First, a new selection from Property is Theft! have been posted:
These are extracts from Proudhon's discussion with the (classical) liberal economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801-1850), translated by Benjamin Tucker (and serialised in The Irish World and American Industrial Liberator btween 12 July and 11 October 1879). The exchange originally appeared in Proudhon's La Voix du Peuple at the end of 1849 and the begining of 1850 being included in the third volume of Mélanges (volume 19 of Œuvres complètes, 1871).
It was a wide-ranging discussion which covered more than just interest. As becomes clear, Proudhon views the abolition of interest within a wider social transformation, namely the abolition of wage-labour: "the organisation of circulation and credit, or the absorption of the function of the Capitalist in that of the Worker." The Organisation of credit, in short, is seen as the means to the organisation of labour, or the replacement of capitalist firms by workers associations.
Second, we will present Bakunin's views on Proudhon prompted by the tri-annual on-line journal Black Flag Anarchist Review having recently produced a Bakunin special to mark his death in 1876 -- Black Flag Anarchist Review Volume 6 Number 2 (Summer 2026).
Bakunin met Proudhon (and Marx) in Paris during 1844. As becomes clear in his writings, Bakunin was very influenced by Proudhon while being critical of certain aspects of his ideas. He appears not to have mentioned Proudhon's patriarchal views, which given his own advocacy of equal rights for both sexes seems strange. Perhaps he considered Proudhon's position as being self-evidently wrong so did not bother even to denounce it? Marx also never challenged Proudhon's sexism - the best we get is his comment in his 1846 letter to Annenkov about Proudhon's "petty-bourgeois sentimentality, by which I mean his homilies about home, conjugal love and suchlike banalities" and "sings the praises of the petty bourgeoisie and of the miserable patriarchal amourous illusions of the domestic hearth." Publicly it was ignored, presumably because he did not really consider it important. However, given Bakunin's repeated comments on the equality of sexes - which shows its importance to him rather than something to be mentioned in passing - the lack of comment is puzzling.
It becomes clear that both Proudhon and Bakunin saw the future socialist society as based upon socio-economic federalism. Workplaces would be democratically run by their members and federated. Communities would likewise be self-governing and federated. Delegates to committees and assemblies would be elected, mandated and subject to recall. There would be an end to executive bodies above the assemblies, instead these assemblies would nominate groups to carry out their decisions. In terms of tactics, both saw change primarily driven by economic activity and organisation -- for Proudhon, producer, consumer and credit co-operatives while Bakunin added unions to these, with these viewed as the drivers. Proudhon was a reformer (albeit one who called himself a revolutionary) while Bakunin was a revolutionary, recognising that capitalism cannot be competed away even by the best organised co-operative movement. Likewise, the State will not simply disappear as the product of economic reform but rather would need to be smashed by insurrection (aided, undoudtedly, by a general strike).
This is why Bakunin suggested that ideas were "Proudhonism widely developed and pushed to these, its final consequences" in his essay on the Paris Commune. (Michael Bakunin: Selected Writings [London: Jonathan Cape, 1973], 198) Daniel Guérin's excellent article on the links between the two anarchists entitled "From Proudhon to Bakunin" -- which was reprinted in Black Flag Anarchist Review Vol. 1 No. 2 (Summer 2021) -- is worth reading on this issue.
In 1867 Bakunin addressed the League of Peace and Freedom, subsequently published as Federalism, Socialism and Anti-Theologism. As regards to socialism, he wrote as follows:
In general, regulation was the common passion of all the socialists before 1848, except one: Cabet, Louis Blanc, Fourierists, Saint-Simonists, all had a passion for indoctrinating and organising the future; all were more or less authoritarians.
But then Proudhon appeared: son of a peasant, and in act and instinct a hundred times more revolutionary than all these doctrinaire and bourgeois socialists, he armed himself with a critique as profound and penetrating as it was merciless to destroy all their systems. Opposing freedom to authority, against these state socialists, he boldly proclaimed himself an anarchist, and in defiance of their deism or their pantheism, he had the courage to call himself simply an atheist or rather, with Auguste Comte, a positivist.
His own socialism, based upon both individual and collective freedom, and on the spontaneous action of free associations, obeying no laws other than the general laws of social economy, discovered or yet to be discovered by social science, outside of all governmental regulation and all protection of the State, subordinating politics to the economic, intellectual, and moral interests of society, was later and by a necessary consequence to lead to federalism.
