Research On Proudhon's Theory Of Property

The theme of "property" is a logic thread to the understanding of Proudhon's doctrinal, just as it runs through the whole Marx's philosophy. While it's an undoubted fact that Proudhon as Marx's lifetime academic adversary is the pull to the rudiment, the formation, development and the perfection of Marx's theory of property which is a core subject unavoidable and far more necessary to embarking on the research on Marx's Philosophy, what has naturally highlighted the academic significance of Proudhon's doctrinal of property. The study on Proudhon's theory of property on the whole can be divided into the following two main plates as the explanation of Proudhon's theory of property and Marx's criticism of Proudhon's theory of property, and specifically speaking contains five chapters, with the former four chapters belonging to the first plate and the fifth chapter for the second one.Chapter One which is insistently faithful to historical materials and source texts, focuses on the comprehensive search for Proudhon's all works about the property and the systematic organization of the above acquired data approximately according to Proudhon's theoretical logic of criticizing, expounding and structuring the property. With no doubted deduction it is no other than Proudhon's life story that has impacted his class stand and theoretical thinking, facilitated his whole academic career and political activities all his life, and made him climb on the stage of history as the philosopher, the economist and the politician standing for the petty bourgeoisie. So it's more than necessary to vividly map Proudhon's life story and settings of works. Since puzzling out Proudhon's theory of property based on viewing Proudhon's original works is no doubt the perfect choice to further thoroughly understand Proudhon, it also needs to sketchily organize all Proudhon's original works, with the subject of "property" as the principal axis and according to the assistance between history and logic. This task refers to manifest the composition backgrounds and conception frames of all the works related to the property, the relation among these works and their own social influence, especially "What is Property", "The Philosophy of Misery" and Proudhon's later works about social reform programs.Chapter Two has from the macroscopic view integrally reflected the status in the theoretical history and the social influence of Proudhon's theory of property, and indicated the philosophical methodology, the logical starting point and the basic standpoint which are internal in Proudhon's theory of property. Having deep recognized evils in modern social civilization, Proudhon directly and exactly directs his critical target to the property which is the foundation of modern society, and faithfully declares "Property is theft". His theory beyond doubt has the epoch-making realistic significance and the profound theoretical significance. This can be embodied in faced with the drive of modernization Proudhon's realistic realization of ownership system and deep concern about revolutionary movement, as well as in the theoretical significance of Proudhon's whole theory of property in the theoretical history of property and the influence in the socialist ideological trend. In order to precisely view the whole economic phenomena of property, Proudhon puts forward the establishment of "Social science" which is distinct from Traditional Political Economics, and pretends to be the social genius who enables to discover the law of social development and guide people to the light. "Social science" which is the admittance for Proudhon to grasp the dialectical relationship between the rationality of justice and the reality of property, specifically is the theoretical base to crack the mystery why property shouldn't but actually exist while justice should exist but actually not, and is aimed to find out the rule of labor and exchange which can rationally define value to eliminate social inequality. Meanwhile, for Proudhon the research method foremost makes perfect sense to pursue eternal truth. He thinks the establishment of science can't totally rely on syllogism such as induction, deduction and so on, but more count on "antinomy" and even "series of dialectics". "Antinomy" is the main logic Proudhon is adopted to criticize property in "What is Property", while "series of dialectics" is the metaphysics how he explains the issue on property in "The Philosophy of Misery". It's clear that Proudhon is extremely hateful to the ownership of the bourgeoisie, which can be showed by his critical attitude to all sorts of views supporting the above ownership in theoretical areas of Law, Metaphysics and Political Economy. He has in the logic of counter-evidence refuted all kinds of hypothesis about the origin of property. For example, property ownership is a natural right; or a right which is based on the fact of possession and then required by people's recognition; or a sacred and inviolable, fundamental right which is endowed by civil law; or a civil right by means of affirmation and mutual recognition of the general will via contract. Furthermore, he has discussed the birth of property respectively