The phone, that screen, that you’re watching this through. It’s not yours. You think it’s yours – and it is, legally – but morally, ethically, actually, its everyone’s.
What is property? Property is theft. Although, not all property, as it turns out.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon was the first self-declared anarchist. He wrote What is Property? in 1840. He was not a wide-ranging and difficult writer, he wasn’t a system builder, he was critical of utopianisms, and was fascinated with contradictions.
For Proudhon, the ideal society was a contractual one – where individuals are free to arrange their relationships under conditions of justice. But for justice to flourish, its laws had to be known to all.
To understand his theory of property, then, it’s important to start with his idea of justice.
He wrote: ‘Justice is the central star which governs society, the pole around which the political world revolves, the principle and regulator of all transactions. Nothing takes place between men save in the name of right, nothing without the invocation of justice’.
‘Justice, nothing else; that is the alpha and omega of my argument’
Human interaction is guided by laws which are the product of calculations, feelings, or facts about what we perceive to be right. We live, in other words, by socialised rules. We queue, we say thanks, we pay tax, we drive on one side of the road, we have the right of free speech, up to the point of causing disturbances.
If ten people stumbled across a bag of diamonds in the forest there would be a conversation about what the correct thing to do was.
These rules are rules of justice. They are intended to make us all freer in the long term.
One of them is property. We can own stuff. It’s ours exclusively.
But, Proudhon asks, what if property was a miscalculation? A misunderstanding of the moral law? A mistake that we’ve been paying for ever since? An original sin that has led to many of our problems?
Let’s really think about it. What is property?
Property, normalised as it’s been, seems to be natural to us. Buy why? Is it a natural right? A natural law? A right of the strong against the weak? It seems like an absolute right. The right to hold property, like the right to life, liberty, or equality before the law.
But take a look at the right to life and liberty.
Rights are the question of what is absolute. Equality before the law is absolute, it cannot be sold, nor can your life or liberty. This would seem perverse to us.
But property isn’t absolute in the same way. It’s taxed, for example; some of it is taken by the government. Surely it can’t be absolute, then.
Proudhon says that surely if, ‘my possessions are my own; no one has a claim upon them’.
Think of that list of socialised rules and rights. Behind all of them – behind any law – is the idea of justice. What is correct? Right? Moral? From a social point of view. So what is the justification (note just at the beginning of justification) for property?
Philosophical justifications for property usually come in two types: arguments of occupation and arguments of labour.
We’ll start, as Proudhon does, with occupation.
He writes: ‘The right of occupation, or of the first occupant, is that which results from the actual, physical, real possession of a thing. I occupy a piece of land; the presumption is, that I am the proprietor, until the contrary is proved’.
In a state of nature, I stumble across some land, with an apple tree on, for example, and put up a fence, and occupy it. The land is my property.
But, Proudhon argues, if this is the case, occupation is simply toleration. In other words, it requires the consent of others. It must be mutual.
If it’s a right, it must be reciprocal. ‘The theatre, says Cicero, is common to all.’
The occupation argument implies equality. Proudhon says that, ‘thine and mine are signs and expressions of personal, but equal, rights. In other words ‘the right to occupy is equal to all’.
The earth is given to us in common to sustain life, so portioning it up must ‘wrong no one’.
This, of course, has important repercussions today, when much of the land is divided.
Proudhon asks, ‘if the first occupants have occupied every thing, what are the new comers to do? What will become of them, having an instrument with which to work, but no material to work upon?’
Each man needs to occupy some area to live, some material to work with. If 100,000 men settle on an island with no inhabitants, does each not have a right to 1/100,000 of the land?
Proudhon writes: ‘Not only does occupation lead to equality, it prevents property. For, since every man, from the fact of his existence, has the right of occupation, and, in order to live, must have material for cultivation on which he may labor; and since, on the other hand, the number of occupants varies continually with the births and deaths, consequently, occupation is always subordinate to population.’
So property cannot be absolute, cannot be ours. We are simply possessors, temporary holders, under the supervision of society. Land, a requirement of our very liberty, cannot be appropriated. Property, then, is theft.
He asks: if water, fire, and air cannot be appropriated, why should land?
Comte said that: ‘If a man should be deprived of air for a few moments only, he would cease to exist, and a partial deprivation would cause him severe suffering : a partial or complete deprivation of food would produce like effects upon him.’
Man needs light from the stars, the earth’s atmosphere, fresh water, and land!
