Marx read Proudhon: he accuses him of having neglected the production reports, while the French anarchist is interested in the political subjugation that he necessarily brought to private property.
Catherine Malabou’s work is a brilliant and stimulating essay. It led through an original development, some of the most current subjects of critical political thought: challenge to neoliberalism, investigation into the commons, denunciation of colonial domination. The author does it from the angle of a reflection on property and dispossession inspired by a fruitful reading of Proudhon. Her thesis is both clear and hidden, because she is, in the same writing gesture, of an exegesis of What is property ? (1848) of Proudhon and a more general position on the ways of carrying out the anarchist ideal. Also, the work deserves to be read not as a linear treaty, but rather as an invitation to circulate and to resonate between them themes and intertwined theatics.
A PROUDHON reading proposal
The book is presented, first of all, as a rereading of the most famous work of the anarchist philosopher, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon from a new angle. It is a question of understanding why he affirms in What is property ? that there was no revolution. During the French Revolution, the people would be “ fell into privilege and servitude. Always by imitation of the old regime. (…) There has been progress in the attribution of the law ; There was no revolution. (Proudhon, cited p. 10). The formula is enigmatic and a good part of the development is to elucidate it.
To do this, the main wire draws Catherine Malabou revolves around the analysis of the property right. Against the analyzes of Proudhon, we could think after Rafe Blaufarb and, as the author insists, that private property rid, by the French Revolution, of its feudal tinters would introduce a truly revolutionary break with the old regime. Indeed, under the old regime, the land conveyed hierarchies and political dominations. However, with the abolition of privileges and the nationalization of the property of the clergy in particular, the property of the land has lost all political value. So that the end of feudalism is contemporary with the affirmation of private property.
However, apparently strange thing, Proudhon affirms that there was no revolution. This is explained, Catherine Malabou shows it eloquently, because an essential feature of feudal power has maintained: the “ dawn ». The expression “ dawn », Catherine Malabou insists there in an original and enlightening way, is borrowed from feudal law. This is the right that the Lord reserves for confiscating the property of foreigners who died without heirs. It is therefore a right of dispossession. It is at this point in particular that the continuity between old regime and post -revolutionary period is played out, because the right of dispossession of the dominant has not disappeared. The bipartition between operator and exploited, between dominant and dominated has not been abolished but, although transformed, was maintained.
This is, precisely, which allows Proudhon to produce another of its paradoxical formulas: “ Property is theft ». THE “ dawn From the post -revolutionary period designates, for Proudhon, the rental annuity, the interest paid against a loan of money, the ferming paid for the provision of a field, the profit released from the workers’ work by the owner of the means of production. To put it synthetically, the windfall relates to all the contemporary forms of the dispossession carried out by the owner because of the dominant position given to him by the property.
Defense and criticism of the common (s)
In doing so, Catherine Malabou returns to Marx’s ambivalence towards Proudhon. What Marx criticizes Proudhon, after having welcomed some of his analyzes, is due to the naivety of his categories of analysis and to the fact that he does not see enough that they themselves are the result of historical processes determined by the production reports. However, Catherine Malabou, against Marxian economic reductionism, considers that anarchism is resistant to criticism by affirming the relative autonomy of politics compared to the economic. What interests Proudhon, like Kropotkine, is not the economic mechanisms, but political subjugation. So, “ Policy is the denunciation of the dynamics of domination and enslavement at work in all regimes, “ ancient ” Or “ revolutionary », A dynamic that economics can never fully enlighten (P. 98). Proudhon is therefore not interested in the genesis of private property but in private property as a political fact making it possible dynamics of domination and it is to the criticism and abolition of these that it becomes attached.
How to achieve anarchism thus designed ? Catherine Malabou first invites us to be wary of those who, like Jeremy Rifkin, have planned the disappearance of property for the benefit of access logics and have made capitalism the best gravedigger of private property. For Rifkin, in his famous work Age of accessconsumption modes would have radically changed, we would seek less and less to acquire goods than to access the experiences or functionalities whose things would be vectors. Access without appropriation would take the place of the exchange of properties. But, for the author, this is an illusion, because it is necessary that the material infrastructure which makes possible access to the experiences or functionalities of the resources belongs to someone. This new structure of capitalism does not abolish, neither property nor aubaine, but creates new annuities and new outbuildings as Cédric Durand has perfectly analyzed it for Gafam under the name of techno feudalism. The right of windfall, again, does not disappear but is transformed.
