Mutualism (economic Theory) - Mutualism and Capitalism

Mutualism and Capitalism

Pierre Joseph Proudhon was one of the most famous philosophers who articulated thoughts on the nature of property. He is known for claiming that "property is theft," but is less known for the claims that "property is liberty" and "property is impossible". According to Colin Ward, Proudhon did not see a contradiction between these slogans. This was because Proudhon distinguished between what he considered to be two distinct forms of property often bound up in the single label. To the mutualist, this is the distinction between property created by coercion and property created by labor. Property is theft "when it is related to a landowner or capitalist whose ownership is derived from conquest or exploitation and only maintained through the state, property laws, police, and an army". Property is freedom for "the peasant or artisan family a natural right to a home, land cultivate, to tools of a trade", and the fruits of that cultivation — but not to ownership or control of the lands and lives of others. The former is considered legitimate property, the latter illegitimate property.

Proudhon argued that property in the product of labor is essential to liberty, while property that strayed from "possession" ("occupancy and use") was the basis for tyranny and would lead a society to destroy itself. The conception of entitlement property as a destructive force and illegitimate institution can be seen in this quote by Proudhon,

"Then if we are associated for the sake of liberty, equality, and security, we are not associated for the sake of property; then if property is a natural right, this natural right is not social, but anti-social. Property and society are utterly irreconcilable institutions. It is as impossible to associate two proprietors as to join two magnets by their opposite poles. Either society must perish, or it must destroy property. If property is a natural, absolute, imprescriptible, and inalienable right, why, in all ages, has there been so much speculation as to its origin? – for this is one of its distinguishing characteristics. The origin of a natural right! Good God! who ever inquired into the origin of the rights of liberty, security, or equality?" (What is Property?)

Mutualist, Clarence Lee Swartz, says in What is Mutualism:

"It is, therefore, one of the purposes of Mutualists, not only to awaken in the people the appreciation of and desire for freedom, but also to arouse in them a determination to abolish the legal restrictions now placed upon non-invasive human activities and to institute, through purely voluntary associations, such measures as will liberate all of us from the exactions of privilege and the power of concentrated capital."

Swartz also states that mutualism differs from anarcho-communism and other collectivist philosophies by its support of private property: "One of the tests of any reform movement with regard to personal liberty is this: Will the movement prohibit or abolish private property? If it does, it is an enemy of liberty. For one of the most important criteria of freedom is the right to private property in the products of ones labor. State Socialists, Communists, Syndicalists and Communist-Anarchists deny private property."

However, Proudhon warned that a society with private property without equality would lead to statist-like relations between people.

"The purchaser draws boundaries, fences himself in, and says, 'This is mine; each one by himself, each one for himself.' Here, then, is a piece of land upon which, henceforth, no one has right to step, save the proprietor and his friends; which can benefit nobody, save the proprietor and his servants. Let these multiply, and soon the people . . . will have nowhere to rest, no place of shelter, no ground to till. They will die of hunger at the proprietor's door, on the edge of that property which was their birth-right; and the proprietor, watching them die, will exclaim, 'So perish idlers and vagrants.'"

Unlike capitalist private-property supporters, Proudhon stressed equality. He thought all workers should own property and have access to capital. He stressed that in every cooperative "every worker employed in the association an undivided share in the property of the company". This distinction Proudhon made between different kinds of property has been articulated by some later anarchist and socialist theorists as one of the first distinctions between private property and personal property; the latter having actual use-value to the individual possessing it.