Even in the case of the anthropoid apes the transition to the instrument and to a product of labour entirely artificial and perfectly independent of the animal"s own body, is only very slowly completed. This is clear from a consideration of the slow process by which man has progressed in perfecting the implements which he has invented. From the action of the bird which beats open a nut with its beak, or the squirrel which cracks it with its teeth, up to that of man who, in order to open the nut, makes use of a stone lying near him, is only a step, and yet by that step the destiny of the _genus h.o.m.o_ is settled. The application of natural objects, such as sticks and stones, to the purposes of daily life, to defence against animals and men, to hunting, to cutting down fruits, and so on, does not certainly become a habit all at once. Indeed, a very long time elapsed before this adaptation became a general and even a conscious one, and it was only possible when the advantages of such objects had been perceived through many experiences.
It needed a still longer time before man learned to choose between the various objects offered to him by nature, and understood how to distinguish a more pointed and sharper or a harder stone from one of those less useful for his purpose. Perhaps it required the experience and disappointments of uncounted ages to bring the consciousness of purpose even up to this point. But when this was once done, when man could judge as to the usefulness of the implement which nature offered him, then a further step of progress, and certainly the most important in this series of developments, was taken. To natural selection follows immediately artificial. The need for suitable and useful implements became more general and greater, and at the same time it became more difficult to satisfy, since nature is not so generous with objects of this kind, and (as was soon seen) only very few substances united all these qualities which hitherto had been recognised as necessary or useful. But by this time individuals who were already better provided for had made other discoveries; they had, for example, in cracking a nut, broken a stone with which they cracked it, and noticed that the broken pieces had greater sharpness and pointedness on their edges than those which nature afforded; or they had found the pieces of some tree split by lightning, and discovered their greater hardness and capacity for resistance. What was more natural under the pressure of the necessity, than to produce intentionally those processes by which the objects afforded by nature became more usable--to break the stone in pieces or to burn the wood?
And now at last the artificial implement was produced, and all future progress was but a trifle compared to the development which had gone before. The wonders of modern technical art are child"s-play compared to the difficulties with which the anthropoid ape succeeded in making the first stone celt. The most urgent need of primitive life, the bitterest compet.i.tion for the necessities of existence, and the concentration of the highest mental gifts then possessed, were necessary to guide the sight of primitive man to the remoter consequences of an action or of a quality. That his sight became sharper and sharper in proportion as the implement once invented showed itself to be insufficient, and became more and more differentiated in its adaptation to the different kinds of labour, follows as a matter of course. But the decisive action occurred when the anthropoid ape for the first time mechanically worked up natural objects, for by doing so he was enabled to exploit nature rationally, according to his desires and requirements, to emanc.i.p.ate himself from the limitations of existence as regards place and climate, to break those chains of partial action which weigh upon everything belonging to the animal world.
One must take fully into consideration the difficulties under which primitive man made his first tools; but one must, however, realise still more the immeasurable advantages which proceed from the possession, and the disadvantages which arise from the want, of a tool, in order to perceive that man had a vital interest in preserving permanently by him the objects which he had produced. If in his inexperience he at first threw away his laboriously acquired treasure after using it, yet soon the oft-recurring need for it, and the trouble of remaking it, must have taught him better. And by not leaving the tool behind him for someone else, he made not only a tremendous step in advance in the satisfaction of his needs, but also took a step higher in the social scale of his tribe. The others had need of him, admired him, feared or flattered him; they perhaps sought to take his treasured tool away from him; he had therefore to defend himself against others, and all these facts formed still more strongly the desire to keep it for himself permanently and exclusively. The conception of property flashed upon the human mind. It sprang from the sweat of labour; and human culture begins not with equality but with property.
