Entnommen aus: The New Palgrave. A Dictionary of Economics, hrsg. von John Eatwell, Murray Milgate, Peter Newman, London/Basingstoke, 4 Bde., 1987
Proudhon was born in Besan~on, France, into a very humbie family. Despite a scholarship, poverty forced him to interrupt his exceptionally brilliant studies. He became, in turn, a printer, print shop foreman, scholarship student at the Besangon Acaderny, owner of a small print shop, and managing clerk in a river transport company in Lyons. He then became a writer and journalist, following this profession through ineessant material difficulties, political trials, election to parliament, prison and exile. On his death he left a vast bädy of work, in which he tackled at the same time problems of philosophy, ethies, sociology and cconomics. He can equally well be seen as orte of the founders of so ciology, the father of anarchism, orte of the inspirational forces behind cooperativism and mutualism, orte of the sources of syndicalist thinking, 'the boldest thinker of French socialism' (Marx), a pioneer of federalism atnd regionalism, or one of the apostles of mass education.
From his study of history and observation of the world, Proudhon derived a 'serial dialectic'. Everything in the world is 'serial' - i.e. is differentiated, divided, graduated and graded, but also coordinated, articulated, grouped; everything is multiple, everything is synthesis. The 'series' is a 'whole composed of elements arranged according to a certain reason or law'. 'Serial dialectic' is a 'law' of progression and organization, a general process of growth common to matter and spirit, to man and society. An antinomic dialectic, it unfolds as a chain of antinomic pairs whose opposition is the source of all movement and cannot be resolved into synthesis. Such a dialectic of tension, or of the 'balancing of opposites', is thus fundamentally opposed to the Marxian dialectic of synthesis.
To struggle to be, to unite to be, are the two poles of the vital dialectic of every person and every society. Work is the condition for survival, the constituent 'organic law', the 'generative fact', the 'shaping force' of soeiety. Antagonism and solidarity are no more than Tünctional laws'.
All labour implies at the same time differentiation and association. In working society orte does not find 'workers' but a single worker diversified to infinity. The 'fundamental' law of labour is the law of division. There is a fürther law connected with this - that of 'collective force' as expressed in the .collective surplus' generated by association, the collective product being the result not of the addition of individual efforts, but of their multiplication when they are brought together in association.
Labour, for Proudhon, is the 'field of observation' of political economy, which studies the division of labour and its series (organization, collective force), the distribution of the instruments of labour (right and mutuality), and the efficiency of labour and its results (value and economic accounting). To organize labour is to demarcate functions, and then'to group them according to the laws of labour. The division of labour is the law of fünction; every individual worker is therefore necessarily an integral member of the enterprise, fulfilling an economic function. Starting from these individual fünctions, through a kind of integration, one can organize the entire society.
Labour is the real measure of exchange value, the only standard by which different products can be compared. The substance common to wages, investments, capital and profits is that they are either objectified labour or accumulated labour. Supply and demand are simply 'iMments tradueteurs', (translating factors) constantly disrupted by monopolies, fraud, speculation ete., and do not allow use value (utility) and exchange value (Iabour costs) to be objectively comparcd. For the 'law of proportionality of values' to be respected, a 'constituted value', a synthesis of use value and exchange value, must be created; 'society's accounts' must also be drawn up, labour seientifically managed and the structure 'socialized'.
Proudhon regarded accounting as 'the whole of political economy'. An astonishing forerunner of many later theories, he drew a distinetion between individual accounts and accounts relating to 'each type of value' ('chaque nature de valeurs') and combined them in a 'single account', a veritable set of national economic and social accounts. He hoped to establish al form of accounting by sector and by industry, prelude to a 'centralization of accounts', since 'all industries are bound together in orte cluster by their mutual relations ... all products act as ends and as means of each other'. He glimpsed the problem of variation in the 'proportion' of labour, and hence in input-output coefficients, and he connected this to technical progress. He believed that a kind of 'higher mathematics' could help in developing 'social economics', but warned against any ill-considered use of mathematics in economics.
All the ills of mankind spring from 'mere accounting error'. The 'social balance' is inexact. The gratuitous appropriation of collective effort, the inequality of exchange, the law of escheat, all distort the economic accounts. Property is at the same time 'right of exclusion and theft' and 'despotic power'. Competition, although a necessary stimulant, kills competition; it generates monopoly, which is necessary in that it consolidates the achievements of labour, but which corrupts economic life since it improperly appropriates to itself the profits of .collective force' and creates poverty.
Proudhon's historical labourism bears no relation to Marx's historical materialism. For Proudhon, social and economic facts are only the 'manifestations' and 'signs' of ideas. Economics is metaphysics in action, the implementation of the ~eternal laws of reason'. Proudhon declared himself against capitalism, the exploitation of man by man; against statism, the government of man by man; against communism, 'the degradation of the personality in the name of society', and against Christianity, 'a system of personal degradation in the name of right'. All bis works are a prodigious effort to lay bare the foundations, the elements and the method for a self-managed society free of all alienation. He foresaw and proposed the building of a 'scientific socialism'.
What makes society possible, for Proudhon, is the .opposition of powers', 'mutual counterbalance'. Society must be organized solely on the basis of contract. In industry, wage labour will be replaced by common, joint ownership by all those who play a part in production, while in agriculture individually owned farms will be integrated into communes or agricultural groups, and cooperatives will prevail in trade and commerce. Through the federation of 'business properties' (propriiii.y d'entreprises) and rural communes and the establishment of consumers' associations and a production/consumption union, a federative 'republic can be created, the government of which would be formed by successive delegations from 'natural', autonornous, selfmanaged groups. Within this industrial republic the equity of social relations will be assured by free credit and 'exchange vouchers' issued by an exchange bank and secured against products.
Proudhon had faith only in the 'proletarians' to bring into being this new social structure, but unlike Marx he saw the emancipation of the proletariat merely as a particular fact of world history 'which is in the process of taking place'.