Proudhonism
The term Proudhonism denotes a current of social and political views that go back to the French social reformer and theorist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon . Its core lies in the fundamental criticism of monopolies such as property and state power . Proudhonism played a key role in shaping anarchism .
Starting points
The writing What is property?
Proudhon, who came from a humble background and was a worker himself, was named in 1840 by his writing Qu'est-ce que la propriété? Ou recherches sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement ( What is property? Or: investigations into the basis of law and government ), which he dedicated to the workers. It contains the famous quote "Property is theft".
Proudhon extended the criticism of the property monopoly already expressed by other socialists to a systematic analysis of the causes of property , its right to exist and its future. He contradicted the prevailing doctrines of bourgeois economists and legal scholars and used their theses to show that the possessing classes had no right to their property, which in reality belonged to the producers.
According to Karl Marx, he did not succeed in attempting to unveil the secret of surplus value and to go beyond the utopian interpretation of David Ricardo 's labor theory of value . However, in directing attention to this point, it became, according to Marx, epoch-making.
Individualization of production
Proudhon criticized the separation of the producers from the means of production from the petty-bourgeois standpoint and looked for a way beyond capitalism and communism that would save the individual mode of production from being destroyed by capital . He couldn't imagine communism in any other way than in terms of the barracks in the factories .
Private property and communism meant for him one-sided extremes on the one hand of the individual , on the other hand of the social principle, which he regarded as the two sides of human nature. In order to balance the two, Proudhon wanted to remove the means of production from the control of the capitalists and large landowners and transfer them to society . This should be made available to the producers as personal property so that everyone can work with their own means of production. For Proudhon, property (according to legal parlance) was not the same as property and was not reprehensible like it.
Problems and contradictions
Justice and equality
Proudhon saw the ideal mediation between the individual and society in that “equality” and “justice” which seems to result from the direct exchange of the labor products of simple commodity producers. According to his idea, all producers had to exchange their products only according to the simple law of value with the hour of work as a unit of value, in order to abolish all exploitation and oppression, to realize the right to work and to secure a fair share of the total product for all members of society, which is absolute for all immediately - according to Proudhon's later views, however, according to the achievement .
Theoretically, according to the Marxist view, Proudhon was still caught up in the prerequisites of the bourgeois economy he opposed . From the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production he sought to derive the paradox that property was “impossible”, since it not only had to start from an original equality , but also, taken to extremes, necessarily reverted to equality.
added value
Proudhon, for example, who, like the economics of his time, did not distinguish productive consumption from individual consumption, believed that capitalism was incapable of realizing surplus value because the worker could only buy back the products he created up to the amount of his wages.
Since Proudhon, despite his attempt to derive surplus value from the social character of production, did not dispute the view at the time that surplus value arises from the non-equivalent exchange of goods and services, he looked for an ideal exchange relationship and assessed the exchange value of goods and services, which he simply reduced to the cost price , as an absolute determination. This shifted the starting point of the economic transformation into the sphere of circulation of money, which later became the field of his reform projects.
Simple production of goods
The conception of simple commodity production , which Proudhon had only begun in 1840 in the appendix to his criticism of property, he raised in 1846 in his Système des contradictions économiques ou Philosophie de la misère ( system of economic contradictions or philosophy of misery ) to an independent theory , which he opposed not only to bourgeois economy, but equally to communist and other socialist doctrines.
Proudhon believed that in order to overcome the contradictions of the capitalist mode of production and thus the misery of the workers, one only needed to remove the negative aspects of the existing economic relations, which he regarded as eternally valid categories . He was not of the opinion that they inevitably follow from the positive developments in capitalism, that also the capitalist law of value was only the logical and historical consequence of the simple law of value.
Critique by Karl Marx
In his work Das Elend der Philosophie (1847), Karl Marx criticized the “abstract- antinomic category scheme ” and Proudhon's method of communication point by point as a response to Proudhon and accused his efforts of “petty-bourgeois utopianism ”, the simple law of value as the economic basis of society to treat and not to understand "that this egalitarian relationship, this ideal of improvement , which he wants to introduce into the world, is itself nothing but the reflex of the present world and that as a result it is totally impossible to want to reconstitute society on the basis, which is itself only the embellished shadow of this society ”.
Reform proposals
The interest-free loan as a starting condition
Since Proudhon suspected the source of the exploitation of labor power not in the labor process itself, but ultimately in the sphere of circulation of goods and services, he soon held only the interest on capital , a special form of capital profit, to be the real reason and especially money capital, represented by the Financiers and bankers, for the real form of exploitation. Therefore, in order to implement his reform program, Proudhon came up with the idea of providing all workers with interest-free credit for the purchase of their own means of production.
Such a reform, so Proudhon believed, would transform capitalist society in a peaceful way into an order of equality and justice by giving everyone the means to become an independent worker, that is, a small producer of goods. With this in mind, he now included the cooperative movement in his plans. In 1849 Proudhon made the practical attempt to set up a people's bank on small shares at five francs, to grant the workers' production cooperatives the necessary credit and, in addition, to organize monetary exchanges at the value of working hours.