This rather lengthy digression has been necessary in order that we may be able to oppose actual facts to the logical subtlety of Proudhon, which appears to-day to have a greater power than ever of leading men astray. The question whether the producer of a stone celt was merely the user of its advantages (Latin, _possessor_) or its actual owner and master; whether he also had the right to the substances of which it was composed, appears, after what we have said above, to be simply childish. The property, which was absolutely labour-property, was at once perceived to be such, to be _dominium_ and not merely _possessio_; it never occurred to anybody either to doubt it or to believe it. Now, Proudhon declares that general consent cannot justify property, because general consent to an injustice cannot form the basis of justice. But apart from the fact that the innate sense of justice in society is merely a fiction of Proudhon"s, as of all earlier or later Utopians, this proposition may perhaps belong to metaphysics or ethics, but certainly not to the empirical science of sociology. For he who puts on the crown, and whom all agree to obey, is really king, even if he has waded to the throne through seas of blood. The question, in so far as it is neither political nor a justification of his mode of action, is not a legal one but purely ethical. The answer to this question prejudges nothing either as to life or society, and history knows cases enough of actions which cannot be approved from the moral standpoint, and yet have turned out to the advantage of the community.
The opinion that agrarian communism, or the village community, is the most primitive form of property and the natural form of society, is also quite untenable. In the first place, because the word _naturally_ cannot be taken in the sense that it implies an unalterable normal condition, or something fixed; for, in reality, _naturally_ means that which develops itself, and therefore something in the highest degree changeable. In the second place, because tribal communism is by no means such a primitive condition as the Socialists, from Rousseau"s time downwards, seem to believe, and wish to make others believe.
Rather, a state preceded it, in which only movable property, the _jus utendi atque abutendi re_, was known to man. Races have been found which possess very scanty conceptions of religion, which have not recognised the family in the widest implication of the idea; whereas, on the other hand, no race has been found to whom the idea of property was not known. Certainly in this case it was only a question of the possession of weapons and ornaments, and so forth; possession of land, especially as a communal possession, has only been found among a comparatively small number of primitive peoples, and implies a very advanced state of social culture. But, however little this condition is the natural one, [Greek: kat" exochen], still less is it particularly moral or just.
We know to-day for certain that the rise of communal possession in land was always inseparably connected with the introduction of slavery, and that one cannot be thought of without the other. But to wish to imagine equality in addition to the collective possession of primitive society is to a great extent a distortion of the facts of history. Whatever facts we may produce from the actual and not merely imaginary primitive history of property would be so many arguments against Proudhon"s contention. His economic argument is just as untenable, that labour should lead to equality. All work, according to Proudhon, is the effective of a collective force, which is equal to the resultants of the forces of the single individuals who form the labour group. Consequently, the product of labour is the property of the whole community, and every worker has an equal claim to it. This is, briefly, the argument which, from premises that are possibly correct, draws conclusions that are entirely false. Proudhon gives the following example: "Two hundred grenadiers placed the obelisk of Luxor on its pedestal in a few hours, and yet we do not believe that one man could have performed the same work in two hundred days. The collective force is greater than the sum of individual forces and individual efforts. Therefore the capitalist has not rewarded the labourer fairly when he pays wages for one day multiplied by the number of day-labourers employed by him."
It will be seen that Proudhon here proceeds from the a.s.sumption that the value of a product of a labour is a firmly established and easily fixed amount, as John Grey and Rodbertus had taught before him; for only in this case could it be exactly stated how great the claim is which belongs to a labourer. In fact, the characteristic feature of Proudhon"s theory of value lies in his endeavour to determine and fix values; that is, to use his own dialectic jargon, according to the synthetic solution of the ant.i.thesis of value in use and value in exchange, in which our economic life fluctuates. Supply and demand, considered by others as the factors which regulate and determine value, are to him only forms which serve to contrast with one another the value in use and value in exchange, and to cause these values to combine. From justice, which ought to be the foundation of society, he concludes the necessity, and from general obedience of life to law the possibility, of a determination of values. Even this value, thus determined, will be a variable amount, a proportionate figure, similar to the index which in the case of chemical elements gives their combining weights. "But this value will none the less be strictly fixed. Value may alter, but the law of values is unalterable; indeed, the fact that value is capable of alteration only results from its being subject to a law whose principle is essentially fluctuating, for it is labour measured by time." (_Contradictions_, i., "On the Theory of Value.") Value is thus brought into consideration within the community which producers form among themselves by means of the division of labour and exchange, the relation of the proportion of the products which compose riches, and that which is specially termed the value of a product is a formula which a.s.signs a proportion of this product in coins in the general wealth.