‘A man who should be prohibited from walking in the highways, from resting in the fields, from taking shelter in caves, from lighting fires, from picking berries, from gathering herbs and boiling them in a bit of baked clay, — such a man could not live’
So we are justified in using these things, as long as we guarantee others the use of them. We come back, again and again, to a type of equality.
Proudhon writes: ‘equality of possessions, equality of rights, liberty, will, personality, are so many identical expressions of one and the same idea, — the right of preservation and development; in a word, the right of Life’
But we still need to possess some things, we must have the right to use. If this right does not come from occupation, where does it come from?
Proudhon now turns to those who have argued that property is justified by labour. John Locke’s theory is the most well-known of these.
Locke said that a person has a right to an object as property when they have laboured upon it. Without this right, how would people live, after all?
If I come across an apple tree, I labour by plucking an apple from it and I have a right to that apple.
Proudhon’s criticisms of this come in a few different forms. First, he says, labour might give you a right of possession – the apple – but not of the means.
Take the farmer who tills the field or looks after the orchard and so makes it their property. Does the fisherman owns the river because he fishes in it? No.
While the farmer and the fisherman might have a right to the product of their labour they do not make property of the means to that product. There is a distinction here between the means of production and the value added.
So you could say that the labourer adds something to the land and so has a right to what is added. If I make a shovel from ore and wood from resources I find can I justifiably says it’s mine?
Firstly, no because the ore and the wood come from occupancy and as we’ve seen, this can change. As more people are born, for example, more have a rights claim on raw materials that I used. From this perspective, I can possess it, borrow it, use it, as long as it’s not harming anyone.
But still, surely part of it is mine? The part I added value to through my labour?
Fine, says Proudhon, but most value is added socially. He writes: ‘There is not a man, then, who does not live off the products of several thousand industries; not a labourer who does not receive from society at large the things which he consumes.’
‘One product cannot exist without another; an isolated industry is impossible. What would be the harvest of the farmer, if others did not manufacture for him barns, wagons, ploughs, clothes, etc.? What would the scholar do without the publisher, the printer without the type-setter and the machinist, and these in their turn without a multitude of other industries?’
It might seem hyperbolic, but his point to remember is that if labour is what produces rights to property then all those that contributed to any object must be compensated. It is their right, after all; that’s what the theorists of property say.
There are then, by their standards, social property rights. Proudhon asks those that argue that property is the result of labour: if that is true, then why do so many who labour not have property? In fact, most labour, and so this should lead to some kind of equality. How is it that some labour and have enough to secure their entire futures and others labour and cannot feed themselves for more than a day? Furthermore, he says if labour is the basis of property then the proprietor gives up his field as soon as they receive rent for it from another. As soon as they’re idle and someone else is using it.
Ultimately, this line of thinking leads Proudhon to a loose equality.
He writes: ‘The limited quantity of available material proves the necessity of dividing the labor among the whole number of laborers. The capacity, given to all, of accomplishing a social task, — that is, an equal task, — and the impossibility of paying one laborer save in the products of another, justify the equality of wages.’
And, more than this, the obvious conclusion is that usury, rent, and wage labour becomes immoral. If I am forced to rent because all of the land has been taken, to borrow money because I have no capital, or to sell my labour because I have no product to work on of my own, then I am being stolen from. Property is theft.
Proudhon writes: ‘The field which I have cleared, which I cultivate, on which I have built my house, which supports myself, my family, and my live stock, I can possess: 1st. As the original occupant; 2d. As a laborer; 3rd. By virtue of the social contract which assigns it to me as my share. But none of these titles confer upon me the right of property. For, if I attempt to base it upon occupancy, society can reply, “I am the original occupant.” If I appeal to my labor, it will say, “ It is only on that condition that you possess.” If I speak of agreements, it will respond, “ These agreements establish only your right of use.’
From these two lines of criticisms – occupation and labour – Proudhon has ultimately argued that all possession has a dual nature. A part that is ours by virtue of needing it for the flourishing of our own liberty, and a part that is society’s who have contributed to its value, and still has a right to it based on need. Another way of saying this might be that everything is only borrowed.
Ultimately, his theory of property can be summed up by his phrase, ‘The right to product is exclusive – jus in re ; the right to means is common – jus ad rem’.
Proudhon is one of the most important figures in the history of socialist and radical thought.
As George Woodcock writes, ‘property is incompatible with justice, because in practice in represents the exclusion of the worker from his equal rights to enjoy the fruits of society.’
With what Proudhon has said in mind, ask yourself this: is landlordism justified? Is rent? On capital? On loan?
Is the very idea of ownership as simple as you first thought?
