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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
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.
Literal contradiction
Proudhon defined "property," in the tradition of Roman law, as "the right to use and abuse" -- the absolute legal right to do anything with property, so long as the State has granted title. Thus, in context, "property is theft" means "the absolute legal right to sovereignty over titled property is theft" -- which is not a contradiction, since "theft" does not mean legal theft, but "property" does mean legal property. In other words, it is a particular policy of the State, a particular conception of property implemented as law, which is being called theft, rather than any and every concept of property itself. In fact, only one chapter of Proudhon's book is dedicated to the analysis of legal property: the other chapters address property in other ways. Since objectivists are unable to conceive of the idea that the definition of the types of property is arbitrary -- they maintain that some particular form of property is the only form that property can take -- they cannot resolve the 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, used the phrase's literal self-refutation as his prime example of the fallacy of the stolen concept: "f no property is rightfully owned, that is, if nothing is property, there can be no such concept as “theft”…to use the concept “theft” while denying the validity of the concept of “property,” is to use “theft” as a concept to which one has no logical right—that is, as a stolen concept".
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. As 20th century anarchist scholar Albert Meltzer explains in Anarchism: Arguments For and Against, Proudhon was using different definitions of "property" in the phrase "property is theft" – the property doing the thieving, and the property being thieved from. The property that is theft is private property, whereas the pre-existing concept of property that allows Proudhon to use the concept of "theft" is not the same property, but people's natural inheritance.
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."
Footnotes
I. 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."
References
- ^ 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
- The Stolen Concept by Nathaniel Branden - originally published in The Objectivist Newsletter in January 1963.
- George Woodcock, Anarchism: A History of Libertarian Ideas and Movements. Broadview Press, 2004; see e.g. page 13
- Meltzer, Albert (2000). Anarchism: Arguments for and against. Stirling: AK Press. pp. pp. 19–20. ISBN 1873176570.
{{cite book}}:|pages=has extra text (help) - ^ William Shepard Walsh, Handy-book of Literary Curiosities, p. 923
- Robert L. Hoffman, Revolutionary Justice: The Social and Political Theory of P.J. Proudhon, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), pp. 46-48.