Leaving out of the question the moral arrangement of the world, which even here has contributed to this definition of double meaning, we may ask, how is this formula, which a.s.signs in coins the proportion of the product in the general wealth, reckoned? Proudhon has always appealed only to the realisation of the idea through the actual circulation of values on the one hand, and to the law-abiding character of nature on the other. Upon the point of "realisation" we shall have something to say later. But the law-abiding character of life is, however, just as much an algebraical expression as the "proportion of the product."
Supposing both are not disputed, what follows, then? If I know the exact formula for the direction and velocity of a projectile, shall I now be able to protect myself from every bullet by merely getting out of its way? The introduction of statistical methods into the general formula for special values Proudhon has himself excluded as incorrect.
The question settles itself. Society goes on of its own accord--_laissez aller, laissez faire_--everything remains in the old way. In addition to this mistake, we find that there is in Proudhon"s mind great confusion with regard to the two ideas of time of labour and value of labour.
"Adam Smith takes as a measure of value sometimes the time necessary to produce a commodity and sometimes the value of labour," says Marx in his celebrated polemic against Proudhon.[1] "Ricardo discovered this error by clearly proving the difference between these two modes of measurement. Proudhon, however, goes even farther than the error of Adam Smith, by identifying two things which Smith has only brought into juxtaposition. To find the right proportion according to which the labourers should have their share in the products of their labour, or, in other words, to determine the relative value of labour, Proudhon seeks some measure for the relative value of commodities. To determine the measure for the relative value of commodities he cannot invent anything better than to give us as an equivalent for a certain quant.i.ty of work, the total of the products made by it; which leaves us to suppose that the whole of society consists of nothing but labourers, who receive as wages what they themselves produce. In the second place, he maintains the equal value of the working days of different labourers as an actual fact; in a word, he seeks the measure for the relative value of commodities in order to discover the equal payment of labourers, and a.s.sumes the equality of payment as a settled fact, in order to proceed to search for the relative value of commodities."
[1] _Das Elend der Philosophie: An Answer to Proudhon"s Philosophie des Elends._ Stuttgart, 1892 (German ed.).
If we turn back to the question, What is property? we find this confusion of ideas is answerable for his unsuccessful attempt to prove that labour must create equality and annihilate property. Here, too, the equality of the working days is a.s.sumed, and therefore the equality of wages is demanded. But, then, immediately this working day is changed into his work done in a day (_tache sociale journaliere_).
"Let us a.s.sume," says he, "that this social day"s work amounts to the cultivation or weeding or harvesting of two square decametres, and the mean average of all the time necessary for these amounts to seven hours. One labourer will finish it in six hours; another in eight hours; the majority will work seven hours; but so long as each performs the amount of work required of him, he deserves the same wages as all the others, however long he may have worked at it." Here time of work has imperceptibly changed into quant.i.ty of work, and wages are given, not according to the measure of equal working times but according to the measure of equal performances. Proudhon here seeks for a solution by saying that the more capable workman, who performs his day"s work in six hours, should never have the right to usurp the day"s work of a less capable labourer, under the pretext of greater strength and activity, and thus rob him of work and bread; it is advantage enough derived from his greater capacities that, by this shortening of his time of labour, he has greater opportunity to work for his own personal education and culture, or to enjoy himself, and so on. But Proudhon must be driven even from this last corner of refuge by the question, What will take place if anyone will perform only the half of his day"s work? Proudhon says: "That is all right; obviously half of his wages are sufficient for that man. What has he to complain of if he is rewarded according to the work which he has performed? and what does it matter to others? In this sense it is right and proper to apply the text, "to each according to his work"; that is the law of equality."[2]
[2] _Qu"est-ce que la Propriete?_ p. 102.
