Proudhon

 

1. On January 1865, Pierre Joseph Proudhon died in a house in the Passy neighborhood in Paris. At 10 Rue de Passy, to be exact, which is now 12 Rue de Passy.  His posterity outside of France was tied, for good and ill, to the pamphlet Marx wrote against him, The poverty of philosophy, which inversed Proudhon’s book, The philosophy of poverty (La philosophie de misere). Inside France, as well as inside the greater anarchist tradition, Proudhon holds a more elevated place, as a political philosopher, a sociologist, and a writer.

Proudhon met Marx in the winter of 1844. At this time, Proudhon was a celebrated journalist. He was also the writer of Qu'est-ce que la propriété?  In 1840.  Proudhon was the child of the obscure, of those who were never the focus of the metropolitain gaze: his father was a peasant small farmer, a grape grower on the outskirts of Besançon, who lost his shirt trying to make and sell beer.  When he was eleven, he entered the college at Besançon and became a star pupil, so that he was sent to Paris on a stipend raised by some of the notables of the town. In Paris, however, he was not recognized as a genius from the provinces: from 19 until 30, he worked as a typesetter for the Gauthier printers. It was as a typesetter that he had his first professional connection to letters. In the hours left to him after his ten hour shift, he read.

Marx, that university graduate, knew that Proudhon was sensitive about being an autodidact. The young Marx was filled with righteousness, but he had the cruelty of a coddled son and a doctor of Law. He used Proudhon’s autodidacticism against him in later polemics.

2. Although the Anglophone world knows Proudhon firstly through Marx, it was Sainte-Beuve, the literary critic, who tried to write Proudhon’s biography. Saint-Beuve was collecting materials for it when he died.

It might seem odd that the critic who flattered the grand dames of the salons by reviewing their memoires (which Proust, in his Contra-Sainte-Beuve, makes much of) spent his final years tracking down the correspondence of France’s greatest anarchist thinker. But Sainte-Beuve saw Proudhon as a writer, a philosophe in the 18^th century vein.

Proudhon himself laments, somewhere, that he wanted to write like Voltaire, but always ended up sounding like Rousseau.  

3. “If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery ? and I should answer in one word, It is murder, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required to show that the power to take from a man his thought, his will, his personality, is a power of life and death; and that to enslave a man is to kill him. Why, then, to this other question : What is property ? may I not likewise answer, It is theft without the certainty of being misunderstood ; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?”

This is the beginning of  a pamphlet that exploded like a bomb in 1840: What is Property? It is still his most famous work – and its opening paragraph credibly ranks up there with the beginning of Rousseau’s Social Contract. That high mercury pitch, that overture to the opera.

The rankers are always after the fulfilment and not the promise – the 100 greatest books, not the one hundred greatest introductory paragraphs. Myself, I’m a promise collector, and for me, Proudhon makes the list.

But what do I know about Proudhon?

2. Marx, in 1865, when Proudhon died, wrote a letter about him that was published in the Sozial-Demokrat. He reiterates a point he made in 1848: Proudhon was basically an economics ignoramus. A political economist, Marx thought, who tried to solve the problem of poverty through distribution did not understand that the real problem was the class control of production. Marx conceded the power of Proudhon’s pamphlet, and regarded the force of that pamphlet, the rhetoric of indignation, had its place in the history of the “left”.  “It is evident that even when he is reproducing old stuff, Proudhon discovers things in an independent way.” This included, of course, a certain logic of opposition. Marx sees this as a kind of orphan, or misfire of thought, which can only be at home once it is assimilated into dialectical materialism. Marx, in 1865, is a little distant from the young man who recognized alienation as the great byproduct and force of the capitalist system. He is distant from the Proudhon who once wrote: “Everything I know, I owe to despair.”

Proudhon used his despair. Although Marx takes it that Proudhon represented the eternal petit bourgeois attitude, he forgets that despair, its cognitive-affective place. Between an alienation from the happiness that justifies the whole system and the brute lessons of experience, the hard edge of other people’s happiness.

But this is not to diminish Marx’s insight. Marx’s grasp of the system is much greater than Proudhon’s. Marx’s problem, however, is that his grasp, which sees the whole system in a sort of historic present, resolves in the idea of revolution an evolution that could, and in fact has, long outlasted Marx’s understanding.

