Politics: Anarchism - The Economy

-His conversion (from socialism to anarchism) was mainly the result of his visit to the Jura Federation in Switzerland where he observed an experiment in cooperative production and living among a community of watch-makers who pooled their resources and the profits of their work.

-These communities, based on a single occupation, were self-governing cooperatives where the workers operated without any government and shared the fruits of their production equally.

-His plans were mainly described in 'Fields, Factories and Workshops' (1898).

-His brand of anarcho-communism proposed the creation of natural communities (communes).

-These would be smaller-scale communities than those described by Bakunin.

-His argument was that if people were free to join whichever community they wished, they would not be subjected to any force.

-He stated, 'Don't compete! - Competition is always injurious to the species, and you have plenty of resources to avoid it!'

-Without scarcity, he argued, there would be no competition, and without competition, there would be no inequality.

-In 'Mutual Aid' (1902), he insisted that the competitive economic world was not inevitable - with cooperation and communal living, mankind could free itself from the structures of being forced into competition for scarce resources.

-He believed that the individual was entitled to anything they could find in the world.

-Furthermore, it was the right to use one's ego to use other people for one's own purposes.

-He claimed people are capable of altruism, of fellow feeling, but this would show itself only if a person's ego saw altruism as being in their own interests.

-Egoists (his followers) didn't develop coherent economic ideas, save for the notion that free individuals would find a way to trade with each other on the basis of their rational self-interest.

-Egoist conception of economic life is very much associated with the accumulation of property.

-We all have a drive to obtain possessions and, having obtained them, to retain them.

-In his seminal work, 'What Is Property?' (1840), he is famous for his assertion that 'property is theft'.

-He did not totally oppose private property, merely property that was used to oppress workers or to promote inequality.

-Workers and peasants, he accepted, might own what they needed to manage their own production - these he called 'possessions' to distinguish them from 'property'.

-He is often described as a 'libertarian socialist'.

-He agreed with the socialist ideal of the means of production being owned in common and the abolition of the capitalist system of exchange but also advocated the abolition of any kind of government.

-Socialists saw the state as a vital part of the creation and maintenance of workers' rights, but he rejected it on the grounds that it would become oppressive.

-His brand of anarchism was to be decentralised and made up of communities of workers who had come together freely to form cooperative working groups.

-This theory, known as mutualism, also known as 'contractualism', proposed the replacement of capitalism with a system of exchange based on contracts entered into on a free, mutually beneficial basis.

-He was concerned that workers and peasants should receive the true value of what their labour produced instead of its market value, which was determined by capitalist forces beyond the worker's control.

-He proposed a voucher system to indicate the real value of goods, based on labour input and a national bank to supply funds to independent workers and peasants.

-These funds were to replace the need to make profits.

-He was also a bridge between individualist and collectivist anarchism.

-He was collectivist in that he proposed a federal system of communes, very like those envisaged by Kropotkin, and backed by a 'People's bank' which could recycle surplus funds to these productive units.

-However, he was also individualist as he saw workers and groups of workers freely entering contracts with each other for the exchange of labour and goods.

-His hopes for a reconciliation between individualism and collectivism are summed up in these words, as part of 'What Is Property?' (1840): 'When politics and home life have become one and the same, when economic problems have been solved in such a way that individual and collective interests are identical - all constraints having disappeared - it is evident that we will be in a state of total liberty or anarchy.'.

-His idea of mutualism was influential among 19th-century anarchists, with Kropotkin in particular with his work 'Mutual Aid' (1902), similarly insisting that the competitive economic world was not inevitable. With cooperation and communal living, mankind could free itself from the strictures of being forced into competition for scarce resources.

-Aspects of his mutualism can be seen in the 20th-century cooperative movements (of consumers in Britain and of peasants and workers in the continent of Europe), in the commune movement of the 1960s and 1970s, and even in the current 'fair trade' movement which seeks to ensure that producers in developing countries receive the just reward for their goods.

-Similarly, his ideas of decentralisation can still be seen in the aim of some non-government organisations to promote subsistence production in developing countries to prevent producers from being forced to produce for world commodity markets at prices that discriminate against them and force them into large, artificial productive units.