But this is to retract all along the line. Proudhon, who a.s.sumes the equality of all working days, and has made it the basis of his theory of value, must now admit the dependence of wages upon the performance of work, and admit also, although reluctantly, the statement of St.
Simon, "to each according to his work," which he had set out to refute. He ought to have gone still farther and said: "If anyone will not do any work, what happens then? Obviously the man needs no wages; why should the others then trouble about it?--it is the law of equality." But what becomes then of the equality to which work was said to lead? Further, what about the impossibility of proving the right of property through work? All Proudhon"s arguments in proof of the impossibility of property are mere dialectic sword-play which hardly anyone takes seriously. Proudhon does not even criticise actual circ.u.mstances, but proves that, following his ideal a.s.sumptions (which in any case exclude property), property is impossible.
The supposed result of his book he sums up in the Hegelian formula: "Communism, the first form and the final destiny of society, is the first terminus of social development, the thesis; property, the contradictory opposite to communism, forms the second terminus, the ant.i.thesis; it remains for us to determine the third terminus, the synthesis, and then we have the required solution. The synthesis results necessarily from the correction of the thesis by the ant.i.thesis. It is therefore necessary to examine closely its peculiarities, and to exclude that which there is in them hostile to society. The two that remain will, when united, form the true formula of human social life."[3]
[3] _Qu"est-ce que la Propriete?_ p. 202.
Karl Marx, who made very merry over Proudhon"s dialectic, thought he had played his trump card against the capitalistic method of production in almost the same way, namely, with the Hegelian proposition of the negation of negation. If they both explained themselves by bringing forward, besides the dialectic proof, also an historical and economic one for their contentions, the answer is that historic proof cannot be brought forward for Proudhon"s synthetic conception of property or for Marx"s method of production, since history only concerns itself with the past or the present; whereas such conditions as they imagine exist only in the future, and can only be derived from the past or present conditions by the dialectic method, and only can be a.s.sumed as hypotheses.
This standpoint unites Proudhon and Karl Marx, the Anarchists and the Social Democrats; they both call each other Utopians, and both are right.
Proudhon in his book upon property did not answer the question put in its t.i.tle, _What is Property?_ as he had promised in the introduction.
From his statement "property is theft," which was uttered with so much _eclat_, and of which, according to his own account at least, he was prouder than if he had possessed all the millions of Rothschild--from this paradox one might conclude, and certainly the great majority of his readers do conclude usually that Proudhon was an enemy of property in general. That is not at all the case. "What I have been seeking since 1840 in defining property," said he much later (in _Justice_, i., p. 302), "and what I wish to-day, as I have repeated over and over again, is certainly not abolition of property. For this would be to fall into Communism with Plato, Rousseau, Louis Blanc, and other opponents of property, against whom I protest with all my strength.
What I demand from property is _a balance_." But all his life Proudhon was unable to dispel the misunderstanding which he carelessly brought upon his doctrine in his first writing by a talented paradox. We say carelessly, for the concluding answer which Proudhon gives to the question, "What is property?" was, even in his first work, not "property is theft" but "property is liberty;" only the use of all his great scientific apparatus was quite superfluous, because it was in no way connected with the chief purpose of his book. Proudhon might just as well have placed the supposed conclusion, the Ten Commandments of his economic doctrine, at the beginning of his book, for they were arrived at not by the method of science but of speculation. These Ten Commandments run:
(1) Individual possession is the fundamental condition of social life; five thousand years of the history of property prove it; property is the suicide of society. Possession is a right; property is against all right; suppress property and maintain possession, and you would by this one main alteration transform everything--laws, government, economy, statesmanship; you would make evil disappear from the earth.
(2) Since the right of occupation is the same for all, possession changes according to the number of possessors; thus property can no longer be created.
(3) Since the result of labour remains the same for the whole of the community, property, which arising from the exploitation of others and from rent, disappears.
(4) Since every human work necessarily arises from a collective force, every piece of property becomes both collective and indivisible--to be exact, labour annihilates property.
(5) Since every capacity for any occupation, including all the instruments of labour and capital, is collective property, the inequality of treatment and of goods, which rests upon the inequality of capabilities, is injustice and theft.