Dissolution of the state
As the February Revolution of 1848 ripened , Proudhon also developed his ideas of the abolition of the state. He, who viewed the state as abstractly as it did the economic situation, saw in it the main instrument of class strife and social oppression and the main obstacle that stood in the way of the abolition of the property monopoly.
From the historical development so far, he inferred that state power had steadily decreased in the course of human history and was approaching its end. The March Revolution, which he had not expected, he considered the beginning of the dissolution phase and the coup d'état of Napoléon III. who also surprised him for a further step in that direction. Proudhon developed these views particularly in his contemporary studies Confessions d'un révolutionnaire ( Confessions of a Revolutionary ) of 1849 , and La révolution sociale demontrée par le coup d'état du 2 décembre 1851 ( The social revolution, evidenced by the coup d'état of December 2nd 1851 ) from 1852 .
Economic instead of political reforms
He rejected the organized class struggle , above all the political one, as harmful, since it only hardened the fronts and inhibited the shrinking process of political violence. He hoped, with his economic reform of credit, for which he also wanted to win the middle bourgeoisie , to undermine and eliminate the state as it were.
Proudhon's worldview and ideal of society
anarchism
The anarchism , which Proudhon propagated as a social ideal and thus introduced as a political term for the abolition of all political authority and central management of society, differed fundamentally from the communist view that in a classless society the self-administration of the associated producers takes the place of the state .
Mutualism
Proudhon opposed not only the false expectations that the socialist Louis Blanc had of a democratic republic as the organizer of the socialist association, but also the principle of democratic centralism advocated by workers' communism .
In accordance with his ideal of freedom, Proudhon propagated mutualism , as he called his system of economic relations in connection with the voluntary reciprocity of solidarity obligations that the French workers had entered into in their first defensive struggles against the aspirations of capital. On the basis of a voluntary agreement of mutual services alone, Proudhon allowed social ties and especially the cooperative association of producers.
On the other hand, he was reluctant to admit an inevitable minimum to a tight association, as required by a large modern enterprise (for example in the transport sector). In order to steer the overt particularism of the cooperatives, he finally agreed to a federalist social structure in his paper Du principe fédératif ( On the federation principle ) of 1863 .
Philosophical basis
Proudhon developed his mutualistic principles particularly in his writing Solution duproblemème sociale. L'idée générale de la révolution au XIXe siècle ( solution of the social problem. The general concept of revolution in the 19th century ) from 1851 , in which he also advocated cooperation between the workers and the middle bourgeoisie. In his three-volume anti-clerical work De la justice dans le révolution et dans l'église ( Of Justice in the Revolution and in the Church ) from 1865 , for which he was influenced by Ludwig Feuerbach's criticism of religion , Proudhon also opposed the growing religious socialism in his posthumous pamphlet from 1865, De la capacité politique des classes ouvrières ( On the political empowerment of the working classes ).
Dialectic of contradiction
In the first-mentioned work, Proudhon, who borrowed from the dialectical forms of thought of Immanuel Kant and GWF Hegel , also gave a general expression of his worldview. He declared the contradiction to the basic law of the universe, life and society.
However, since he economic categories as the Kantian antinomies treated and the dialectic as a method understood between thesis and antithesis , a synthesis to produce, the contradiction meant him no real development principle. The contradiction functioned as a motive for a reciprocity of the phenomena, which does not dissolve the opposites (antagonisms), but needs and evokes the balancing justice to convey them. Proudhon's thinking was based on an idealization of bourgeois forms of life.
Marx judged: “Proudhon first draws his ideal of justice, the justice éternelle , from the legal relationships corresponding to commodity production, which, incidentally, also provides the comforting proof for all philistines that the form of commodity production is just as eternal as justice . Then, conversely, he wants to remodel real commodity production and the real law corresponding to it according to this ideal. ” Proudhon rejected the materialistic conception of history by Marx.
Effects
On the whole, Proudhon's views on social reform were close to egalitarianism . Not least because of the persecution he was exposed to, his views had a strong influence on the workers 'movement in the Romance countries ( France , Belgium , Spain and Italy ), especially in the French workers' movement and its section , up until the 1850s and 1860s in the First International .
The experiences of the Paris Commune practically refuted Proudhonism, so that its influence declined sharply. Essential theorems of Proudhonism were adopted by the various currents of anarchism , both anarcho-syndicalism in the trade union movement and theoretical Bakunism , which Marx contemptuously described as a "caricatured form of Proudhonism". Proudhon's theses are repeatedly taken up in connection with the role of the state, the criticism of plutocracy , the anti-centralist social structure and others.
Proudhonism had a considerable influence on Richard Wagner's cultural and political ideas .
literature
- John Ehrenberg: Proudhon and His Age. Humanities Press, Atlantic Highlands NJ 1996, ISBN 0-391-03891-5 .