How would you classify Proudhon's political position

[FieldHound]

I have just finished reading 'What is Property?' and am undecided on how to classify his political philosophy. Of course he's remembered mostly as an anarchist, but know some don't consider him a "real" anarchist by later standards. A thread I made about liberal roots/texts had a couple of responses claiming this book as more liberal than anarchist. Wikipedia calls him a socialist, though in 'What is Property' he takes shots at least at communism and Fourierism. Also according to wiki he later went on to refer to himself as federalist. We also have the term mutualist, which as far as I know is considered an anarchist philosophy.

So how would you personally classify his ideas and philosophy - does he really fit under anarchist, socialist, liberal etc or does he have a unique philosophy that's more difficult to box?

[Comrade #138672]

Proudhonism?

[Zoroaster]

Mutualism?

[Os Cangaceiros]

As far as the "land question" went, he had a romantic attachment to the small landholder/farmer/artisan worker, so those professions were to be sustained by a system of mutual credit which everyone would contribute to and everyone would take from when they were in need. Large scale enterprises (like factories, railways, mines etc.) were to be collectivized and subject to worker's self-management, pretty much the standard anarchist position.

I'd categorize Proudhon as more of a radical republican than anything. He came from a line of people who had participated in the 1789 revolution (his cousin was a Jacobin who was imprisoned after the Terror) and that was the intellectual current he was swimming in more than anything else, although he would have a big impact on what would later become anarchism, there's no denying that.

[Collective Reasons]

What is Property? sets out the basics of Proudhon's position: anti-capitalism and anarchism. He stuck to those commitments for the rest of his life. But the details were developed over the remaining twenty-five years, with considerable twists and turns along the way. Unfortunately, translations have been spotty at best, and Proudhon's later work is very seldom read, so a lot of misconceptions have persisted. If we set aside his inconsistencies when it comes to the family and the role of women, he was as thoroughgoing an anti-authoritarian as the anarchist tradition has seen, applying his basic principles (opposition to absolutism, commitment to progress) to a range of topics from first philosophy to international relations. Because there was not yet an ideology of anarchism or a vocabulary attached to it in Proudhon's lifetime, modern readers are sometimes confused by the variations in his presentation, but anarchy, federation, and mutualism are all aspects of the anarchic analysis he was developing. He was extremely critical of the systems of the earlier socialists, although he drew considerable inspiration from both Fourier and Pierre Leroux (who coined the term socialisme in the mid-1830s.) Again, in France, the meaning of socialism was undergoing a rapid evolution at the time Proudhon began writing. Leroux had initially intended individualisme and socialisme to designate extremes to be avoided or tendencies to be balanced, and Proudhon's approach followed this line of thinking to a large degree, including strong emphases on both individualization and association, but by the time of the 1848 Revolution, even Leroux was forced to acknowledge that socialism had come to designate the revolutionary current of which both he and Proudhon were members.

[tuwix]

So how would you personally classify his ideas and philosophy - does he really fit under anarchist, socialist, liberal etc or does he have a unique philosophy that's more difficult to box?

He was anarchist and socialist without doubt. But "What is property?" makes him one of the predecessors of communism. Undoubtedly this book was inspiration for Marx in his considerations about property.

[Os Cangaceiros]

^ he called it a work of "great scientific progress" in The Holy Family, so probably.

[Creative Destruction]

He was anarchist and socialist without doubt. But "What is property?" makes him one of the predecessors of communism. Undoubtedly this book was inspiration for Marx in his considerations about property.

I don't think "inspiration" is the proper word here. That implies there was an undoubtedly positive aspect in Proudhon's work that lead Marx to his conclusions. Marx drew his conclusions through a largely negative (in that he was seeking to negate Proudhon) dialogue with Proudhon's works, which implies that Marx had these views before he started engaging with Proudhon's work.

[Collective Reasons]

I don't think "inspiration" is the proper word here. That implies there was an undoubtedly positive aspect in Proudhon's work that lead Marx to his conclusions. Marx drew his conclusions through a largely negative (in that he was seeking to negate Proudhon) dialogue with Proudhon's works, which implies that Marx had these views before he started engaging with Proudhon's work.

Marx was initially very positive about Proudhon, but it certainly would have been hard for Proudhon, a critic of communism, to have been an inspiration for that part of Marx's thought.

[Creative Destruction]

Marx was initially very positive about Proudhon, but it certainly would have been hard for Proudhon, a critic of communism, to have been an inspiration for that part of Marx's thought.

The earliest letter I can find of Marx's, in regards to Proudhon, is in 1846, where he tries to get Proudhon on board with some unification of German and French socialists. Engels speaks of Proudhon in terms of being "inspired" by his works, but Marx's positivity was more about unification, not economics or philosophy, which he eventually arrived to the conclusion that was an untenable idea generally (see the whole of the Critique of the Gotha Program.) In the following year, though, Marx put out The Poverty of Philosophy, which was not a positive analysis of Proudhon's work at all. In 1846, though, Engels goes on to completely trash Proudhon in a letter to the Communist Correspondence Committee.

I suspect any positive assessment by Marx or Engels was meant to butter him up, since he held sway with French socialists that the Germans were trying to set up with. No substantial work of theirs, that I can find, offers a positive (that is, they're positively drawing their conclusions about philosophy, economics [including property]) assessment of Proudhon. Marx's remark that What Is Property? represents a scientific advancement is almost damning with faint praise, because Marx, in the same sentence, says that Proudhon's ideas will be superseded with something else.

eta. I just found something earlier, in 1844:

https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1844/manuscripts/labour.htm

Where Marx basically calls what Proudhon is saying abstract capitalism.

You could say that he's treating Proudhon in a lot of works as he treats Hegel, but even then that's overstating it quite a bit.

[Collective Reasons]

Given their overall relations, I wouldn't work too hard to resist a reading of Marx that is consistently insincere towards Proudhon, although it seems like Proudhon's actual pull in France was not so great. And the observation that What is Property? would be superseded by more scientific work seems like one of the fairer things that Marx said about Proudhon, particularly as Proudhon himself worked so hard to provide a scientific account. It's too bad that his work on Economy never reach a publishable state, because there's a lot of very interesting material there.

[Creative Destruction]

Well, the main reason I'm "resisting" this claim is because it would imply that there is something in Proudhon that you can draw from to inform your view of property, should you be looking at it from a Marxist sense. And there isn't, because Marx was never positive about Proudhon's ideas. Which isn't to say you shouldn't look at Proudhon and form your own conclusions, but is to say that if you're interested in the Marxist conception of property, it's relation in society (to labor and all else), that it'd be a wasted effort.

[Collective Reasons]

I think you misunderstand. I'm essentially ceding that ground to you, although if Marx was attempting to leverage support through Proudhon, it seems like a bad tactic. I think that the place influence is usually claimed is in the theory of exploitation. "Anarcho (http://anarchism.pageabode.com/pjproudhon/appendix-proudhon-and-marx.html)" notes this passage from The Holy Family:

Proudhon was the first to draw attention to the fact that the sum of the wages of the individual workers, even if each individual labour be paid for completely, does not pay for the collective power objectified in its product, that therefore the worker is not paid as a part of the collective labour power.
But I'm happy enough to conclude that Marx, while noting the theory of exploitation through alienation of collective force, ended up, knowingly or not, working from a somewhat different understanding of the problem.

[QueerVanguard]

Q: How would you classify Proudhon's political position?
A: Shit.

Next question.

[Zoroaster]

Q: How would you classify Proudhon's political position?
A: Shit.

Next question.

How does that help the OP? This is the learning forum, keep your opinions to yourself.