from the intrinsic and the extrinsic aspects. In his opinion, property ownership is intrinsically born of human's misjudgement to the eternal truth "justice" owing to the defect of human's reason, and extrinsically derives from power and trick.In order to move forward to answer why Proudhon has the above theoretical inclination to property, Chapter Three as the premise of thoroughly interpreting Proudhon's theory of property has meticulously explored three layers of connotation about the concept of property in it from the microscopic perspective, discriminated the evaluating criterion or stating principle which is justice Proudhon criticizes, explains and builds the property ownership, and accurately surveyed the property Proudhon actually fights against and the one he indeed supports. "Ownership" and "possession" respectively have their own sense defined by Proudhon himself. He considers "ownership" as "theft" because it's a right which enables one enjoys and governs another people's labor as well as its diligent gains, which is the root of social inequality. While "possession" leading to felicity is a distinct right from "ownership", which means enjoying and governing at will some one's own belongings, incomes, labor and its diligent gains; which means someone can't prevent contemporary others from equally gaining what's equivalent to what he has privately-owned, nor to deprive people in future from this right; which represents social equality. Analyzing Proudhon's concept of property from the perspective of the subject-object relation, it's intelligible that Proudhon represents no more than the self-reliant peasant and individual producer or petty bourgeoisie, and opposes the non-laborers of large landlords and capitalists who sit idle, enjoy the fruits of others'work and live by profit, and their respective incomes, "rent" and "interest". With the perception that the property issue intrinsically entails two layers of content which are the legally-righteously-speaking property and the economically-speaking property, so for the sake of the integral and scientific construction of the property theory once he has accomplished the legal and righteous criticism of property, he then turns to establish the system of property's economic contradiction so as to explain economic phenomena of property and expound property ownership, and base on it finds out the formula of "justice" to construct afresh the realistic property. As for "justice", Proudhon has made a distinction between the justice as the eternal truth and the profane justice which is created by people's interpretation of the former justice. For him the eternal justice is based on the principle of liberty and equality. He holds a kind of inherent conception of justice, and by the historical inquiry of the profane justice he has probed into the birth and the variation of ownership and verified the dialectical relationship between the realistic property ownership and justice. In the end, it's declared that the property Proudhon calls "theft" is specially the ownership endowed by law, merely the privilege via the nominal and abstract possession to profit by other people's toil, the metamorphous and abused proprietorship, but the right of equal possession based on working, the commensurate ownership which means tantamount property to equivalent labor and respects impartial distribution coincident with non-equivalent labor on the precondition of admitting the individual's diversity.On the basis of the macroscopic and microscopic analyze of Proudhon's theory of property, Chapter Four has further elaborated the for-self property theory Proudhon intends to build up. The theory which is to portray a general profile of the future realistic ownership and put forward some basic principles for it, is indeed the social reform program he comes up with to deal with the realistic metamorphous and abused proprietorship. In this chapter a third social form of "mutual aid system" based on the principle of equal possession Proudhon has conceived to replace the current ownership system has been dialysed, a probably feasible pathway to structure the ideal society has been illustrated, and the organizational form of this society has been predicted. The conception of "mutuality" on Proudhon's opinion has two levels of sense which are "liberty" at the angle of the legal and righteous relation and "exchange" in the context of the economic relation. "Liberty" means the synthesis of the bourgeois system of ownership and the primitive communal system, but neither of them, while " exchange" which is supposed by Proudhon as the timely representation of commercial community in the modern society with production and commutation as its mainstream, is to follow the labor theory of value and the rule of value composition, or it will generate the unfair ownership relation. "Clearing bank" as the effective approach to realize the mutual society is to rebuild the reasonable labor organization and to distribute the product according to constructed value, so as to restrain the circulation and operation of capital and in this way to eventually put an end to capitalist property. It is a tissue of mutual collaboration constituted willingly by every individual