Far from the mirages of neoliberalism, another path would take shape, that of the outbuildings and the self -government. Indeed, the theoretical and political movement of the commons calls into question the reduction of the economy to appropriation by proposing ways of possessing, producing and working in common freed dominations and also freed from economic dictate. As part of the commons paradigm, the economy, subject to the Autogoument, becomes political. But what is both attractive and worrying in the outbuildings is that they certainly allow us to think of the self -government of the community, but, in doing so, they risk making us give up the fundamental anarchist conviction according to which no one belongs to anyone, not even the community. Thus, anarchism is rebellious to any form of totalization: “ No one belongs to anyone. You can’t pool anyone. It “ belong to anyone “, Which is never analyzed neither in common theories nor in reflections on communism, can never become a principle. Otherwise, it would belong (P. 224).
Of the phenomenon of dispossession as an anarchist paradigm
Finally, a last frame, in reflection, relates to the easements and the forms of dispossession in general. Despite his condemnation of slavery, the author’s confession, it does not seem that What is property ? Provide elements to think of this dispossession. But it proposes to rely on the work of Robert Nichols, Theft is Property ! To deepen this frame. Its title reverses the Proudhonian formula: it would be the flight that would make the property. This allows Catherine Malabou to reflect on the complex forms that colonial dispossession takes where the flight has not been preceded by any property. Because it is dispossession, colonial flight, which produces in return a sense of what has been clean and has been removed, which a people is now private. The question of dispossession, also gives it the opportunity to question the position of the marginalized, those who are dispossessed of social identity and access to the inheritance, whose status is limited: aubans, serfs and bastards, the outsiders, foreigners, underprivileged which are a challenge for an egalitarian society, a challenge that arims, in negative, to the ownership of those who do not have the status. From this angle, he is “ necessary to understand what a flight is to insist more on what deprivation is than on property (P. 258).
This detour also makes it possible to return to a point often perceived as a contradiction of Proudhonian thought: the way in which the anarchist philosopher revives a defense of free property against the logic of the fief in Property theory (1862). Such free property, which feudal law called “ alleu ” Or “ Allodial land », That is to say a non-lucrative property, could indeed guarantee individual independence without allowing the resurgence of dominations. However, the revolutionary promise of a property for all has been betrayed and the social cleavage lines were maintained. Thus the realization of anarchism would be less in the research and the institution of a form of ideal government than in the realization and deepening of the revolutionary gesture. Anarchism, in this sense, would be reluctant to all “ attempted control of anarchist space That one could try to circumscribe and determine in a univocal political ideal (p. 273). In reality, the anarchist must refuse to impose a political ideal which would be a “ Domination of anarchism itself ». The anarchist must therefore admit the aporia specific to his commitment and become “ The spokesperson for all the aubans, serfs, bastards, workers, while remaining a foreigner, questioning the stolen memory of servitude without creating servile memory or obedient disciples. Stay the other, unfit and “ improper »» (P. 272).
Our restitution of Catherine Malabou’s essay offers a possible journey in the mixed frames that he offers and which awaken in the reader a invigorating reading pleasure. If we sometimes remain hungry, waiting for such or such a frame to be in -depth, we also mean that a more laborious development would have made the work lose a lot of its liveliness. Catherine Malabou thus strives to recall the inchoative character of any anarchist commitment. Whoever seeks a definitive normative response to the political challenges of our time could be disappointed by the aporia which closes the work, but he could not deny that there is, in this aporia which is the affirmation of the continuation and deepening of the revolutionary process, something that characterizes, in fact, anarchism. The latter never offers learned discourse, of an economic type for example, which could end a question, but, politically engaged against everything that reproduces the forms of domination, it draws a political space which constantly renews the question of the conditions of the realization of real equality between free people.