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Proudhon in the 21st century

Proudhon in the 21st century

From decentralised organisation to critiques of war, Proudhon’s thought remains a provocative force

~ Alex Prichard ~

On the 160th anniversary of the death of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, it’s time to look at his work with historical distance. There is no question of wholesale endorsement of everything this tireless writer put to paper, let alone its worst parts. Instead, we should be selective and look at the best of his ideas. Here are some of them.

Hail Caeser!

In Proudhon’s time, populism went by a different name: Caesarism, a political ideology that put faith in a charismatic, larger-than-life leader, elected by ‘the people’, who could slice through the interests of vested elites. Remind you of something? In General Idea of the Revolution, Proudhon argued that Caeserism emerges when the population, dissatisfied with administrative breaks on its sovereignty, elects a strongman in an attempt to achieve the impossible. This book was written before the coup carried out by Napoleon’s nephew Louis, who became emperor Napoleon the Third. But Proudhon expected such a project to fail. Caesarism is doomed because centralisation and hierarchy are structural flaws, or contradictions, in societies with a complex division of labour. The people cannot ‘take back power’ through a leader, they can only do it themselves.

Against representation

Proudhon denounced universal suffrage at every opportunity. It’s not that he thought people shouldn’t be allowed to vote, only that if voting is for parties within the state, then we’ve already lost anything worth calling democracy. In French partie referred originally to the division between the two sides of the same national assembly. Universal suffrage ends up endorsing prior elite bargaining, and is only one, very crude way of coming to collective decisions. Proudhon thought that instead of sovereignty, or a final point of authority, all ‘natural groups’ should be empowered by those who give them ‘collective force’. Given the unstoppable pluralisation of society through the complex division of labour, larger and smaller groups should exercise their own force to direct their activities—be they regions, factories, workshops, towns, cities, networks, universities, you name it. Proudhon argued for decentralised federalism as the most appropriate institutional means to coordinate these plural ‘natural groups’. His late writing on justice as immanent equilibrium and agro-industrial federation tried to work out this model.

War and peace

Did you know that Tolstoy borrowed the title of his famous novel from a work by Proudhon? Despite all the geopolitical upheavals of the mid-19th century, Proudhon was practically alone among his contemporary socialists in theorising war, peace and imperialism—writing no less than six books on the topic. He argued that contradictions in the economy are what drives conflict and war. What he called ‘pauperism’, or the enforced destitution of the working class caused by a refusal to redistribute wealth, was invariably addressed by plundering or conquering neighbours rather than transforming the economy from the bottom up. If war was once a ‘heroic’ pursuit, in the industrial age artillery and rifling are pushing armies away from each other, making death a near certainty, not a risk. There is no valour in indiscriminate shelling, disease and societal devastation, and all gains are ill gotten. Proudhon thought that the solution to the problem of war is not peace, or the cessation of hostilities, but the transformation of social structures and processes—primarily the state and private property.

The far right

Proudhon was from peasant stock, grew up in the foothills of the Jura, and the liberal bourgeoisie and the aristocratic right felt he had a certain ‘salt of the earth’ cachet about him. It helped them that he denounced the mainstream left at every turn, including their bourgeois dalliance and ‘feminism’. He was a sex essentialist and wilfully ignored science that contradicted his views on female inferiority. But he also rejected Jacobin centralism, positivist rationalism, technocracy and romantic intellectual solipsism, believing all of this would precipitate the decline of French civilization. Along with his seeming celebration of struggle, antagonism, antinomy, and balance or equilibrium  in War and Peace, it’s not hard to see why the right have claimed him for their own. Of course, they ignored his socialism, his realism and his anti-statism. This is something to bear in mind in the context of today’s ‘culture wars’.  

Anarchy without foundations

Proudhon advocated for anarchy, which he understood as the absence of a final or fixed point of authority. Freedom and progress were only possible, he argued, when we unshackled ourselves from the notion that there is or even should be a final or fixed point of authority, whether that was natural, religious, political, scientific or whatever. His sex essentialism is not consistent with this idea, to say nothing of his antisemitism. But Proudhon thought science was only the means to justice, not an end in itself, and had he listened harder and lived longer he would have surely changed his mind on both. Because fundamentally he defended the indeterminacy of nature and science, and the idea that free will was central to justice. Unlike others in his time, he did not think science was the fulfilment of history, or that technocracy was inevitable. He did not want to make science a secular religion or set up a priesthood around it. And if any of this sounds eerily relevant, then you can see why his work is worth revisiting.

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