Proudhon - A Biography

THE CRITIC OF PROPERTY
' validity. As he contended, all of us, workers and capitalists, pro­
ducers and parasites, are everlastingly in debt to the past and to
society. We live as we do by reason of centuries of common work;
j the labourer could not do the tasks which create ‘surplus value’ un­
less he had the tools and the co-operation provided by social effort,
and it is thus in fact the social and not the personal element in work
■ which the exploiter appropriates. He does not steal from a man the
results o f that man’s personal labour; instead he takes for himself
the extra productive power conferred on us by collective work.
Proudhon seems hardly to have realised the full import of this
extremely illuminating hint. He made his point and passed on to
a refutation of the anti-egalitarian arguments o f the Saint-Simon-
ians and the Fourierists, both of whom declared that, because men
are unequal in capacity, they must receive an unequal return for
their labour. Proudhon, advancing from the conception o f the
social basis of all labour, declares that, though men may indeed
be unequal in capacity, in rights they must be equal, since it is
not their own merits but the inherited traditions, techniques and
means of production embodied in society which make it possible
for them to develop their capacities. It follows that each man, in
working according to his capacity, is only establishing the same
right as his neighbour, however spectacular may be his con­
tribution.
Following on these arguments, Proudhon declares that property
is incompatible with justice, because in practice it represents the
exclusion of the worker from his equal rights to enjoy the fruits
o f society.
But, since property is incompatible with equality and by impli­
cation with justice, and since our present social order is based on
property, it remains to consider an alternative. Will it be commu­
nism? Certainly not, for, though man is a social being and seeks
equality and justice in his relationships, he also loves indepen­
dence, and society develops naturally in this direction. Commu­
nism, in Proudhon’s eyes, is the primitive form of association, and
property originates in man’s desire to gain independence from its
| slavery. And here we come to a particularly interesting indication
o f his studies at the time, for he proceeds to reduce the proposition
to what he calls ‘a Hegelian formula,’ with communism as the
thesis and property as tne antithesis. ‘When we have discovered
the third term, the synthesis, we shall have the required solution.’