Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (52 page)

He further anticipated the German Nazis in his stress on the link between blood and soil. He insists that
‘Land belongs to the race of people born on it
, since no other is able to develop it according to its needs. The Caucasian has never been able to take root in Egypt.’ As to the mixing of the races, while it can give vigour to the native race, ‘blood can be mixed but that it does not become
fused.
One of the two races always ends by reverting to type and absorbing the other.’
⁹⁷
In his position on race and women nothing so clearly revealed Proudhon’s roots in the puritanical, narrow-minded, and reactionary peasants of Franche-Comté.

The conservative tendency in his thinking which is so transparent in his views on women and race came to the fore in his old age in other fields. He replaced the bold Hegelian dialectic of his youth, for instance, and came closer to the liberal John Stuart Mill by arguing that opposites should not realize a higher synthesis or fusion but rather an equilibrium. It is from this perspective that he came to recommended property as a counterweight the power of the State, and wanted authority to balance liberty.

His growing caution is also apparent in his view of progress. In his
Economic Contradictions
, he had written that humanity in its development obeys an ‘inflexible necessity’.
⁹⁸
In a work on the
Philosophy of Progress
(1853), he continued to define progress as ‘an affirmation of universal movement’ and claimed that what had dominated his studies and constituted his originality as a thinker was that ‘in all things and everywhere, I proclaim
Progress
, and that no less resolutely, in all things and everywhere, I denounce the
Absolute’.
By the time he came to write
Justice in the Revolution and Church
(1858), however, he stressed that ‘We are not moving toward an ideal perfection or final state’. Moreover since humanity like the creation is ceaselessly changing and developing ‘the ideal of Justice and beauty we must attain is changing all the time.’
⁹⁹

Despite his declining health and growing conservatism, Proudhon still took a strong interest in the emancipation of the working class. In the presidential elections of 1863, he urged abstention or the ‘silent vote’ against those who argued that it was necessary to gain political power through the ballot box. Impressed by the ‘Manifesto of the Sixty’ issued by a working class committee in support of their candidate Henri Tolain in a by-election in Paris in 1864, he recognized in an open letter the sharpening class
conflict which was dividing ‘society in two classes, one of employed workers, the other of property-owners, capitalists, entrepreneurs’.
¹⁰⁰
Just before he died, he was working on a book entitled
On the Political Capacity of the Working Classes
(1865) in which he singled out the proletariat as the torch-bearers of revolution and recommended a new tactics for them to achieve freedom and justice.

Proudhon had never been an able tactician and had adopted widely differing strategies throughout his life. At first he had relied on Godwin’s method of rational education: ‘Stimulate, warn, inform, instruct but do not inculcate.’
¹⁰¹
He had no time for the alternatives put forward by his socialist contemporaries. Workers’ control of industry, he argued, would only reduce enterprise and productivity while a progressive income tax would legitimize privilege rather than bring about equality. At the outbreak of the 1848 Revolution in France, he further condemned the proposals of Louis Blanc since his welfare State would need dictatorial authority and his plan to nationalize industry would only change the managers and stockholders. As for Auguste Blanqui’s revolutionary dictatorship, it was nothing but a glorification of force: ‘It is the theory of all governments turned against the governing classes; the problem of tyrannical majorities resolved in favour of the workers, as it is today in favour of the bourgeoisie.’
¹⁰²

After his disastrous experience of the ‘parliamentary Sinai’, Proudhon turned to economic remedies in an attempt to bring about a mutualist society. But even if his People’s Bank had succeeded it would only have checked the power of the big bourgeoisie and primarily benefited the commercial middle class. Despairing at the course of events, Proudhon even considered, after his brief and ignominious flirtation with Napoleon III, a scheme for the ‘dictatorship of the people of Paris’.
¹⁰³
He quickly realized however that it would be both disrespectful and impotent, and he retreated into gradualism. Emphasizing moral renovation before political economy, it was now a question of
‘attente révolutionnaire’.

In his last work
On the Political Capacity of the Working Classes
(1865), Proudhon suddenly offered a new and incisive strategy. He had come to see social change primarily in terms of a class struggle. As the commercial middle class was being smothered, there was a growing polarization between the big bourgeoisie and proletariat. It was the proletariat who were in the ascendancy, growing in political capacity and class consciousness. The revolutionary task had thus fallen to them to rally under their leadership the peasants and the rump of the middle class.

Combined with this Marxian analysis was a renewed stress on the education of the working class. Proudhon had always celebrated work as one of the greatest human activities and looked forward to a time when ‘Labour would become divine, it would become the religion.’
¹⁰⁴
He hated
the division of labour under the factory system, which required overspecialization, and reduced workers to mere instruments. He therefore wanted a young worker to be apprenticed to many trades. He also recommended the simultaneous education of mind and body, combining the study of arts and sciences with work in fields and factories. In this way, he hoped to form the all-round worker.

Proudhon continued to criticize both the political left and right. He maintained that the
laissez-faire
of the free-market economists is as oppressive as government since it assured ‘the victory of the strong over the weak, of those who own property over those who own nothing’.
¹⁰⁵
At the same time, he returned to the attack against ‘State socialism’, especially Louis Blanc’s communist version. With prophetic clarity, Proudhon at the end of his life observed that

As for the dictatorship of the proletariat advocated by Marx, Proudhon argued prophetically that it would ensure universal servitude, all-encompassing centralization, the systematic destruction of individual thought, an inquisitorial police, with ‘universal suffrage organized to serve a perpetual sanction to this anonymous tyranny’.
¹⁰⁷
In place of
laissez-faire
capitalism and State socialism, Proudhon finally proposed once again his system of mutualism as the only way to create a free society: ‘In this system the labourer is no longer a serf of the State, swamped by the ocean of the community. He is a free man, truly his own master, who acts on his own initiative and is personally responsible.’
¹⁰⁸

When it came to practical tactics, Proudhon rejected the remedy of the trade unions and the parliamentary road to power. In their place, he recommended the tactic of complete withdrawal from organized politics in order to convert the whole of France to mutualism and federalism: ‘Since the old world rejects us’ the way forward is to ‘separate ourselves from it radically’.
¹⁰⁹
He was confident that the most important factor in popular movements is their spontaneity and that a revolution could spontaneously transform the whole of society.

