Graham R (Ed.) - Anarchism - A Documentary History of Libertarian Ideas Volume One - From Anarchy to Anarchism (300 CE to 1939)

38 / ANARCHISM
being inviolable, the wages of labourers (like their rights and duties) should be
equal.
7. Products are bought only by products. Now, the condition of all exchange being
equivalence of products, profit is impossible and unjust. Observe this elementary
principle of economy, and pauperism, luxury, oppression, vice, crime,
and hunger will disappear from our midst.
8. Men are associated by the physical and mathematical law of production, befo
re they are voluntarily associated by choice. Therefore, equality of conditions
is demanded by justice; that is, by strict social law: esteem, fr iendship, gratitude,
admiration, all fa ll within the domain of equitable or proportional law
only.
9. Free association, liberty-whose sole fu nction is to maintain equality in the
means of production and equivalence in exchanges-is the only possible, the
only just, the only true fo rm of society.
10. Politics is the science of liberty. The government of man by man (under
whatever name it be disguised) is oppression. Society finds its highest perfection
in the union of order with anarchy.
9. Proud/wn: The System of Economic Contradictions (1846)
After tile publication of What is Property, Proudhon published two more "memoirs" on
property, and narrowly avoided going to jail fo r 11is subversive ideas. He immersed himself in
political economy, publishing ill 1846 a massive two volume critique of hnllrgeois political
economy and socialist utopianism entitled, The System of Economic Contradictions, or,
The Philosophy of Misery. Karl Marx (1818-1883) responded the fo llowing year with his
sarcastic and unfair rejoinder, The Poverty of Philosophy, by which Marx hoped to establish
his reputation on the intended ruins ofProudhon ' So Of particular note is Proudhon's critical
view of machinery, which Marx lampooned as the reactionary musings of a retrograde
who wished to return to a preindustrial utopia. The fo llowing selections are taken from
Benjamin Tucker's 1888 translation, with minor modifications.
FROM THE VERY FACT THAT machinery diminishes the workman's toil, it abridges
and diminishes labour, the supply of which thus grows greater from day to day and
the demand less. Little by little, it is true, the reduction in prices causing an increase
in consumption, the proportion is restored and the labourer set at work again: but as
industrial improvements steadily succeed each other and continually tend to substitute
mechanical operations fo r the labour of man, it fo llows that there is a constant