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nococklikehorsecock · 4 years ago

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Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865)

As we shall see below, the early American individualist movement (particularly its founder, Josiah Warren) was an offshoot of Owenite cooperativism. But in addition, American individualism was influenced heavily by the mutualist theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. Reciprocity (or mutuality, or commutative justice) was central to Proudhon’s economic thought. In a passage in Volume II of System of Economical Contradictions, Proudhon writes:

The theory of mutuality…, that is to say exchange in kind, …is the synthesis of the notions of private property and collective ownership. This synthesis is as old as its constituent parts since it merely means that society is returning… to its primitive practices as a result of a six-thousand-year-long meditation on the fundamental proposition that A=A.

The mutualist principle of “service for service, product for product, loan for loan, insurance for insurance, credit for credit, security for security, guarantee for guarantee” is an application of the legal principle of reciprocity to “the tasks of labor and to the good offices of free fraternity… On it depend all the mutualist institutions: mutual insurance, mutual credit, mutual aid, mutual education…, etc.” The perfect expression of mutuality for Proudhon was the contract between equals, both “synallagmatic” (bilateral) and “commutative” (based on an exchange of equal values). Unequal exchange, on the other hand, was the defining characteristic of exploitation:

…If… the tailor, for rendering the value of a day’s work, consumes ten times the product of the day’s work of the weaver, it is as if the weaver gave ten days of his life for one day of the tailor’s. This is exactly what happens when a peasant pays twelve francs to a lawyer for a document which it takes him an hour to prepare…. Every error in commutative justice is an immolation of the laborer, a transfusion of the blood of one man into the body of another….

Reciprocity is built into the normal functioning of a free market. When exchange is free and uncoerced, it is impossible for one party to benefit at the other’s expense.

The ratio at which goods and services are exchanged will move toward a value that reflects the respective costs of the parties, including the disutility of their labor. So the normal pattern of free exchange is cost for cost, effort for effort, disutility for disutility, so that things equal out through the “higgling of the market.” Or as Proudhon described it:

Whoever says commerce says exchange of equal values, for if the values are not equal and the injured party perceives it, he will not consent to the exchange, and there will be no commerce.

….What characterizes the contract is the agreement for equal exchange; and it is by virtue of this agreement that liberty and well-being increase; while by the establishment of authority, both of these necessarily diminish….Between contracting parties there is necessarily for each one a real personal interest…. Between governing and governed, on the contrary, no matter how the system of representation or of delegation of the governmental function is arranged, there is necessarily alienation of a part of the liberty and of the means of the citizen….

….For no one has a right to impose his own merchandise upon another: the sole judge of utility, or in other words the want, is the buyer…. Take away reciprocal liberty, and exchange is no longer the expression of industrial solidarity: it is robbery.

Proudhon was heavily influenced by Comte’s schema, in which “industrial” society based on contract succeeded the previous “militant” (feudal) stage of history. His ultimate vision for society was “the notion of Contract succeeding that of Government….” The state would wither away, and the political be absorbed into the economic:

It is industrial organization that we will put in place of government…. In place of laws, we will put contracts.—No more laws voted by a majority, or even unanimously; each citizen, each town, each industrial union, makes its own laws.

In place of political powers, we will put economic forces….

Hodgskin’s theory of natural and artificial property, and Proudhon’s similar theory, were to be paradigmatic for American individualist anarchist economics. The common theme running through market anarchist theories of property is that natural property rights reflect scarcity, while artificial property rights create it; natural property secures the individual’s right to her own labor-product, while artificial property entitles the holder to collect tribute on the labor-product of others; natural property entitles the holder to a return for her contributions to production, while artificial property entitles the holder to collect a toll for not impeding production.

Thus, in response to the proprietor’s claim not only to have labored but to have provided employment to those otherwise without means of support, Proudhon challenged:

You have laboured! Have you never made others labour? Why, then, have they lost in labouring for you what you have gained in not labouring for them? Like the children of Israel in Canaan, the proprietor reaps where she did not sow.

Proudhon also argued, in language that echoed Hodgskin, that capitalists enclosed the increased productivity of cooperative labor as a source of rent by preempting the channels by which workers otherwise might exchange credit on their own non- exploitative terms. As a result the increase in productivity from collective labor is appropriated entirely by the owning classes:

[T]he capitalist has paid as many times “one day’s wage” as he has employed labourers each day…. For he has paid nothing for that immense power which results from the union and harmony of laborers and the convergence and simultaneity of their efforts….

…A force of a thousand men working for twenty days has been paid the same as a force of one working fifty-five years; but this force of one thousand has done in twenty days what a single man, working continuously for a million centuries, could not accomplish: is this exchange equitable? Once more, no; for when you have paid all the individual forces, you have still not paid the collective force….

This is made possible by a monopoly on the supply of credit, which prevents associated labor from appropriating the productivity gains from association in the form of increased wages. By maintaining a monopoly on the function of advancing the capital necessary to organize collective production, and supplying the labor fund, capitalists are able to appropriate the net product to themselves as profit. The purpose of Proudhon’s mutual credit proposals was to enable workers, rather than absentee owners, to profit from cooperation: “the collective force, which is a product of the community, ceases to be a source of profit to a small number of managers and speculators: it becomes the property of all the workers.”

Proudhon’s views on privilege and artificial property were in direct conflict with the more orthodox apologetics of French liberal Frederic Bastiat, as institutional economist John Commons argues:

According to Carey and Bastiat, and contrary to Ricardo and the communists and anarchists, the landlord or capitalist rendered a service to the community as much as did the laborer. The value of this service was the alternative price which the employer or laborer would be compelled to pay if he did not pay rent to the landlord, or profit and interest to the capitalist. He was better off by paying rent for superior land than he would be by going to the margin of cultivation where no rent was paid, and better off by paying profits and interest to capitalists than by working for marginal capitalists who made no profits.

But Bastiat and Carey did not distinguish “productivity” and “service” from rents on artificial scarcity. For Bastiat, the landlord and capitalist contributed a “service” equivalent to the alternative cost if his land or capital were not available; if rent on land and profit on capital are less than the utility the laborer receives from access to them compared to what her utility would be without, that is actually an unearned rent accruing to labor. And likewise inventions:

…all this social accrual of value was freely available to present laborers who did not own it, and thereby “saved” them from the labor they would otherwise be compelled to perform, as individuals repeating the past history of society, in order to obtain the present necessaries and luxuries.

But for some reason the landlords and capitalists are allowed to stand in for “society” in taking credit for the improved land and technology that make increased productivity possible. Thanks to privilege, they can collect tribute for the productivity gains created by society. Proudhon illustrated the principle with regard to the landlord’s alleged “service” or “contribution” to production, in merely not impeding access to land she was not working herself:

The blacksmith who makes farming equipment for the farmer, the wheelwright who makes him a cart, the mason who builds his barn…, etc., all of whom contribute to agricultural production by the tools they provide, are producers of utility; and to this extent they have a right to a part of the products… “Without any doubt,” Say says, “but the land is also an instrument whose service must be paid for, and so…” I agree that the land is an instrument, but who made it? The proprietor?… The monopoly of the proprietor lies just in the fact that, though he did not make the implement, he requires payment for its use.

Land is productive; but its productive forces are freely given by nature. They can contribute to exchange value only when the free gift of nature is monopolized. The landlord’s only “contribution” to value is that she sits atop the free gift without using it herself, and charges tribute for access to it. Or as Marx put it in volume 3 of Capital, “Land becomes personified in the landlord and… gets on its hind legs to demand, as an independent force, its share of the product created with its help.”

- Kevin Carson

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