Demanding the Impossible: A History of Anarchism (51 page)

In his final years, Proudhon was active as ever in his writing. Inspired by his friend Gustave Courbet, he wrote a work
On the Principle of Art
(1861) in which he saw its social task as ‘to improve us, help us and save us’. He also developed a realist theory of art, calling on the artist to work from true observation. In a phrase which recalls Godwin’s definition of truth and the original tide of his novel
Caleb Williams
, Proudhon declares that not only must we begin by ‘seeing things as they really are’ but the task of the artist is to portray us ‘as we really are’.
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Ironically, this doctrine became the basis for the Soviet notion of socialist realism in art, while anarchism made a much stronger impact on avant-garde artists in the Dadaist and Surrealist movements of the early twentieth century.

Keen to clarify his ideas on social organization, Proudhon next wrote
The Federal Principle
(1863). He reiterates that ‘the Government based on liberty is the government of each man by himself, that is
anarchy
or
self-government.
’ This is to be achieved through the principles of federalism and decentralism. His treatment of federalism represents one of his most important contributions to anarchist theory, and has become particularly relevant today as empires break up and nations forge new alliances. In order to resist the tendency of power to accumulate more power, he proposed that society be broken up into a federation of autonomous regions. A contract between them in the form of an explicit agreement could then be discussed, adopted and amended at the contracting parties’ will. Indeed, tracing the word to its Latin root, Proudhon calls federation a ‘political contract’.
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The fundamental unit of society would remain the commune in which mutualist associations of property-owning and independent workers
exchanged the products of their labour and organized their relationships through free contracts which are bilateral and based on equal exchange. Agricultural production would be based on the family, although Proudhon recognized the possibility of large industrial associations working as well as small ones.

Society however would still be arranged from the bottom up. The largest units within the federation would be assigned the fewest powers and the smallest ones the most. The higher levels would also be subordinated to the lower ones. Each unit of society would be sovereign and have the right to secede from the federation. Delegates would be sent to the federal assembly, while officers of the federal authority would be recallable and the authority itself would withdraw as soon as it had accomplished its specific task.

Proudhon argued that such a federal system is the very reverse of hierarchy or centralized administration and government. Nevertheless, it becomes clear that in order to resolve disputes, parties would have to submit to the authority of an independent arbiter. For the political contract to be binding, the citizen must abandon a degree of liberty in order to attain the special object for which the contract is made, namely to ensure that they keep to their contracts. While Proudhon denies that such an authority amounts to a government, and is merely the agent of the contracting parties, it is difficult to believe that it would not develop into one. Moreover, Proudhon drastically qualifies the right of secession from the federation by asserting that, in disputes over the interpretation and application of the terms of the federal contract, the majority has the right to compel minority compliance. Authority yet again raises its ugly head in his scheme and seriously infringes each member’s autonomy. By arguing that authority and liberty presuppose each other, Proudhon crosses the boundary from anarchism to liberalism with its belief in a minimal State to ensure contracts are kept. The threat of sanctions by the federal authority would also probably undermine the self-assured ties of obligation between citizens.

As Proudhon grew older, he showed signs of an increasing conservatism, especially regarding property and government. He still wanted to see a just distribution of property in which the worker received the value of his labour. In a work on the
Theory of Properly
written between 1863 and 1864, he clarified his earlier position by saying that he was not against the private ownership of wealth itself, but only against the sum of abuses which might spring from it.
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He now identified property with the family, the most sacred of institutions, and with it defended the right of inheritance. He even preferred private property in its absolute and inalienable sense rather than as ‘possession’ since he considered it the only power that could act as a counterweight to the State. After waging war against the abuses of property
for most of his life, Proudhon concluded that it had qualities inherent in its nature of the greatest value. Above all, it was ‘liberal, federalist, decentralizing, republican, egalitarian, progressive, just’.
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In the supreme irony of his complex life, the man who had once boldly declared that ‘Property is Theft’ came to see private property as the greatest bastion against State tyranny.

Proudhon also had second thoughts about authority and government. He had long considered them incompatible with man’s dignity and freedom. In 1853, he reiterated his political faith of 1840:
‘I am an anarchist
, declaring by this word the negation — or better — the insufficiency, of the principle of authority’.
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But ten years later he began to talk about the ‘government’ of anarchy rather than the ‘union of order and anarchy’ as the highest form of society:

There was not merely a linguistic question at stake but also a conceptual one. Proudhon now maintained that far from being incompatible with authority, liberty ‘assumes an Authority that bargains with it, restrains it, tolerates it’.
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It follows that in any society, even the most liberal, a place is reserved for authority. Since the two contrary principles of authority and liberty which underlie all forms of organized society cannot be resolved or eliminated, the problem is to find a compromise between the two. The new formula was
‘the balancing of authority by liberty
, and vice and versa’ — no longer the destruction of the former in order to realize the latter.
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In fact, Proudhon in the end accepts the need for some form of minimal government. Central government in his federal and mutualist society is not merely a neutral arbiter and enforcer but an initiator. While leaving the execution of policies to the local authorities, he insists that ‘In a free society the role of the State or Government is essentially one of legislating, initiating, creating, inaugurating and setting up’. Far from withering away, the functions of the State ‘as prime mover and overall director never come to an end’.
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Yet although Proudhon now accepted the need for government and authority in a transitional period in his published work, he still looked forward in private to a time when centralized political authority would disappear, to be replaced by federal institutions and a pattern of life based on the commune. When individual and collective interests become identical
and all constraint disappears, we will eventually reach ‘a state of total liberty or anarchy’ in which ‘Society’s laws will operate by themselves through universal spontaneity, and they will not have to be ordered or controlled.’
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Proudhon saw in the principle of federalism a way of overcoming national boundaries and hoped Europe would eventually become a confederation of federations. But his own nationalism became increasingly narrow and xenophobic. He liked to claim that his patriotism was not exclusive: he would never put devotion to his country before the rights of man. If he had to choose, he would be prepared to sacrifice his country to justice. Nevertheless, he argued that a federal republic should always give its citizens preference over foreigners in all transactions.

