Proudhon Quotes

“Failure to recognize the historical specificity of the bourgeois conception of rights and duties leads to serious errors. It is for this reason that Marx registers...a vigorous indictment of the anarchist Proudhon... Proudhon in effect took the specifics of bourgeois legal and economic relations and treated them as universal and foundational for the development of an alternative, socially just economic system. From Marx's standpoint, this is no alternative at all since it merely re-inscribes bourgeois conceptions of value in a supposedly new form of society. This problem is still with us, not only because of the contemporary anarchist revival of interest in Proudhon's ideas but also because of the rise of a more broad-based liberal human rights politics as a supposed antidote to the social and political ills of contemporary capitalism. Marx's critique of Proudhon is directly applicable to this contemporary politics. The UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948 is a foundational document for a bourgeois, market-based individualism and as such cannot provide a basis for a thoroughgoing critique of liberal or neoliberal capitalism. Whether it is politically useful to insist that the capitalist political order live up to its own foundational principles is one thing, but to imagine that this politics can lead to a radical displacement of a capitalist mode of production is, in Marx's view, a serious error.”
― David Harvey, A Companion to Marx's Capital, Volume 1

“...a social state in which only a few are ever becoming richer, and many poorer, and in which the majority of the middle-class can barely maintain their standing by a life-and-death struggle, is certainly adapted to raise the question, whether immense accumulations of property are, in a densely-populated country like ours, compatible with social welfare. When, especially, we contemplate the progressive depression of such large masses of the people in our own times, we need not wonder that the most fundamental questions as to property have been raised. Nay, when we review the fearful wrongs to which the masses have been subjected in every European nation - the iniquity which has obtained in social usage, and been 'established by public law' - we will not feel very much surprised to find that, what we have been accustomed to regard as the corner-stone of civilisation - the institution of private property - has been assailed with a vehemence which has sought its ultimate expression in the tremendous aphorism of the great French Socialist, Proudhon, that 'Property is Theft'.”
― William McCombie, Use and Abuse

“Proudhon, e.g., thinks that with the sentence “Property is theft” he has at once put a brand on property. In the sense of the priestly, theft is always a crime, or at least a misdeed”
― Max Stirner, The Ego and Its Own