(6) Trade necessarily presupposes the freedom of the contracting parties and the equivalence of the products exchanged; but since value is determined by the amount of time and expense which each product costs, and since freedom is inviolable, the workers remain necessarily equal in reward as also in rights and duties.
(7) Products are only exchanged again for products; but since every bargain presupposes the equality of products, profit is impossible and unjust. Take heed to this, the first and the most elementary principle of economics, and pauperism, luxury, servitude, vice, crime, and hunger will disappear from our midst.
(8) Men are already, before they fully agreed to do so, a.s.sociated from the physical and mathematical law of production; the equality of external conditions of existence is thus a demand of the justice of social right, of strict right; friendship, respect, admiration, and recognition alone enter into the province of equity or proportion.
(9) Free a.s.sociation, or freedom which limits itself to expressing equality in the means of production and equivalence in articles of exchange, is the only possible, the only right, and the only true form of society.
(10) Politics is the science of freedom; the government of men by men, under whatever name it may be concealed, is servitude; the highest consummation of society is found in the union of order and anarchy.
We will only select from this Decalogue of Collectivist Anarchism one dogma, the seventh; because it contains a fundamental error of Proudhon"s, which must continually produce other errors. "Products,"
he says, "are only exchanged for products; but since every bargain presupposes the equality of products, profit is impossible and not right." By this proposition the question of pauperism and everything evil is to be solved, and, in fact, Proudhon even made some attempts to realise the theory contained therein. But that every bargain presupposes the equality of products in any other than the sense determined by supply and demand, is untrue; yet even this equality is not regarded by Proudhon as such. He understands thereby equivalence or the equality of values, which again is determined by the time of labour, and accordingly he makes it a presupposition of a free bargain that only products which represent equal times of labour can be exchanged. Thus a hat which took six hours to make, should be exchanged for a poem which was written in the same time. And if we are startled by the incorrectness of this a.s.sumption, what can be said for the converse of this statement, namely, that products of equal value, _i. e._, such as represent equal times of labour, must be accepted at any time in place of payment, just as money is accepted to-day?
Proudhon ascribed the utility of money as a universal medium of exchange to the supposed circ.u.mstance that its value was fixed or established, and concluded therefrom that whenever the value of other commodities was determined, they would have the same utility as money; thus, that it would be possible to exchange at any time a watch which represented three days" work for a pair of boots which had been made in the same time. And to complete this economic and logical confusion, Proudhon once again inverts history, and makes the just and free exchange of products and the circulation of values the starting-point for the determination of values, and thereby also the foundation of his realm of justice, freedom, and equality, in which economic forces have free play.
If values circulate themselves, then too they determine themselves, and thus only is there a just bargain; profit is impossible, so too is the acc.u.mulation of capital and property. Since all have equal share in production as in consumption, commodities will always be where they are needed, and they will always be needed where they exist; supply and demand will equal one another, value in use and value in exchange will be the same, value is determined, and the circle (which is in any case a vicious circle) is completed. Land, like all the means of labour, is a collective possession. Every one will enjoy the full results of his labour, but no one will be able to heap up riches because profit in any form is impossible. Men will collect through their own free choice in productive groups, which again will be in direct intercourse one with another, and will exchange their products as may be required, without profit. Common interests will be determined by Boards of Experts, who will be chosen by the members of these groups by means of universal suffrage. The total of all these boards, which are completely autonomous, forms the only existing and only possible administration. Governments become superfluous, since the economic life must entirely absorb political life. And since there will be no property and no distinction of rich and poor, there will also be no rule of one man over another, there will be no criminals, judicial and civil power, militarism and bureaucracy become superfluous and disappear of themselves. In spite of anarchy (_i. e._, no government), or rather because of it, the greatest, the only order will prevail.
