Proudhon’s ideas and social change
A BRIEF reply to Iain McKay's response to my article The Poverty of Proudhon's Anarchism ("Distortions about Proudhon"): First, I will say that McKay's Property Is Theft!: A Pierre-Joseph Proudhon Reader is an excellent place to start for those who want to learn more about Proudhon's life and thought.
He criticizes my article for saying that Proudhon "openly" espoused anti-Semitic views. But that's not what I said. Here's the sentence I actually wrote: "Proudhon openly supported patriarchal family forms and held stridently anti-Semitic views."
I'm happy to concede the grammatical quibble if that wasn't clear enough. But, as I noted, the reason Proudhon became popular was because of his focus on cooperatives, credit unions and reforms for working-class people.
Marx took issue with how Proudhon formulated these ideas as a strategy for social change. Marx was a master of polemical fire, and sometimes he extended his opponents' arguments to "logical conclusions" that they themselves did not hold. I quoted Howard Zinn's quip on this front.
However, in The Poverty of Philosophy, Marx's critique of Proudhon focuses on his economic, philosophical and political premises. Here, I think, Marx is right on target. I won't repeat my article, but simply note that McKay concurs that Marx is right to criticize Proudhon for opposing strikes and revolution, even as he rightly points out that many other anarchists (I would say most!) disagree strongly with Proudhon on this.
There is one distortion I think McKay should reconsider making. He writes that Marx was "wrong to push the labor movement towards electioneering." In the context of 1847, it is unclear what McKay is referring to, because Marx clearly expected the revolution to take the form of strikes and insurrections.
Marx supported universal suffrage as a democratic demand, but he hardly prioritized "electioneering" at the time. Later, he did argue that workers should participate in elections where possible, but so did Proudhon, if not in words, then in deeds. Proudhon stood for election himself twice in 1848, winning office in June and serving in the Constituent Assembly, where he generally opposed workers taking to the barricades, as they did later that same June.
Elsewhere, McKay criticizes Proudhon for his focus on "mutualism" and his opposition to revolution--some of the very points Marx objected to--writing, "What we need to do is to create a culture of resistance in our workplaces and communities, a movement which, while fighting capitalism, seeks to replace it. In short, mutualism is not enough--we need revolutionary social movements."
I welcome McKay's response and am very happy to continue a comradely exchange about how to strengthen the "revolutionary social movements" our planet needs so desperately; however, I can't help but feel that he jumped the gun, running to defend Proudhon's ideas, which are, as he readily concedes, largely indefensible.
Todd Chretien, Oakland, Calif.
