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| '''Property is theft!''' (]: ''La propriété, c'est le vol!'') is a slogan coined by ] ] in his 1840 book '']''. | |||
| {{bquote|If I were asked to answer the following question: ''What is ]?'' and I should answer in one word, ''It is ]!'', my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required . . . Why, then, to this other question: ''What is ]?'' may I not likewise answer, ''It is ]!'', without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?|||Pierre-Joseph Proudhon|'']''{{Ref_label|A|I|none}} }} | |||
| By "property," Proudhon referred to the ] concept of the ''] of property''{{ndash}} the right of the proprietor to do with his ] as he pleases, "to use and abuse," so long as in the end he submits to state-sanctioned title, and he contrasted the supposed ] with the rights (which he considered valid) of ], ], and ]. | |||
| In the ''Confessions d'un revolutionnaire'' Proudhon further explained his use of this phrase:<ref>Pierre-Joseph Proudhon. ''No Gods, No Masters: An Anthology of Anarchism''. Edited by Daniel Guerin, translated by Paul Sharkey. 2005. AK Press. ISBN 1904859259 p. 55-56</ref> | |||
| {{bquote|In my first memorandum, in a frontal assault upon the established order, I said things like, Property is theft! The intention was to lodge a protest, to highlight, so to speak, the inanity of our institutions. At the time, that was my sole concern. Also, in the memorandum in which I demonstrated that startling proposition using simple arithmetic, I took care to speak out against any communist conclusion. | |||
| In the ''System of Economic Contradictions'', having recalled and confirmed my initial formula, I added another quite contrary one rooted in considerations of quite another order – a formula that could neither destroy the first proposition nor be demolished by it: Property is freedom. In respect of property, as of all economic factors, harm and abuse cannot be dissevered from the good, any more than debit can from asset in double-entry book-keeping. The one necessarily spawns the other. To seek to do away with the abuses of property, is to destroy the thing itself; just as the striking of a debit from an account is tantamount to striking it from the credit record.}} | |||
| ==Criticism== | |||
| ], although initially favourable to Proudhon's work, later criticised, among other things, the expression "property is theft" as ] and unnecessarily confusing, writing that "since “theft” as a forcible violation of property presupposes the existence of property" and condemning Proudhon for entangling himself in "all sorts of fantasies, obscure even to himself, about true bourgeois property."<ref name=marx1/> | |||
| ==Similar phrases== | |||
| {{see also|anarchist terminology}} | |||
| ] had previously written, in his ''Philosophical Researches on the Right of Property'' (''Recherches philosophiques sur le droit de propriété et le vol''), "Exclusive property is a robbery in nature."<ref name=curiosities>William Shepard Walsh, '''', p. 923</ref> Marx would later write in a 1865 letter to a contemporary that Proudhon had taken the slogan from Warville,<ref name=marx1>], "", from ''Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume 2'', first published in ''Der Social-Demokrat'', Nos. 16, 17 and 18, February 1, 3 and 5, 1865</ref> although this is contested by subsequent scholarship.<ref>Robert L. Hoffman, ''Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.J. Proudhon'', (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 46-48.</ref> | |||
| Similar phrases also appear in the works of ], who taught that ''superfluum quod tenes tu furaris'' (the superfluous property which you hold you have stolen). | |||
| == Footnotes == | |||
| <div class="references-small"> | |||
| '''<small>I</small>.''' {{Note_label|A|I|none}} This translation by ] renders "''c'est le vol''" as "it is robbery," although the slogan is typically rendered in English as "property is theft." | |||
| </div> | |||
| ==References== | |||
| {{Reflist}} | |||
| ] | |||
| ] | |||
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