Proudhon - A Biography

THE CRITIC OE PROPERTY
It is when he is discussing property in relation to work that
Proudhon makes some o f his most significant statements. He
argues that labour alone is the basis o f value, but that this never­
theless does not give the labourer a right to property, since his
labour does not create the material out of which the product is
made. ‘The right to products is exclusive—-jus in re-, the right to
means is common—-jus ad rem .’
But means, as Proudhon points out, does not consist only o f the
raw materials provided by nature. It includes also the vast heritage
of installations built by men in the past, the accumulated tech­
niques and traditions of civilisation, and more important, the
element of co-operation in labour which makes each man’s work
so much more effective than if he acted in solitude. This, according
to Proudhon, is the real ‘surplus value’ o f which the capitalist
appropriates an unduly disproportionate share. ‘Now this repro­
ductive leaven— this eternal germ of life, this preparation of the
land and manufacture of implements for production— constitutes
the debt o f the capitalist to the producer, which he never pays; and
it is this fraudulent denial which causes the poverty of the labourer,
the luxury of idleness, and the inequality of conditions. This it is,
above all other things, which has been so fitly named the exploita­
tion o f man by man.’
In What is Property? we have thus not only a labour theory of
value based on Ricardo and differing little from that of Marx— ■
though antedating it by some years— but also a widely different
theory o f surplus value which seems a great deal more acceptable
even in the undeveloped but provocative sketch Proudhon has
given us. Marx’s theory of surplus value is restricted to the par­
ticular relation of employer and employee. With its implicit con­
nection with the nineteenth-century ‘Iron Law o f Wages,’ accord­
ing to which the workers are kept down to the mere necessities of
living and procreation and all the rest of the product of their labour
is taken by the capitalist, it has become outdated in modern society,
for it is impossible to claim that the American worker is merely
receiving enough to keep him alive— unless one stretches the
point to include automobiles among the requisites of a subsistence
existence. But in this culture where a relatively high standard of
comfort is widely spread and where, far from the middle class
becoming proletarianised, the proletariat has climbed towards the
lower ranks o f the middle class, Proudhon’s theory still retains its