The following is sourced from https://handwiki.org/wiki/Biography:Pierre-Joseph_Proudhon:
“Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (15 January 1809 – 19 January 1865) was a French politician, philosopher and the founder of mutualist philosophy. He was the first person to declare himself an anarchist, using that term, and is widely regarded as one of the ideology’s most influential theorists. Proudhon is even considered by many to be the “father of anarchism”. He became a member of the French Parliament after the Revolution of 1848, whereafter he referred to himself as a federalist.
Proudhon, who was born in Besançon, was a printer who taught himself Latin in order to better print books in the language. His best-known assertion is that “property is theft!”, contained in his first major work, What Is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and Government (Qu’est-ce que la propriété? Recherche sur le principe du droit et du gouvernement), published in 1840. The book’s publication attracted the attention of the French authorities. It also attracted the scrutiny of Karl Marx, who started a correspondence with its author. The two influenced each other and they met in Paris while Marx was exiled there. Their friendship finally ended when Marx responded to Proudhon’s The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty with the provocatively titled The Poverty of Philosophy. The dispute became one of the sources of the split between the anarchist and Marxist wings of the International Working Men’s Association. Some such as Edmund Wilson have contended that Marx’s attack on Proudhon had its origin in the latter’s defense of Karl Grün, whom Marx bitterly disliked, but who had been preparing translations of Proudhon’s work.
Proudhon favored workers’ associations or co-operatives as well as individual worker/peasant possession over private ownership or the nationalization of land and workplaces. He considered social revolution to be achievable in a peaceful manner. In The Confessions of a Revolutionary, Proudhon asserted that “Anarchy is Order Without Power”, the phrase which much later inspired in the view of some the anarchist circled-A symbol, today “one of the most common graffiti on the urban landscape”. He unsuccessfully tried to create a national bank, to be funded by what became an abortive attempt at an income tax on capitalists and shareholders. Similar in some respects to a credit union, it would have given interest-free loans.
This next bit is sourced from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre-Joseph_Proudhon:
Private property and the state
Proudhon saw the privileged property as a form of government and that it was necessarily backed by and interlinked with the state, writing that “[t]he private property of privilege called forth and commanded the State” and arguing that “since the first related to the landowner and capitalist whose ownership derived from conquest or exploitation and was only maintained through the state, its property laws, police and army”. Hence, Proudhon distinguished between personal property and possessions (possession) and private property (propriété), i.e. productive property while the former having direct use-value to the individual possessing it. Unlike capitalist property supporters, Proudhon stressed equality and thought that all workers should own property and have access to capital, stressing that in every cooperative “every worker employed in the association [must have] an undivided share in the property of the company”. In his later works, Proudhon used property to mean possession. This resulted in some individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker calling possession as property or private property, causing confusion within the anarchist movement and among other socialists.
In his earliest works, Proudhon analyzed the nature and problems of the capitalist economy. While deeply critical of capitalism, Proudhon also objected to those contemporary in the socialist movement who advocated centralized hierarchical forms of association or state control of the economy. In a sequence of commentaries from What Is Property? (1840), posthumously published in the Théorie de la propriété (Theory of Property, 1863–1864), Proudhon declared in turn that “property is theft”, “property is impossible”, “property is despotism” and “property is freedom”. When saying that “property is theft”, Proudhon was referring to the landowner or capitalist who he believed “stole” the profits from laborers. For Proudhon, as he wrote in the sixth study of his General Idea of the Revolution in the Nineteenth Century, the capitalist’s employee was “subordinated, exploited: his permanent condition is one of obedience”. In What Is Property?, Proudhon also wrote:
Property is physically and mathematically impossible.
Property is impossible, because it demands something for nothing.
Property is impossible because wherever it exists production costs more than it is worth.
Property is impossible, because, with a given capital, production is proportional to labor, not to property.
Property is impossible, because it is homicide.
Yes, I have attacked property, and shall attack it again.
Property is robbery.
The people finally legalized property. God forgive them, for they knew not what they did!
Proudhon believed that illegitimate property was based on dominion (i.e. entitlement) and that this was backed by force. While this force can take the form of police in the employ of a state, it is the fact of its enforcement, not its form, that makes it what it is. Proudhon rejected entitlement regardless of the source and accepted possession based on occupancy. According to Proudhon, “[t]here are different kinds of property: 1. Property pure and simple, the dominant and seigniorial power over a thing; or, as they term it, naked property. 2. Possession. ‘Possession,’ says Duranton, ‘is a matter of fact, not of right.’ Toullier: ‘Property is a right, a legal power; possession is a fact.’ The tenant, the farmer, the commandité, the usufructuary, are possessors; the owner who lets and lends for use, the heir who is to come into possession on the death of a usufructuary, are proprietors.”
In Confessions of a Revolutionary, Proudhon also wrote:
“Capital” […] in the political field is analogous to “government”. […] The economic idea of capitalism, the politics of government or of authority, and the theological idea of the Church are three identical ideas, linked in various ways. To attack one of them is equivalent to attacking all of them. […] What capital does to labour, and the State to liberty, the Church does to the spirit. This trinity of absolutism is as baneful in practice as it is in philosophy. The most effective means for oppressing the people would be simultaneously to enslave its body, its will and its reason.
In asserting that property is freedom, Proudhon was referring not only to the product of an individual’s labor, but also to the peasant or artisan’s home and tools of his trade and the income he received by selling his goods. For Proudhon, the only legitimate source of property is labor. What one produces is one’s property and anything beyond that is not. Proudhon advocated workers’ self-management and was opposed to the private ownership of the means of production. In 1848, Proudhon wrote:
“Under the law of association, transmission of wealth does not apply to the instruments of labour, so cannot become a cause of inequality. […] We are socialists […] under universal association, ownership of the land and of the instruments of labour is social ownership. […] We want the mines, canals, railways handed over to democratically organised workers’ associations. […] We want these associations to be models for agriculture, industry and trade, the pioneering core of that vast federation of companies and societies, joined together in the common bond of the democratic and social Republic.”
Proudhon also warned that a society with private property would lead to statist relations between people, arguing:
“The purchaser draws boundaries, fences himself in, and says, ‘This is mine; each one by himself, each one for himself.’ Here, then, is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no one has right to step, save the proprietor and his friends; which can benefit nobody, save the proprietor and his servants. Let these multiply, and soon the people […] will have nowhere to rest, no place of shelter, no ground to till. They will die of hunger at the proprietor’s door, on the edge of that property which was their birth-right; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, ‘So perish idlers and vagrants.’”
According to Proudhon, “[t]he proprietor, the robber, the hero, the sovereign—for all these titles are synonymous—imposes his will as law, and suffers neither contradiction nor control; that is, he pretends to be the legislative and the executive power at once […] [and so] property engenders despotism. […] That is so clearly the essence of property that, to be convinced of it, one need but remember what it is, and observe what happens around him. Property is the right to use and abuse. […] [I]f goods are property, why should not the proprietors be kings, and despotic kings—kings in proportion to their facultes bonitaires? And if each proprietor is sovereign lord within the sphere of his property, absolute king throughout his own domain, how could a government of proprietors be any thing but chaos and confusion?”
I am only a quarter of the way through What is Property? at the moment, having been aware of Proudhon for many years but only recently found the time to read his work. I am captivated and very much looking forward to reading the other books referenced above.
Here you can download a free PDF copy of What is Property?