Proudhon moreover began to express an almost Messianic belief in the destiny of his own country, systematically opposing anything that was hostile or foreign to the ‘sacred land of Gaul’. He wanted to see France return to its ‘original nature’, liberated once and for all from foreign beliefs and alien institutions: ‘Our race for too long has been subject to the influence of Greeks, Romans, Barbarians, Jews and Englishmen.’
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For Proudhon, France became the ultimate expression of the Revolutionary Idea and he judged foreign affairs chiefly from the perspective of its interests.

As a result, he opposed nationalist movements in Poland and Hungary. In his
Federation and Unity in Italy
(1862), he was also critical of the attempt by the ‘Jacobin Mazzini’ to create a centralized nation since he feared that a strongly united Italy would threaten France’s role as a major Catholic power. It further led him to defend Napoleon’s support of the Pope against Garibaldi and the King of Sardinia. It is easy to see why French nationalist writers earlier this century should turn to Proudhon for inspiration.

These views were not a temporary aberration on Proudhon’s part. There were aspects of his thought which were reactionary from the beginning. This is most evident in his doctrine of equality.

Proudhon’s definition of justice was so closely linked with the principle of equality that in his vocabulary they almost seem interchangeable terms. He insisted that equality is a law of nature: men are born equal and society itself is moving towards an equality of talents and knowledge. Existing inequalities are therefore simply the result of social custom and education. He believed that hierarchy is one of the most powerful instruments of oppression and he resumed Rousseau’s battle against deference being made towards those who had wealth, power and prestige. Hierarchy not only results in exploitation, but deference engenders ‘special perquisites, privileges, exemptions, favours, exceptions, all the violations of justice’.
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It followed for Proudhon that equality is a necessary condition for liberty.

Proudhon believed that the 1789 Revolution had declared the principles of Equality and Liberty in the political arena; in the middle of the following
century, the time had come to extend it to the economic sphere. His strong adherence to the principle of equality made him base his scheme of mutualism on the equivalent exchange of equal goods and services on commutative, not distributive, justice. Indeed, he opposed the socialist principle espoused by Louis Blanc and Etienne Cabet of distributive justice according to need since it preserves a degree of inequality.

But for all these noble sentiments, there was from the beginning a glaring hole in Proudhon’s doctrine of equality. Like the lawyers of the French Revolution with their rights, Proudhon only applied it to European males. As might be guessed from his attitude to his wife, Proudhon considered women innately inferior to men in both intelligence and virtue. Few men have been so categorical in their male supremacy: ‘The complete being … is the male. The female is a diminutive of man.’
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He went on to declare that woman is a mean term between man and the rest of the animal realm. He idealized man as the maker, woman as the user; where the former has a thinking mind, the later only has a feeling heart. Proudhon even calculated woman’s total inferiority to man as a ratio of 27:8.

Woman’s proper place is therefore in the home and her proper role is as an instrument of reproduction. She has no right to contraception; ‘reliance must be exclusively on
abstinence’
within marriage in the matter of population control.
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Marriage itself should be undissolvable: it is a union of male ‘power’ and female ‘grace’ with man remaining superior in ‘labour, knowledge and rights’.
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While recognizing that authority is born with the family, and the family is the embryo of the State, Proudhon is adamant about the need to preserve the ‘natural’ institution of patriarchy within the family. Authority in his scheme of things is to be banished from all parts of society except the home where man is to remain the undisputed master and his wife his submissive handmaiden. Proudhon even wrote just before he died a third of a work called
Pornocracy, or Women of Modern Times
(1875) in which he cruelly attacked the Saint-Simonian feminists who demanded intellectual and sexual freedom. To his eternal shame, the so-called father of anarchism sided with the most crude reactionaries by counting himself proudly amongst those men who think ‘a woman knows enough if she knows enough to mend our shirts and cook us a steak’.
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It comes as no surprise to learn that Proudhon thought that women simply do not count in public life: ‘society does no injustice to woman by refusing her equality before the law. It treats her according to her aptitudes and privileges. Woman really has no place in the world of politics and economics.’ If she were to be on an equal footing with man in public life, it would mean ‘the death of love and the ruin of the human race’.
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Proudhon was no less prejudiced and dogmatic when it came to race. For all his eloquent celebration of male equality, he maintained that there
are ‘badly born and bastard races’ whose inferiority will be underlined by any attempt to educate them. In the forward march of progress they will be wiped out: in capital letters Proudhon declares that the ‘law of revolution’ is ‘L’EGALITE OU LA MORT!
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He was profoundly anti-Semitic and wanted all Jews except those married to Frenchwomen to be expelled from France: ‘The Jew is the enemy of the human race. This race must be sent back to Asia, or exterminated.’
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