Anarchism Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 3000 words

Anarchism - Essay ExampleHe attended the local school but was primarily self-educated at the towns public library. Proudhon, was among the inventors of socialism, along wih Marx, Bakunin, Blanqui, Blanc, Herzen, Lassalle and Engles. Of these, Proudhon had the profoundest effect upon the workers movement in the 19th century and his ideas influenced some of the most notable later anarchists, including both Tolstoy and Bakunin, both of whom knew Proudhon personally. Indeed, throughout his spiritedness Proudhon acquired and kept a remarkable collection of friends, and as his notoriety spread, acquaintances. Before Proudhon, the word anarchist had been exclusively used as a derogatory epithet to be flung at ones political opponents. Proudhon was the first person to adopt the label with enthusiasm. He denounced the government of man by man as oppression, and in its place advocated a society base on equality, law, independence, and proportionality which finds its highest perfection in the union of order with anarchy. He defined anarchy as the absence of a master, of a sovereign, and envisaged a society in which the sovereignty of the will yields to the sovereignty of reason. For Proudhon Capital in the political field is analogous to government. The economic idea of capitalism, the politics of government or of authority and the theological idea of the Church are three identical ideas, linked in various ways. To attack one of them is equivalent to attacking all of them. What capital does to labor, and the advance to liberty, the Church does to the spirit. This trinity of absolutism is as baneful in practice as it is in philosophy. The most effective means for oppressing the people would be at the same time to enslave its body, its will and its reason. (What is Property, Pierre Proudhon 1840, page 23). One exception to this position was his Proudhons sexism, causing Joseph Dejacque (as well as subsequent anarchists) to attack Proudhons support for patriarchate as being inconsistent with his anarchist ideas. In his earliest works, Proudhon analyzed the nature and problems of the capitalist economy. While deeply critical of capitalism, he also objected those contemporaneous socialists who idolized association. In series of commentaries, from What is Property (1840) through the posthumously published Theorie de la properiete (Theory of Property 1863-64) he declared in turn that property is thieving, property is impossible, property is despotism, and property is freedom. When he said property is theft, he was referring to the landowner or the capitalist who he believed take the profits from laborers. For Proudhon, the capitalist employee was subordinated, exploited his permanent condition is one of obedience. In asserting that property is freedom, he was referring not only to the product of an individuals labor, but to the tyke or artisans home and tools of his trade and the income he received by selling his goods. For Proudhon, the only leg itimate source of property was labor. Proudhon was remarkably consistent in his persuasion about economic issues, but that his rhetoric changed considerably over the years, and that the tactics he adopted in dealing with an understanding of property as ceaselessly somewhat impossible shifted slightly. First published in 1840, Proudhons