Book Review

Book Review

What Is Property?

by Pierre_Joseph Proudhon

     “Property is theft” is one of those literary sentences that gets stuck in your head as if someone permanently burned it into your gray matter with a branding iron. What Is Property? is Pierre-Joseph Proudhon’s attempt at explaining what it means. Understanding his argument is certainly an intellectual challenge.

     First Proudhon explains how he defines “property”. This is not as easy as it may seem since he does not follow the common understanding of “property” in terms of possession and ownership of something, most often an object, money, real estate, or intellectual property. On one hand, he defines it as synonymous with a concept like “attribute” or “characteristic”. The properties of the human body include a head, a torso, limbs, organs and everything else an average human being is composed of. He extends this definition to include objects that a human owns, possesses, or uses. Humans are users of tools so ownership of tools is perfectly alright in Proudhon’s mind. These two kinds of property are acceptable to him. The property he objects to is a landlord’s or businessman’s appropriation of goods produced by laborers in exchange for money. The semantic root of “property” and “appropriation” are philologically linked so that “appropriate” would mean “to take property away from someone”. This type of business transaction is what Proudhon rants against when he says “property is theft”.

     The reasoning behind this notion can be tricky and confusing. This is probably because Proudhon had not followed his own chain of logic to its end. It goes something like this: one laborer extracts raw materials from the Earth, another laborer forges them into tools, and those tools get used to do farm work. Each laborer along the chain adds something of value to the crops that are the final product. If we were to calculate a value for each step in the process based on time and effort spent in work we could conclude that each vegetable or piece of fruit is worth x amount of money when the proprietor comes to collect his goods. He buys the food in bulk which means that he pays less per item than the sum of the cost of labor put into its production. Since “labor” is a property of a laborer, each laborer in the chain of production owns a portion of all the crops that are later sold. So when a tenant farmer receives payment for his produce, the property of each laborer is being appropriated by the proprietor against their will. Therefore, property is theft and the proprietor is a criminal. After following Proudhon’s reasoning, it makes sense. Well at least it does for about twenty or thirty seconds. The if you start to think about it in detail, the whole theory falls apart. This is as close as he comes to constructing a logically coherent argument.

     The following section is an explication of the concept “property is impossible”. Proudhon sets the bar higher here and some of his arguments in this part are smart, a little more clear and a littlre more clever. One of his strongest points is that a piece of farmland exists in time and space. The farm itself may be sentient but the land it is on exists eternally. Furthermore, space and time are physical dimensions, kind of like vessels that are filled with things like farms, farmers, and crops. The landlord holds a lease giving the time of purchase and the boundaries of the land tract he owns but the lease does not state that he owns the time and space in which the land tract exists. That is because it is impossible for any human to own the abstract dimensions of time and space just as it is impossible for a finite being to own something that exists infinitely like a section of Earth. Therefore, property is impossible. It is like saying a wagon is made out of wood and the wood is made out of molecules which are made out of atoms that are made out of subatomic particles. No one can actually own subatomic particles so that means the wagon can not be owned. Now try stealing a car and using that argument as a defense in court; you would probably not be found innocent but you might end up getting locked in a hospital for the criminally insane rather than the federal penitentiary. It is an interesting concept but too far from the real world to be of much value. It might make an interesting topic of discussion in a law class though.

     The third and final section is a rant. Proudhon derails his narrative fequently, starting with an etymological examination of the word “theft” which shifts into a summary of Hegel, followed by some religious sermonizing, a declaration of anarchism as the only logical form of governing, and it all ends with a rather bizarre and hysterical statement that the idea of property being theft will wipe out the older ways of life and usher in a new utopian paradise of freedom, justice, and equality for all. Despite Proudhon’s inability to stay on topic, this section contains some of the clearest and most well written thoughts in the book.

     What Is Property? is a strange book. Even the most fanatical anarchists would concede that the logic has a few shortcomings. One obvious flaw is that the statements “property is theft” and “property s impossible” are mutually exclusive concepts; you obviously can not steal something that doesn’t exist. At best Proudhon will be remembered as a minor footnote in history which is certainly more than I can say for myself or most of you who are reading this, by the way. Despite his rudimentary thinking, Proudhon was one of the first theorists of anarchism and his ideas had a strong influence on Karl Marx who lifted the ideas of collective ownership and the elimination of the bourgeoisie class directly from his thinking. Marx and Proudhon were actually friends until the two had a falling out and died as enemies.

     Even if Proudhon’s thinking is confused and underdeveloped, knowing something about his life puts it into a clearer perspective. Proudhon grew up in a family of tenant farmers. He saw first hand how the people he knew struggled with the hardest physical labor and lived in extreme poverty while the landlord paid them pennies so he could sell their crops and make a fortune doing little more than signing receipts and lending money at interest. Proudhon was good at reading, got accepted at a college and saw the French Revolution come and go, leaving the poor farmers poor and the aristocrats rich. He saw that the replacement with monarchy by parliament left the general populace just as oppressed as ever. He desperately wanted to transform society so the farm laborers would have their fair share in life. What Is Property? Can be seen as an attack on the economic and political injustice of the world. Despite its naivite and limited scope, it is a sincere fight in favor of the common people who deserve more than what they get. Proudhon had no chance of winning this battle but he was determined to keep up the attack until the end. There is something admirable and noble about his attitude.

     So is property theft? Proudhon does not make a convincing case but in failing to prove his point he raises a lot of questions about society and morality that are legitimate and worth contemplating. The statement “Property is theft” is like William S. Burroughs claim that “language is a virus”. It is one sentence that has become detached from its original context to fly freely through the ethers of abstract thought to this day, a power-chord riffing through the symphonies of intellectual debate. It is a mind-blowing thought that survives long past any other ideas put forth by Proudhon.

Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph. What Is Property? Cambridge University Press, New York: 1992.