Work · Socialism, Anarchism, Marxism & Critical Theory
What Is Property?
“Property is theft”: whoever owns without working lives off the labour of others; possession for use is legitimate, ownership as a right to unearned income is not.
Introduction
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, a printer from Besançon studying on a scholarship from the city’s academy, published the book in 1840 as a “first memoir” on the principle of right and of government. Its opening answers the title question with the formula “property is theft”. Proudhon examines the usual justifications of property – first occupation, labour, law – and argues that each, taken seriously, leads to equality instead; work is collective, and the owner appropriates the surplus produced by the “collective force” of many workers. In the same book he calls himself an anarchist, the first writer to adopt the word as a positive label. Marx praised the book in The Holy Family (1845) before breaking with Proudhon.
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