producer with freedom who for some specific interest weighs and then negotiates a contract, and a boardroom which is to substitute metallic coin for labor currency and to supply low interest or even interest-free credit, and where is for direct exchange and without the inter-mediation of merchant. This sort of social reform proposals Proudhon has suggested vividly reflects his mild anarchic tendency, which can be embodied by his clear-cut objection to extreme activities such as class struggle and violent revolution, his request of banning any political state or party and his opposition to all suppressing authority. In Proudhon's later work "The Principle of Federalism", he raises another principle of organization named "federalism", which appears to fail to agree or conflict with his anarchism, or is considered to be his apparent compromise to the dilemma of the impotence of improving the reality his radical theory has encountered. Actually, his proposed "federalism" isn't contrary to his anarchism at all, but is the supplement of his anarchism, the federal state he calls for is a necessary transitional form for the realization of anarchy. In addition, it's worthwhile to declare that Proudhon's anarchism belongs to individualistic anarchism but collectivistic or communist anarchism.Chapter Five places particular emphasis on scanning Proudhon's theory of property based on Marx's basic principle, standpoint and point of view, so as to make clear similarities and differences between their theories of property and then perceive the gain and loss of Proudhon's theory of property. Marx has an intricate relationship with Proudhon and on the issue of property doesn't hold a changeless attitude to Proudhon's doctrinal, which goes through a transformation process from praise to fall. What's more, for the most part he's more inclined to oppose Proudhon other than stand by him. Although he first of all has fully affirmed the theoretical significance of Proudhon's theory of property in the theoretical history of property and identified the possible epoch-making realistic significance of Proudhon's theory of property, especially "What is Property". By no means having totally accepted Proudhon's doctrinal of property, he is on the contrary aware of its characteristics non-scientific, halfway critical and falsely revolutionary. He has from the perspective of economical philosophy uncovered the non-scientific "social science" and falsely dialectic research methods how Proudhon studies the issue on property. He blames Proudhon for his replacement of human's history by conceptual history in the interpretation of the formation and development of realistic property and his mistake of economic categories for the entity of economic relationships so as to result in separately and one-sidedly regarding the category "property", criticizes "series of dialectics" Proudhon has created is nothing but the fabrication of Hegel's dialectic and repudiates Proudhon's whole metaphysics or "social science" which is actually far away from traditional political economy. To follow up, Marx has in the historical dimension probed into the real birth and developing history of the ownership relation between capital and wage labor, which also means to scientifically spy on the economical root giving birth to property, so that to refute Proudhon's legal and righteous idealism as well as metaphysical economy how he studies the origin of the property ownership, including Proudhon's viewpoint of justice and proprietorship theory of origin on the basis of land rent. Furthermore, he has found fault with Proudhon's equal possession by considering it actually as a conception in national economics, and then censured Proudhon for his halfway criticism of political economy. That's to say, subjected to adelomorphic fetishism Proudhon hasn't yet get rid of the mindset of bourgeois economics and tries to overcome dissimilation within the scope of alienation as well as remove the property ownership on the premise that property keeps its exist. Anyway it's assertive that equal possess Proudhon has always been expected from the view of peasants and petty bourgeoisie should be essentially different from socialized individual property Marx has called for to rebuild at the standpoint of the proletariat. At last Marx has revealed the reformist character of Proudhon's social improvement program by criticizing his anarchism, made clear to all the anti-scientific essence of Proudhon's for-itself theory of property by diagnosing his system of bank credit is no more than his ridiculous thought and Utopia. All these can be seen by disclosing the absolute holy liberty the individual is entitled to in civil society is totally fake; by the accusal of Proudhon's tendency to class mediation for proposing cooperation between labor and capital, ignoring class antagonism and objects to class struggle, and of his non-dialectical look upon the function of the state and authority; by predicating "clearing bank" is merely an impractical Utopia the petty bourgeoisie's conceived, by insight into Proudhon's misconception of the relation of commodity and currency, the labor theory of currency including the axiology as well as the nature and motion of capital.