Property is theft!

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Property is theft! (French: "La propriété, c'est le vol!") is a slogan coined by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his 1840 book "What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government".

By "property," Proudhon referred to the Roman law concept of the "sovereign right of property"ndash the right of the proprietor to do with his property as he pleases, "to use and abuse," so long as in the end he submits to state-sanctioned title, and he contrasted the supposed right of property with the rights (which he considered valid) of liberty, equality, and security.

In the "Confessions d'un revolutionnaire" Proudhon further explained his use of this phrase: [Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. "No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism". Edited by Daniel Guerin, translated by Paul Sharkey. 2005. AK Press. ISBN 1904859259 p. 55-56]

bquote|In my first memorandum, in a frontal assault upon the established order, I said things like, Property is theft! The intention was to lodge a protest, to highlight, so to speak, the inanity of our institutions. At the time, that was my sole concern. Also, in the memorandum in which I demonstrated that startling proposition using simple arithmetic, I took care to speak out against any communist conclusion.

In the "System of Economic Contradictions", having recalled and confirmed my initial formula, I added another quite contrary one rooted in considerations of quite another order – a formula that could neither destroy the first proposition nor be demolished by it: Property is freedom. [...] In respect of property, as of all economic factors, harm and abuse cannot be dissevered from the good, any more than debit can from asset in double-entry book-keeping. The one necessarily spawns the other. To seek to do away with the abuses of property, is to destroy the thing itself; just as the striking of a debit from an account is tantamount to striking it from the credit record.

imilar phrases

Brissot de Warville had previously written, in his "Philosophical Researches on the Right of Property" ("Recherches philosophiques sur le droit de propriété et le vol"), "Exclusive property is a robbery in nature."William Shepard Walsh, " [http://books.google.com/books?id=1zo4AAAAMAAJ Handy-book of Literary Curiosities] ", p. 923] Karl Marx would later write in a 1865 letter to a contemporary that Proudhon had taken the slogan from Warville,Karl Marx, " [http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1865/letters/65_01_24.htm Letter to J. B. Schweizer] ", from "Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume 2", first published in "Der Social-Demokrat", Nos. 16, 17 and 18, February 1, 3 and 5, 1865] although this is contested by subsequent scholarship. [Robert L. Hoffman, "Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.J. Proudhon", (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 46-48.]

Similar phrases also appear in the works of Saint Ambrose, who taught that "superfluum quod tenes tu furaris" (the superfluous property which you hold you have stolen).

Footnotes

I. Note_label|A|I|none This translation by Benjamin Tucker renders "c'est le vol" as "it is robbery," although the slogan is typically rendered in English as "property is theft."

References