Proudhon died in 1865. He had lived long enough to learn that many in the French working class were taking his advice and that the First International had been established largely by his followers. The crowning irony of his life was that the man who felt excommunicated from his contemporaries
was accompanied to his grave in the cemetery in Passy by a crowd of several thousand mourners. Proudhonians went on to form the largest group in the Commune of Paris six years later. Proudhon’s reputation became so high that one communard simply carried around an uncut copy of
On the Political Capacity of the Working Classes
to demonstrate the strength of his revolutionary commitment.

Proudhon was undoubtedly one of the most paradoxical and inconsistent social thinkers of the nineteenth century. His combative view of human nature is undoubtedly one-sided and his version of history highly speculative. He presents man as a self-governing individual and recognizes the ‘collective force’ of social groups, but fails to arrange these insights into a coherent whole. He sees man torn by destructive passions and yet capable of rational control. He does not properly define the relationship between the egoistic and benevolent impulses. Above all, as Marx pointed out, he fails to see that human nature is not an unchanging essence but a product of history which changes in the course of development.

In his ethics, Proudhon does not properly define the meaning of justice. While his concept of respect involves a duty to forbear as well as to intervene in the affairs of others, he fails to delineate the boundaries between personal autonomy and social intervention. Again, he does satisfactorily solve the dilemma between the individual conscience and the moral conventions of society. Autonomy requires that we should follow our own consciences, not what society prescribes, yet Proudhon is ready to utilize social pressure to make the individual conform to the norms of society.

His ethical intuitions by their very nature cannot be affirmed or denied, and as such are beyond discussion. He offers no evidence to prove that the laws of justice are either inherent in nature or in humanity. His claims for social science are also untestable, and he makes the classic error of making moral judgements about so-called ‘facts’.

In his economics, Proudhon presents bargaining as the primary pattern of social relations. After rejecting the State and any form of central planning he looks to the market to achieve equivalent exchange. His mutualist society would be made up of rational individuals who calculate their own interests, yet this would seem to overlook the ‘collective force’ of social groups and organizations. It is a weakness shared by all forms of market socialism. Aware of the corrosive nature of such bargaining, Proudhon does not extend it to the patriarchal family where love replaces calculation and respect enjoins ‘complete sacrifice of the person’.
¹⁰⁹
It is a clear sign of the weakness of his position that he feels compelled to fall back on the family in order to compensate public self-interest with private altruism. Ironically, the family provides the moral foundation for his contractual scheme; without it there would be no moral sense.

In his mutualist society, Proudhon looks to contracts to replace laws and government. But his version of contracts as mutually acceptable agreements imposes no obligation on the contracting parties except that which flows from their personal promises. Given his pugnacious view of human nature, it is difficult to see why they should not degenerate into endless wrangles or dictated settlements. Even if, as he suggests, the contracts are made public, formal and explicit, and public opinion reinforces the purely moral obligation of promises, there is no final certainty that people will keep their agreements. His resort to a federal authority to solve disputes, and his call for an express oath of fidelity to the rules of contracting show that he was aware of the difficulty, but their introduction would doubtless lead to the reconstitution of the State.

Since Proudhon believes that human beings are naturally aggressive, selfish, and domineering, it would seem inevitable that they would grasp for power in a society without government. Proudhon tries to mitigate the danger by equalizing the power of organizations and by encouraging their diversity: ‘the greatest independence of individuals and groups’ must go with ‘the greatest variety of combinations’.
¹¹⁰
But the principle of social diversity is not fully developed. Again, although Proudhon adopts a version of commutative justice as a rule for all bargains to bring about equality, under his mutualist scheme hard workers would receive more and a new labour hierarchy would bound to re-emerge in the long run. As Kropotkin later pointed out, the criterion of need is more just than productivity as a principle of distribution.

But if Proudhon remains theoretically confused, he at least draws attention to the central problems of government and property which oppress humanity. For all his lamentable racism, chauvinism and patriotism, it is unreasonable to see him as forerunner of fascism; if anything he was a liberal in proletarian clothing. He may have grown more conservative in his views of government and property as he grew older, and less certain about the course of progress, but bitter experience had taught him the difficulties of achieving his ideals. His recognition of the political capacity of the working class was a considerable improvement on his earlier tactical positions.

Despite the authoritarian dimension to his work, freedom was Proudhon’s ultimate goal and the key to his thought. For him, freedom denotes complete liberation from every possible hindrance: the free man is ‘liberated from all restraint, internal and external’. Freedom in this absolute sense not only rejects all social pressure, public opinion, and physical force from outside, but also the voice of conscience or the drive of passion from within. It allows the individual to think and act as he pleases, to become completely autonomous. It recognizes ‘no law, no motive, no principle, no cause, no limit, no end, except itself’.
¹¹¹
It is not surprising that any attempt
to realize such boundless freedom would encounter overwhelming obstacles. But even if it is an impossible goal, Proudhon’s flawed attempt to achieve it makes him one of the greatest of all libertarians. It is not without good reason that Bakunin recognized him as the father of the historic anarchist movement.