He also mentions Proudhon when discussing what socialism means to the socialist: "The socialist, on the contrary, draws upon his positive rights to life and to all pleasures of life, intellectual, moral, and physical. He loves life, and he wants to enjoy it to the fullest. His convictions being a part of himself, and his duties toward society being indissolubly linked to his rights, to remain faithful to both, he will know how to live in accordance with justice, like Proudhon, and if necessary die like Babeuf; but he will never say that the life of humanity must be a sacrifice, nor that death is the sweetest fate."
On 24 May 1868, he wrote a letter to La Voix de l'Avenir where he acknowledges Proudhon's influence in even stronger terms:
The great and true master of us all, Proudhon, has written, in his fine book on Justice in the Revolution and in the Church, that the most disastrous combination that could be formed would be that which would join together socialism with absolutism, the tendencies of the people toward economic emancipation and material well-being with dictatorship and the concentration of all political and social powers in the State.
The following year saw Bakunin write the Policy of the International (L'Égalité, August 1869) which stated:
A great part of the bourgeoisie is tired of the reign of Caesarism and militarism that it itself established in 1848, for fear of the proletariat. Just recall the June days, precursors of the December days; recall that National Assembly which, after the June days, cursed and insulted, unanimous bar one voice, the illustrious and we can say heroic socialist Proudhon who alone had the courage to hurl the challenge of socialism at this rabid herd of bourgeois conservatives, liberals and radicals. And we must not forget that amongst those insulting Proudhon a number of citizens still living, and today more militant than ever, and who, baptised by the persecutions of December, have since become martyrs of liberty.
This refers to Proudhon's Address to the Constituent National Assembly on 31st July 1848, which is justly famous (even Marx later admitted "his attitude in the National Assembly merits nothing but praise"). In Letters to a Frenchman on the current crisis (1870), Bakunin again praised Proudhon as regards his activity during the 1848 Revolution: "In all the revolutionary phantasmagoria of 1848, there were only two truly serious men, though quite unlike each other: Proudhon and Blanqui. All the rest were nothing but bad actors, who performed the Revolution as the medieval brotherhoods performed the Passion - until the moment when Louis Bonaparte came to draw the curtain."
Also of note is Bakunin's agreement with Proudhon on nationality and federalism:
Vestiges of this patriotism are still found, even in some of the most civilized countries of Europe. In Italy, for example, especially in the southern provinces of the Italian peninsula, the lay of the land, the mountains, and the sea produce barriers among the valleys, communes, and towns, separating and isolating them, rendering them almost alien to one another. Proudhon, in his pamphlet on Italian unity, correctly observed that this [national] unity was still only a wholly bourgeois idea and by no means a popular passion, that the rural population has remained largely foreign (and I would even add hostile) to it because this unity, which is in contradiction on the one hand with their local patriotism, has brought them on the other hand nothing but oppression, ruin, and unmerciful exploitation. ("Physiological or Natural Patriotism", The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869-1871 [Buffalo, N.Y.,: Prometheus Books, 1994], 185)
Proudhon wrote on Italy often in his final years, so it cannot be said with confidence precisely which pamphlet is meant but presumably it is Federation and Unity in Italy (1862). In that work Proudhon stresses that unity was associated with the upper classes as it benefits them, not the masses. Thus there was a class element to Proudhon's position (which Bakunin shared) although that could lead him into errors as Bakunin noted:
Then came the sophists, Russian and non-Russian, some hired and others foolishly blind - in whose ranks Proudhon, the great Proudhon unfortunately stood - explaining to us that the Polish revolutionaries were Catholics and aristocrats, representatives of a world condemned to perish, that the Russian government with all its hangmen represented the cause of democracy, the cause of the oppressed peasants, and the cause of the new principle of economic justice. ("The Tactics of Revolutionary Socialism", The Basic Bakunin: Writings 1869-1871, 157-8)
As noted in my debunking of Schapiro, Proudhon's views on Poland have often been misrepresented (deliberately so, in the case of Schapiro). Bakunin does not do so, recognising the class analysis at the base of Proudhon's position while lamenting some of the conclusions he draws from this. Rather than argue that Polish national liberation must embrace the social question (although the Polish aristocrats would hardly do that!) whilst favouring national autonomy, Proudhon appeared to favour the status quo. However, as a reformist he had little else to draw upon in terms of options.
