism should not be glanced over or dismissed so quickly. It’s archaic in comparison to the modern interpretations, but this is a deconstruction of origin(s). Instead, I would like to focus on the absent-presence that emerges out of this phallocentrism. Nobody is king rings out proudly as a revolutionary call-to-arms, but Nobody takes on a spectral chauvinism. Nobody is King, but Nobody is still an authoritative presence, and, above all, a masculine unconscious that imposes as much as it displaces the King. The King’s sovereignty is replaced by another sovereignty, Scientific Reason. This Nobody, this Scientific Reason, remains a masculine one, a sovereignty that is always going to be incomplete.
Everybody is king / Nobody is king. Here we have the contradictions implicit within the ascendance of Aufklärung and modern logocentrism. Within the rationality of a system privileging the presence of sovereignty, the absence of sovereignty has its initial advantages, namely, the governing will of one man. However, this Nobody, when he is sovereign because the absent-presence of Nobody privileges a certain type of Nobody, which is beholden to a Scientific Rationality. And an Academy of knowledge passes down from Nobody to Nobody within these systems of knowledge. In the absence of a King, Nobody is King, but that Nobody has to maintain its systems of rationality.
Every citizen is a legislator. The citizen returns, out of the dialectic, as once again, a shadow of Proudhon, a negative image of the Statesman. The citizen’s ghostly present-absence mediates between the phantom realms of the privileged transcendent godly sovereignty and the lowly rationalism of the empirical universe. For Proudhon, citizens, and citizenry, have a certain uncanniness, a Freudian unheimlich. They take on the Platonic shadow — a shadow Being between the world of the gods and the worlds of men. They are the keepers of the Rational, and, therefore, the beholders of Science. These Promethean spirits haunt the streets of Paris, they haunt the spirit of the Enlightenment, and they haunt the halls of the Monarchs.
Every citizen is a legislator. We approach a system of governance that reflects the direct democracy of an imagined Enlightened future. This approach to direct democracy exists within the framing of Scientific Rationalism as a totalizing system for the world of the political. Therefore, Science — and the Academy of Science that would indoctrinate this rationalism — would legislate away the need for Sovereignty, and the indirect republicanism which had sprung up in the place of the feudal monarchism of 19th century Europe. Every citizen is a legislator.
No one can substitute his will for reason. No one — the logocentrism returns, the metaphysical properties of no one is banished as if to a spirit realm — the unconscious of the sovereign, of Sovereignty. In this formation, to be an anarchist is to be the anti-no one, to be the city that is absent a sovereign, to disavow the king, and, at the same time, disavow the sovereignty that god imprints upon the king. Scientific Reason is the authority, the arkhos here, and his will — the will of the citizen, the no one, the Nobody who is king must remain subservient to something, and for Proudhon, that’s Scientific Rationality. “Everybody is king” / “Nobody is king” / No one can substitute his will for reason. Proudhon returns to the logos after disavowing the sovereign. Anarchy is, after all, the absence of a master, of a sovereign. But, as we have shown, Proudhon is on the side of new masters: rationality, logos, science.
Interestingly, Proudhon recognized the limitations of his knowledge of science. And part of its strength as a sovereign-governing-law-maker was its incompleteness, its indeterminacy. This returns to the indeterminacy of the Aufklärung, that it would replace the deterministic will of the King-Sovereign with the cold hard rationality of empirical truth. Rationality and Indeterminacy intermingled under the same principle — they were not reliant on the will of one man, and therefore, the rationality of many men, or, rather, a Man-to-come, the future-men. Most people were fairly ignorant of the scientific progression at the time, and its potentiality offered up a future that was to-come, a democracy that was to come, and that science itself would prove itself to be more egalitarian than a society with a King. Everyone is King / Nobody is King.
Of the science itself, I confess that I know nothing more than its principle; and I know of no one at present who can boast of having penetrated deeper. Many people cry, “Come to me, and I will teach you the truth!” These people mistake for the truth their cherished opinion and ardent conviction, which is usually anything but the truth. The science of society — like all human sciences — will be forever incomplete (249).
Government, governmentality, juridical, The Law, therefore, can be, according to Proudhon, replaced by statistics, but that those statistics will be forever incomplete. Unlike the Marxian idea of the “withering away of the state,” Proudhon imagined a world completely ruled by science, a science of the people, which would negate the need for a State. To repeat, once again: Every question of domestic politics must be decided by departmental statistics; every question of foreign politics is an affair of international statistics. Within the context of a monarchy, this may have appeared as the end-point for the state, but with a global market dependent on science, this reality already seems antiquated — almost as though this anarchist future has already been fulfilled.
It’s doubtful that Proudhon would have imagined the global market working in such a way, with the level of determinism that it does, but, then again, the Scientific Method, as applied to market capitalism, was only in its infancy in the time of Proudhon. As subsequent modern communists, like Vladamir Lenin and Rosa Luxemburg, have argued, the anarchy is within capitalism, that there is endemic anarchy to capitalism which leads to instability and disorder. This attack on anarchism may have only been to caricature, but, in light of Proudhon’s scientific anarchism, the association between technocratic markets run by science, and a future proposed by anarchy, might not be so off base given the working definitions of anarchy at the time.