This is Marx:

“Proudhon’s discovery of “crédit gratuit” and the “people’s bank” (banque du peuple), based upon it, were his last economic “deeds.” My book A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, Part I, Berlin, 1859 (pp. 59-64) contains the proof that the theoretical basis of his idea arises from a misunderstanding of the basic elements of bourgeois “political economy,” namely of the relation between commodities and money, while the practical superstructure was simply a reproduction of much older and far better developed schemes. That under certain economic and political conditions the credit system can be used to accelerate the emancipation of the working class, just as, for instance, at the beginning of the eighteenth, and again later, at the beginning of the nineteenth century in England, it facilitated the transfer of wealth from one class to another, is quite unquestionable and self-evident. But to regard interest-bearing capital as the main form of capital and to try to make a particular form of the credit system comprising the alleged abolition of interest, the basis for a transformation of society is an out-and-out petty-bourgeois fantasy. This fantasy, further diluted, can therefore actually already be found among the economic spokesmen of the English petty bourgeoisie in the seventeenth century. Proudhon’s polemic with Bastiat (1850) about interest-bearing capital is on a far lower level than the Philosophie de la misère. He succeeds in getting himself beaten even by Bastiat and breaks into burlesque bluster when his opponent drives his blows home.”

Under certain economic and political conditions – that is the key, here. We still live under those conditions.

3. In a sense, every crisis turns on how we live under those conditions. Here I am, for instance, in 2026, looking at a period of six years in which our politics and our social imaginary, in France, in Europe, in North America, has been plunged into mourning. Mourning for the effects of COVID – buit even more, for the death of Cheap. The great moderation, the whole end of the Cold War, was predicated on doing away with welfare and substituting cheap. The great cheapness made life bearable: why go to the movies when you can download them cheaply, or even for free? Go to the fast food place and feel like you are eating in a restaurant, like the peeps in the media. If you can’t go to Harvard, you can get a Harvard tee shirt – and for so little! Buy a house for zero down, and pay through a mortgage that might go on for thirty years – but that you won’t have to worry about as you flip that house for another. Go to college and take out loans to pay for it. Cheap, cheap.

4. One of the best essays on Proudhon is by the literary critic, Albert Thibaudet. In « Proudhon, Sainte-Beuve et nous » ( NRF, juillet 1929) Thibaudet calls Proudhon a “worker of ideas”, specifying: “the ideas that are fhose of a worker, working ideas, I mean, which are made to work, to work in the mind, to work in posterity; ideas visibly and originally rooted in the faubourg du Bettant in Besançon… just as those of Rousseau’s are in the low streets of Geneva; the ideas of a hard worker, but also of a pretentious one.”

Thibaudet sees that Proudhon was a utopian who wanted to create utopia now, out of the existing details of the social.

5. It is obvious that property cannot, definitionally, be theft, if theft is, definitionally, the theft of property. It was obvious to Proudhon that both claims are true, and this led him to search for a method, a philosophical guide, to help him understand his insight. Marx led him to Hegel. Only latter did Proudhon stumble upon Leibnitz and the notion of the monad and compossibility. In this, Proudhon founds a line of thought in France that goes through Tarde’s sociology of opposition and the rejection of the dialectic by Deleuze and Guattari. A heady list of names.

I’d add to that list Pasolini. Proudhon was a good Victorian about sex. He was, as well, a traditional sexist. These are the dead ends in his work – some will rightly stop at those dead ends and throw him away. For myself, what is alive in Proudhon is the product of his despair, a despair that, for instance, saw that the anti-clerical jeering of the Enlightenment philosophes and their 19^th century descendents often cashed out as a way of destroying the system of holidays, of Sundays, and demanding that the worker’s whole week, whole life of weeks, be devoted to work. It is an insight into the way the Great Tradition, the metropolitan way of thinking (using James Scott’s distinction) attacks and dissolves the Litte Tradition – turning the little sweetness of life into something bitter. This was Pasolini’s insight as well: Proudhon was in the line of those who saw that the fireflies were disappearing.

6. And, as history “speeds up”, we see, hopefully not too late – we see that we are the fireflies.