The major source of disagreement was over materialism and idealism. In June 1872, in a letter To the Brothers of the Alliance in Spain Bakunin discusses Marx and Proudhon:
Proudhon who was never a God, but who certainly was a great revolutionary thinker and who rendered immense services to the development of socialist ideas, became for that same reason the bête noire of Marx. To praise Proudhon in his presence, was to commit a mortal offence, worthy of all the natural consequences of his enmity - and these consequences are: first hatred, then the filthiest slanders . . .
Now let us acknowledge that Marx is a very serious, very profound economic thinker. He has this immense advantage over Proudhon, of being a realist, a materialist. Proudhon, despite all his efforts to shake off the traditions of classical idealism, nevertheless remained all his life an incorrigible idealist, taking inspiration, as I told him two months before his death, sometimes from the Bible, sometimes from Roman law, and always a metaphysician to the tips of his fingers. His great misfortune is that he never studied the natural sciences, and had never adopted their methods - He had instincts of genius which had made him glimpse the right path, but, driven by the bad or idealist habits of his mind, he always fell back into the old errors; which made Proudhon a perpetual contradiction - a vigorous genius, a revolutionary thinker always struggling against the phantoms of idealism, and never managing to overcome them.
Marx as a thinker is on the right track. He has established as a principle that all religious, political and legal evolutions in history are not the causes, but effects of the economic evolutions - It is a great and fecund thought that he did not entirely invent, it has been glimpsed, expressed in part, by many others besides him - But in the end the honour belongs to him of having firmly established it and having posited it as the basis of his entire economic system. On the other hand, Proudhon understood and felt freedom far better than him - Proudhon, when he did not engage in doctrine and metaphysics, had the true instinct of the revolutionary - he adored Satan and he proclaimed an-archy. It is quite possible that Marx could raise himself theoretically to an even more rational system of freedom than Proudhon - but he lacks Proudhon's instinct.
Bakunin concludes by suggesting his political ideas were "the anarchic system of Proudhon, expanded, developed and freed by us from all its metaphysical, idealist, doctrinaire trappings, and firmly accepting matter in science, and social economy in history as the basis of all subsequent developments." In Statism and Anarchy (1873) Bakunin argued along the same lines:
It goes without saying that Marx read all the French socialists, from Saint-Simon to Proudhon, and it is well known that he hates the latter. Undoubtedly there is a good deal of truth in the merciless critique he directed against Proudhon. For all his efforts to ground himself in reality, Proudhon remained an idealist and a metaphysician. His starting-point is the abstract idea of right. From right he proceeds to economic fact, while Marx, by contrast, advanced and proved the incontrovertible truth, confirmed by the entire past and present history of human society, nations, and states, that economic fact has always preceded legal and political right. The exposition and demonstration of that truth constitutes one of Marx's principal contributions to science. (Statism and Anarchy [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990], 142)
As I've discussed elsewhere, there is a lot more distortion and invention in The Poverty of Philosophy than truth. As regards the claim of Proudhon's idealism, well Proudhon himself rejected Marx's claim: "Have I ever claimed that principles are anything other than the intellectual representation, not the generating cause, of facts?". Indeed, in God and the State Bakunin writes as follows in its very first paragraph:
Who are right, the idealists or the materialists? The question once stated in this way hesitation becomes impossible. Undoubtedly the idealists are wrong and the materialists right. Yes, facts are before ideas; yes, the ideal, as Proudhon said, is but a flower, whose root lies in the material conditions of existence. Yes, the whole history of humanity, intellectual and moral, political and social, is but a reflection of its economic history. (God and the State [New York: Dover, 1970], 9)
It can be said that Proudhon often expressed himself badly and, at times, may not have been consistent in his materialism or as clear about it as Marx but Bakunin in 1873 seems unfair, as his earlier comment suggests. Given that these later comments were made in the context of discussions of the differences in the International, they may have been driven more by that conflict than an objective evaluation of Proudhon's ideas. Also, in the International there were mutualists and Bakunin would have been keen to show the differences between collectivism and that tendency - particularly as these mutualists were reformists who opposed the collective ownership of land.
Given the influence of Proudhon upon Bakunin, given how much he had adopted from Proudhon, it seems strange that what appears to be his final words on the thinker was to dismiss him as a metaphysician (albeit one who "glimpse[d] the right path"). Particularly when, in what became his most famuous work, Bakunin clearly suggested the opposite. Still, as noted, Proudhon was not the clearest writer at times and did pen passages which, quoted out of context, may be misleading - and he has suffered more than his fair share of that over the years.
There may be other mentions of Proudhon which are yet to be translated but hopefully the above gives an indication of Bakunin's views on Proudhon - and his debt to him.