Pierre Joseph Proudhon

Dzieła

• 1840Czym jest własność?

  „Własność to kradzież”: kto posiada bez pracy, żyje z cudzej pracy; posiadanie do użytku jest prawomocne, własność jako prawo do niezarobionego dochodu nie jest.

• 1846System sprzeczności ekonomicznych, czyli Filozofia nędzy

  Każda instytucja gospodarcza – podział pracy, konkurencja, kredyt – zarazem pomaga i szkodzi; Marks odpowiedział „Nędzą filozofii”.

Stanowisko

What Is Property? answers its own question: “property is theft.” Proudhon did not mean possession – the peasant’s field, the craftsman’s tools – but property as a right to income without work, through rent, interest and profit. Against both capitalism and a socialism run by the state he proposed “mutualism”: producers exchange their products on the basis of labour, free credit replaces interest, and contracts between free associations replace laws imposed from above. He was the first to call himself an anarchist, meaning order without rule, and in later works such as The Federative Principle (1863) he described a federation of communes and regions. His System of Economic Contradictions (1846) presented each economic institution as a contradiction to be balanced rather than abolished; Marx, who had praised the book on property, answered with The Poverty of Philosophy (1847), and the two currents later split the First International. Proudhon’s notebooks for December 1847 contain a call to expel or “exterminate” the Jews, and his writings on women, collected in the posthumous Pornocracy (1875), allow them only the roles of housewife or courtesan. Historians still debate how far these views shaped the rest of his work.

Życie i kontekst

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was born in Besançon in 1809, the son of a cooper and brewer. Poverty cut short his schooling, and he trained as a printer and typesetter, teaching himself Latin while setting theological texts. A scholarship from the Besançon academy took him to Paris in 1838. What Is Property? (1840) made him known; in 1844–45 he met Marx, Bakunin and Karl Grün in Paris. Elected to the National Assembly in June 1848, he edited radical newspapers and founded a People’s Bank in 1849 that soon failed. For attacks on Louis-Napoléon he spent 1849–1852 in prison. After Justice in the Revolution and in the Church (1858) he was sentenced again and fled to Belgium, returning in 1862. He died in Passy, near Paris, in 1865.

Dalsze główne dzieła

• What Is Property? (1840)
• System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty (1846)
• General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century (1851)
• Justice in the Revolution and in the Church (1858)
• The Federative Principle (1863)
• The Political Capacity of the Working Classes (1865)