Notes from Proudhon's WHAT IS PROPERTY?

[Dale Eastman]

https://dn790005.ca.archive.org/0/items/property-is-theft-a-pierre-joseph-proudhon-anthology/Property%20Is%20Theft%21_%20A%20Pierre-Joseph%20Proudh%20-%20Pierre-Joseph%20Proudhon.pdf

Liberty is inviolable. I can neither sell nor alienate my
liberty; every contract, every condition of a contract, which
has in view the alienation or suspension of liberty, is null:
the slave, when he plants his foot upon the soil of liberty, at
that moment becomes a free man. When society seizes a
malefactor and deprives him of his liberty, it is a case of
legitimate defence: whoever violates the social compact by
the commission of a crime declares himself a public enemy;
in attacking the liberty of others, he compels them to take
away his own. Liberty is the original condition of man; to
renounce liberty is to renounce the nature of man: after that,
how could we perform the acts of man?

And yet, in spite of
these wonderful prerogatives which savour of the eternal
and the infinite, they have never found the origin of
property; the doctors still disagree. On one point only are
they in harmony: namely, that the validity of the right of
property depends upon the authenticity of its origin. But this
harmony is their condemnation. Why have they
acknowledged the right before settling the question of
origin?

The right of
occupation, or of the
first occupant, is that
which results from the actual, physical, real possession of a
thing. I occupy a piece of land; the presumption is, that I am
the proprietor, until the contrary is proved. We know that
originally such a right cannot be legitimate unless it is
reciprocal; the jurists say as much.

That
which belongs to each is not that which each
may possess,
but that which each
has a right to possess. Now, what have
we a right to possess? That which is required for our labour
and consumption;

Edinburgh professor when he added:
“A right to life implies a right to the necessary means of
life; and that justice, which forbids the taking away the life
of an innocent man, forbids no less the taking from him the
necessary means of life. He has the same right to defend the
one as the other. To hinder another man’s innocent labour,
or to deprive him of the fruit of it, is an injustice of the same
kind, and has the same effect as to put him in fetters or in
prison, and is equally a just object of resentment.”

Man
needs to labour in order to live; consequently, he needs
tools to work with and materials to work upon. His need to
produce constitutes his right to produce. Now, this right is
guaranteed him by his fellows, with whom he makes an
agreement to that effect. One hundred thousand men settle
in a large country like France with no inhabitants: each man
has a right to 1/100,000 of the land. If the number of
possessors increases, each one’s portion diminishes in
consequence;

Pothier seems to think that property, like royalty, exists by
divine right. He traces back its origin to God himself—
ab
Jove principium.

Men lived in a state of
communism; whether positive or negative it matters little.
Then there was no property, not even private possession.
The genesis and growth of possession gradually forcing
people to labour for their support, they agreed either
formally or tacitly,—it makes no difference which,—that the
worker should be sole proprietor of the fruit of his labour;
that is, they simply declared the fact that thereafter none
could live without working. It necessarily followed that, to
obtain equality of products, there must be equality of
labour; and that, to obtain equality of labour, there must be
equality of facilities for labour. Whoever without labour got
possession, by force or by strategy, of another’s means of
subsistence, destroyed equality, and placed himself above
or outside of the law. Whoever monopolised the means of
production on the ground of greater industry, also destroyed
equality. Equality being then the expression of right,
whoever violated it was
unjust.