In fact, if anything ever deserved the name ideal it is this reform of society sketched by Proudhon, to which he himself has given the name "Mutualism." He did not suspect or notice that he had done nothing more than express the abstract formula of existing relationships, the most general conception of the liberal scheme of economics. Things happen in our own world just as Proudhon wished in his kingdom of the future, only there are a few insignificant factors of friction, extensions of co-efficients, and so on, which he, if he had been familiar with scientific methods, would have added as "corrections" to his universal formula. The present world is related to his as any one triangle is to the triangle absolute. The triangle which is neither obtuse-angled, nor acute-angled, nor right-angled, neither equilateral nor isosceles, nor of unequal sides, whose sides and angles are not confined to any particular measurement, may certainly be a real triangle and contain no contradiction in itself (which is by no means the case in Proudhon"s realm of justice), but this triangle cannot be drawn or even imagined. This is the old dispute of nominalists and realists, a piece of scholasticism long since obsolete applied to the problems of modern society, and not even worth refutation, least of all worthy of any man who has once correctly recognised the reality of human society, and made it the guiding motive of his thought.
On two occasions Proudhon seemed to have the alluring opportunity of being able to realise his Utopian visions. The first was in the time of the Revolution. In February, 1849, he founded the People"s Bank (_Banque du Peuple_),[4] which was to take the initiative in free economic organisation, and, according to Proudhon"s expectations, would have introduced "free society" if, at the decisive moment, he had not been sent for three years to the prison of Saint Pelagie for a political offence, and the Bank was therefore compelled to liquidate.
The second opportunity occurred in the year 1855. Napoleon had asked for opinions as to how the _Palais de l"Industrie_, in which the Paris Exhibition had been held, could be used after its close as an inst.i.tution of public utility. Among those to whom this question was addressed we find Proudhon, who answered it with the project of a permanent exhibition,[5] which was to be conducted by a society proceeding from very much the same point of view as the People"s Bank.
This project was, of course, left unnoticed, and Proudhon became deeply disgusted and discouraged at this new disappointment.
[4] After Proudhon"s paper, _Le Representant du Peuple_, had published the statutes of the Exchange Bank, he tried in numerous articles to explain the mechanism and necessity of it. These articles have been collected in a book, and appeared under the t.i.tle, _Resume de la Question Sociale, Banque d"echange_.
[5] The scheme appeared in Proudhon"s posthumous works.
The People"s Bank, like its subsequent second edition, the Permanent Exhibition Company, was to be founded (in Proudhon"s Hegelian method of expression) upon the ident.i.ty of the shareholders and their clients. The producers who had a share in the People"s Bank were to deliver their products to the bank, which would control and determine the prices of those commodities by a.s.sessors, the prices being determined only with reference to the time of labour spent upon them and the necessary expenses of production; profit was forbidden since the bank was not to operate upon its own account. The producer received upon delivery of his goods "exchange bonds," in return for which he then could take from the bank other commodities. As the bank also granted its customers loans without charging interest, money and interest would become unnecessary, trade would gradually be carried on only by means of the bonds of the bank, and thus would be brought about the harmony of social intercourse of which Proudhon dreamed.
The Permanent Exhibition Company was to be a new edition of the People"s Bank, perfected and enlarged in every direction. Since the shareholders of this company consisted of producers, and their purpose was above all the sale and interchange of products, so therefore the subscription for the formation of the capital was not to be, as in the case of other companies, merely in money, but was to be nine-tenths in products, which were to be sold by the company, and the receipts of the sale were then to be credited to the shareholders. As the State was to become surety for the interest on these shares, Proudhon thought that these must become actual money, representing rights to dividend, which could only lose their value by the destruction of the company"s depot for goods. Against the goods which were deposited with it or the sale of which it undertook, as well as against the bills which were given to it to discount, the company was to issue, together with the cash which it had at disposal, general bonds of exchange (_la bons generaux d"echange_) which would represent the goods stored in it and realised by it, and should give the claim to an equal value in goods which the holder of the bond could take from the storehouses as he wished. These bonds were to be the circulating money of the company, and were to be accepted by it instead of cash payments in all transactions with goods or with bills. The circulating paper of the company, held by it at par, owing to the fact that it could be exchanged into money or the goods of the company upon presentation, would become the great lever of its operations and the irresistible instrument of its power. The company was to undertake banking and commission business of all kinds, grant credit in money and goods, and support industry, trade, and agriculture.
