Happy birthday to Proudhon, best-known for hisassertion Property is Theft!, contained in his first major work, What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (Quest-ce que la propriété? Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement), published in 1840. According to Mikhail Bakunin, Proudhon was the first person to refer to himself as an anarchist. In What is Property?, published in 1840, he defined anarchy as the absence of a master, of a sovereign and wrote, As man seeks justice in equality, so society seeks order in anarchy. He declared in 1849 in Confessions of a Revolutionary that Whoever lays his hand on me to govern me is a usurper and tyrant, and I declare him my enemy. In The General idea of the Revolution 1851 Proudhon urged a society without authority. In a subchapter called What is Government? he wrote: To be GOVERNED is to be watched, inspected, spied upon, directed, law-driven, numbered, regulated, enrolled, indoctrinated, preached at, controlled, checked, estimated, valued, censured, commanded, by creatures who have neither the right nor the wisdom nor the virtue to do so. To be GOVERNED is to be at every operation, at every transaction noted, registered, counted, taxed, stamped, measured, numbered, assessed, licensed, authorized, admonished, prevented, forbidden, reformed, corrected, punished. It is, under pretext of public utility, and in the name of the general interest, to be place[d] under contribution, drilled, fleeced, exploited, monopolized, extorted from, squeezed, hoaxed, robbed; then, at the slightest resistance, the first word of complaint, to be repressed, fined, vilified, harassed, hunted down, abused, clubbed, disarmed, bound, choked, imprisoned, judged, condemned, shot, deported, sacrificed, sold, betrayed; and to crown all, mocked, ridiculed, derided, outraged, dishonored. That is government; that is its justice; that is its morality. Capital... in the political field is analogous to government... The economic idea of capitalism, the politics of government or of authority, and the theological idea of the Church are three identical ideas, linked in various ways. To attack one of them is equivalent to attacking all of them . . . What capital does to labour, and the State to liberty, the Church does to the spirit. This trinity of absolutism is as baneful in practice as it is in philosophy. The most effective means for oppressing the people would be simultaneously to enslave its body, its will and its reason. Proudhon favored workers associations or co-operatives, as well as individual worker/peasant possession, over private ownership or the nationalization of land and workplaces. He considered social revolution to be achievable in a peaceful manner. In The Confessions of a Revolutionary Proudhon asserted that, Anarchy is Order Without Power, the phrase which much later inspired, in the view of some, the anarchist circled-A symbol, today one of the most common graffiti on the urban landscape. https://youtube/watch?v=A7TuFy0fcuw
Posted on: Fri, 16 Jan 2015 00:54:49 +0000
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