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Property is theft! (French: La propriété, c'est le vol!) is a slogan coined by French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon in his 1840 book What is Property? Or, an Inquiry into the Principle of Right and of Government.
If I were asked to answer the following question: What is slavery? and I should answer in one word, It is murder!, my meaning would be understood at once. No extended argument would be required . . . Why, then, to this other question: What is property? may I not likewise answer, It is robbery!, without the certainty of being misunderstood; the second proposition being no other than a transformation of the first?
— What is Property?, in Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
(This translation by Benjamin Tucker renders "c'est le vol" as "it is robbery," although the slogan is typically rendered in English as "property is theft.")
By "property," Proudhon referred to the Roman law concept of the sovereign right of property — the right of the proprietor to do with his property as he pleases, "to use and abuse," so long as in the end he submits to state-sanctioned title, and he contrasted the supposed right of property with the rights (which he considered valid) of liberty, equality, and security.
Similar phrases
Brissot de Warville 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." Karl Marx would later write in a 1865 letter to a contemporary that Proudhon had taken the slogan from Warville, although this is contested by subsequent scholarship.
Similar phrases also appear in the works of Saint Ambrose, who taught that superfluum quod tenes tu furaris (the superfluous property which you hold you have stolen), and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who wrote: "In the last analysis all property is theft."
Literal contradiction
Karl Marx, although initially favourable to Proudhon's work, later criticised, among other things, the expression "property is theft" as self-refuting 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." In a 1963 article, Objectivist scholar Nathaniel Branden, in reference to the phrase's literal self-refutation, accused Proudhon of committing the fallacy of the stolen concept by using a concept while ignoring, contradicting or denying the validity of the concepts on which it logically and genetically depends; "f no property is rightfully owned, that is, if nothing is property, there can be no such concept as “theft.”
Proudhon was aware of the literal contradiction involved in the phrase; being inclined towards the use of paradox, he also declared in What is Property? that "property is impossible", "property is despotism" and "property is freedom". A slightly less literal reading of the phrase makes his meaning clear.
References
- ^ William Shepard Walsh, Handy-book of Literary Curiosities, p. 923
- ^ Karl Marx, Letter to J. B. Schweizer, from Marx Engels Selected Works, Volume 2, first published in Der Social-Demokrat, Nos. 16, 17 and 18, February 1, 3 and 5, 1865
- Robert L. Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.J. Proudhon, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 46-48.
- The Stolen Concept by Nathaniel Branden - originally published in The Objectivist Newsletter in January 1963.
- Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Broadview press, 2004; see e.g. page 13