Proudhonism
프루동주의
The ideas of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon and the socialist current that followed them. Taking the exchange of equal values, reciprocity, as the basis of the economy, it sought to abolish exploitation through free contracts between small producers and craftsmen, mutual credit and an interest-free "People's Bank" (mutualism), and it rejected political action and the state in favour of federalism. It was the dominant current in the French sections of the International Working Men's Association in the 1860s, gave way to Bakunin's collectivism from the end of that decade and formed the minority in the Paris Commune, which Engels called the grave of the Proudhon school.
In depth
In What Is Property? (1840) Proudhon declared that "property is theft": the proprietor reaps where he did not sow, and wage labour encloses the value of collective production so that the capitalist collects rent from his workers in the form of profit. In The System of Economic Contradictions, or The Philosophy of Poverty (1846) he presented mutuality as a synthesis of private property and collective ownership. Unequal exchange was the root of exploitation, and in a market free of coercion commerce would progress towards equal exchange in which value reflects only the cost of production. Mutual aid, mutual credit and mutual insurance all rested on this principle of reciprocity. He saw mutuality in the exchange of services and products rather than in the pooling of forces and common work that co-operation meant.
Elected to the Constituent Assembly after the revolution of 1848, Proudhon lobbied for turning the Bank of France into a "People's Bank" that would guarantee mutual credit to all workers. The bank was officially incorporated but never established itself in practice, since Proudhon was arrested and imprisoned after Louis Napoleon Bonaparte rose to power. His last work, The Political Capacity of the Working Classes (1865), proposed a "mutualist system" of workers' self-management. In his later years Proudhon called himself a federalist rather than an anarchist, and his followers called themselves mutualists.
Marx answered The Philosophy of Poverty with The Poverty of Philosophy, written in French in 1847. He took issue with Proudhon's misunderstanding of the relationship between labour, value and price, and with an attack on bourgeois property framed in terms of bourgeois ethics. Proudhon for his part rejected all political action as class collaboration and held that the working class could win its salvation through economic action alone.
In the early 1860s French workers founded trade unions and mutual credit schemes inspired by Proudhon's theories, and after his death in 1865 his followers helped establish the International Working Men's Association. Its Geneva (1866) and Lausanne (1867) congresses bore a strongly mutualist stamp, but by the end of the decade Eugène Varlin and Benoît Malon had brought the French section over to Bakunin's collectivism, which Bakunin himself called "Proudhonism, greatly developed and taken to its ultimate conclusion".
In his 1891 introduction to The Civil War in France Engels wrote that the Commune's majority were Blanquists and its minority members of the International, chiefly adherents of the Proudhon school of socialism, and that the Proudhonists were chiefly responsible for its economic decrees. Yet Proudhon, the socialist of the small peasant and master craftsman, regarded association with positive hatred, while the Commune's most important decree organised large-scale industry by combining the workers' associations of each factory into one great union. Since that had to lead in the end to communism, the direct antithesis of Proudhon's doctrine, the Commune was also the grave of the Proudhon school, which survived, Engels said, only among the "radical" bourgeoisie. Proudhon's mutualism was later taken up by American individualist anarchists such as Benjamin Tucker.