All objects deposited with this society, including gold and silver, and especially all articles composing its balance, were to be arranged in an exchange tariff, which would be continually changeable, and the object of which was to secure the equivalence of values. "Certainly every rise in the exchange of an article would be balanced by an equivalent fall of exchange in one or more articles, if one regards the existing total sum, one-tenth being allowed in fluctuations either up or down. The differences in time in the balance would be entered in a special balance book which would finally equalise itself from time to time."
That is the project; and its author gives the following example: Since the company carries on no business on its own account, and neither acquires nor possesses products itself, and thus does not lose money on the rise or fall, it is only guided in directing the course of prices by one object, viz., to moderate one by the other, and to create a permanent and a daily compensation; thus, if demand arises for one product while it falls off for one or several others, the company raises the price of the first 4 per cent., and at the same time lowers, according to the quant.i.ty of the first, the price of the other in such a way that the compensation is as exact as possible.
Because it is difficult to reach this mathematical exact.i.tude, a certain margin is allowed, which again, compensating itself from time to time, never can amount to the a.s.sets of the society. If we a.s.sume, for the sake of example, that the price of gold has fallen--that is, that gold is freely offered, while silver has risen, that is, is more in demand--the company, since its bills are discounted with its own notes, will give 100 francs of its money for 105 francs of gold, equal to 100 francs in silver; or, to express myself more exactly, for a weight of gold which is only one-twentieth higher than five twenty-five franc pieces, and the weight of silver which is only one-twentieth lower than twenty-five franc pieces. From this compensation no profit accrues to the company; it has only intervened with its own money in order again to re-establish equilibrium.
From this process of compensation carried on by the company, which was to be applied in like manner to all products, raw materials and food stuffs, and so on, Proudhon hoped for that much talked of and much promising fixity of values, since all products would (so to speak) be monetised and made into money, and would maintain the highest degree of circulating power. Branches of the company over all France and a complete public administration were to complete the system, which should have as its object the organisation and centralisation of exchange of products in return for products, according to the formulae of J. B. Say, with as little money as possible, as few intermediaries as possible, with the least possible expense, and for the exclusive benefit of producers and consumers.
It hardly need be observed that the rise and prosperity of these inst.i.tutions must stand or fall by the correctness of the a.s.sumption of fixed values and of the monetisation of all products. Proudhon"s opponents wished to make out, that in view of this knowledge his sudden arrest and imprisonment in Saint Pelagie, by which he was divested of all responsibility for the liquidation of the company, was not altogether unwished for by him. But this is contradicted by the attempt which was renewed later on to realise the project of the People"s Bank. We have, indeed, no cause to suspect Proudhon"s good faith in the matter; on the other hand, the supposed originality of this idea of his is all the more open to suspicion, because in all essential particulars it reminds us too closely of the "labour paper money" of Rodbertus that was to be issued by the State after the determination of values, an idea with which Proudhon"s economics had many points in common. There is a still greater similarity between Proudhon"s projects and the Boards of Trade thought of by Bray ten years before the beginning of the People"s Bank; and it is also like John Gray"s Central Bank.
In later years Proudhon not only outwardly, owing either to compulsion or prudence, renounced all immediate realisation of his intentions, but even became convinced and expressed his conviction in his work upon the federative principle (_Du Principe Federatif_, 1852), that ordered anarchy was an ideal, and as such could never be realised, but that nevertheless human society should strive to attain it by means of federative organisations, as he had sketched it in his earlier writings. Even in this period of mental maturity, when removed from political agitation, he remained the sworn enemy and direct opponent of the Communists, and wished to see the great problem of the best arrangement of society solved, not by universal levelling down, but by the general perfection and development of society; not by revolution from which he had gained nothing but disgust and disillusionment, but by evolution. "If ideas will rise up," he used to say, "then even the paving stones would rise up themselves if the Government were so imprudent as to wait for this."