[What is Property? by P. J. Proudhon]@TWC D-Link book
What is Property?

PART SECOND
226/323

He may then dispose of this legitimate and private property as he sees fit,--exchange it, give it away, or transfer it; and no other individual, or collection of other individuals,--that is, society,--can lay any claim to these values." Thus, by the distribution of collective capital, to the use of which each associate, either in his own right or in right of his authors, has an imprescriptible and undivided title, there will be in the phalanstery, as in the France of 1841, the poor and the rich; some men who, to live in luxury, have only, as Figaro says, to take the trouble to be born, and others for whom the fortune of life is but an opportunity for long-continued poverty; idlers with large incomes, and workers whose fortune is always in the future; some privileged by birth and caste, and others pariahs whose sole civil and political rights are THE RIGHT TO LABOR, AND THE RIGHT TO LAND.

For we must not be deceived; in the phalanstery every thing will be as it is to-day, an object of property,--machines, inventions, thought, books, the products of art, of agriculture, and of industry; animals, houses, fences, vineyards, pastures, forests, fields,--every thing, in short, except the UNCULTIVATED LAND.

Now, would you like to know what uncultivated land is worth, according to the advocates of property?
"A square league hardly suffices for the support of a savage," says M.Charles Comte.

Estimating the wretched subsistence of this savage at three hundred francs per year, we find that the square league necessary to his life is, relatively to him, faithfully represented by a rent of fifteen francs.
In France there are twenty-eight thousand square leagues, the total rent of which, by this estimate, would be four hundred and twenty thousand francs, which, when divided among nearly thirty-four millions of people, would give each an INCOME OF A CENTIME AND A QUARTER.

That is the new right which the great genius of Fourier has invented IN BEHALF OF THE FRENCH PEOPLE, and with which his first disciple hopes to reform the world.


<<Back  Index  Next>>

D-Link book Top

TWC mobile books