Here we have the tensions that are within the two symbolic representations of anarchism — as an outcome of Aufklärung discourse around doubt, rationality, and anti-governmentality, and as an unstable force that already existed within the economic and political structures at the time. And indeed, with the rising tide of global markets and the formulation of the concept of imperialism, the question that we’ll return to time and time again is whether or not anarchy exists already, as a symbolic counterweight to existing structures, and if it already exists, then what will change with the anarchism-to-come, the anarchy of tomorrow, the anarchy-after-capitalism?
Then we get to the communist question. Spirits battling specters. Futures battling futures. Spooks battling spooks. Proudhon sets up his argument against communism by pointing to negative communism — the idea is that primitive communism existed before the invention of property. Incidentally, this is similar to what modern anthropologists have labeled primitive anarchism. This tension of origin must again be noted — anarchists have traced themselves back to an original form before property, while the first anarchist identified this time-before-capitalism as necessarily a communist past, and that a communist future would be the exact opposite — oppressive enslavement. In a Hegelian formulation, he claims that communism and property are a thesis and antithesis and that anarchism is the coming synthesis of the two.
As many have pointed out, Proudhon opposed communism on the basis that it was oppressive and authoritarian. This seemed, to many, to be a prophecy for the coming Soviet Union and Marxism-Leninism and Stalinism in general. Even his main opposition seemed to mirror the Cold War propaganda about the Soviet Union by capitalist nations. His opposition came primarily from a belief in communism promoting laziness and laborers’ inability to freely work.
Communism is oppression and slavery. Man is very willing to obey the law of duty, serve his country, and oblige his friends; but he wishes to labor when he pleases, where he pleases, and as much as he pleases (262).
He also opposed communism because, in his logic, communism is an inversion of the ownership of property, or, capitalism. For Proudhon, communism inverts the relationship of ownership by the strong over the weak, instead of as a dominance of the weak over the strong:
Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is the exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak (262).
Like his anti-feminist views, Proudhon’s arguments against communism follow a chauvinist pattern. That is the belief in the domination of strong men to maintain a post-capitalist, anarchic society. This runs contrary to many strains of modern anarchism where the definition of authority, hierarchy, and patriarchy are all rejected as a main practice of anarchism. In the end, Proudhon’s scientific or classical anarchism foreshadows some of the political developments that are to come — specifically, Bakunin, Kropotkin, and, of course, Karl Marx.
Who could have imagined the coming split between Proudhon and Karl Marx? The two had a brief friendship and Marx viewed Proudhon as a potential ally due to the idea that the proletariat could exist without property. Marx eventually took umbrage with Proudhon’s economic ideas in The Philosophy of Poverty and wrote a scathing rebuttal, The Poverty of Philosophy. While picking intellectual fights with anarchists became a common occurrence for Marx, Proudhon’s anarchist musings opposed to parliamentary politics makes his analysis, while flawed, an improvement over modern anarchists siding with bourgeois political parties.
The historicity of these figures within the same epoch cannot be passed over without noting the difference than to the period we currently find ourselves. This exciting and radical period during the early days of industrial capitalism was all about the future — the speculation of a world after industrialization, and the belief in emancipation of classes due to competing sciences and logic. This was a period when there was suffering but there was also a future to behold, it was in the grasp of Enlightened European intellectuals who bore witness to the early crises of capitalism who figured the ending of private property was an absolute eventuality.
The absolution of historical determinism gave rise to the scientific resolve that capitalism would end somehow, some way, and that a socialist future was just on the horizon. These thinkers saw themselves preparing the foundations for a new way for society to function, just as capitalists had mobilized and experimented with how to structure society in the advent of industrialization. Of course, this absolution and the deterministic outlook was met with constant pushback from the now ascendant bourgeois class and all the people that depended upon them both as bastions of their economic purposes, but also as a goal to be achieved in modernity.
This speculative future stands in stark contrast to the hauntological precarity of our present capitalist societal conditions. We cannot imagine either a communist or anarchist future, let alone a world without property. While What is Property offers us a glimpse into how radical thinkers were dealing with questions concerning a post-capitalist future, Proudhon’s belief in Enlightenment rationality, and the emancipatory spirit of scientific reason lays the groundwork for the spirit of anarchy and anarchism for generations to come. At its heart, the question was always of democracy, of participation, and action for a new more equal society.
Proudhon’s ‘classical’ or ‘scientific’ anarchism is the spirit that hangs over anarchism, just as Marx haunts communism. In some ways, it’s even more spectral, even more fleeting, even more of an absent-presence in liberal democracies and so-called late-capitalism. These absences can be traced through signs and signifiers, through radical actions in the face of insurmountable centers of power and states of authority, but the ghost is never fully present. It lives stuck between the world of Order and Disorder, the world of Property, and the world of Anarchy.
