Le Représentant du Peuple: Specimen issues (October-November 1847) - The Libertarian Labyrinth

[u/humanispherian]

https://www.libertarian-labyrinth.org/proudhon-library/le-representant-du-peuple-specimen-issues-october-november-1847/

[u/humanispherian]

A project page for translations from the prospectus and two specimen issues that appeared in 1847, prior to the launch of Le Représentant du Peuple — and prior to the February Revolution. So far, I've translated the initial statement of purpose from the prospectus and three articles from the second specimen issue.

[u/DecoDecoMan → u/humanispherian]

I have question about War and Peace, specifically the portion on "the American Question". With respect to slavery, Proudhon says this about American slavery while stating to repudiate slavery on principle:

We think about blacks as if they were our peers, just as the Roman or the Greek might have thought about the Gaul or the Jew, their equal as a man, but one who has become their slave due to the fortunes of war. But what ought to strike all minds and is impossible for any serious friend of humanity not to take into account, is the inequality that obtains between human races and which makes the problem of social and political balance so problematical. The Caucasian stands out from all the others and not merely on account of fairness of face and elegance of figure; there is a superiority of physical, intellectual and moral strength. And that superiority of nature is increased tenfold by the social state, so that no race can stand in our way. A few English regiments contain and govern one hundred and twenty million Indians, and we have just seen that it took only a tiny army of Europeans to conquer China. What comparison can there be between the Anglo-Saxon and the Redskin who would rather death than civilization, or the negro imported from the Sudan? The New World races retreat before the advance of the Whites; the massacres by the Spanish have been less murderous of them than contact with civilized folk. Finally, have we forgotten that, since the feudal system was done away with, freedom in this industrialist society of ours has meant to the weak-bodied, weak-minded individual, whose family connections have not been able to guarantee an income, something worse than slavery: proletarianism? This is dictated by force, insofar as it is still the overriding law in society; and I say that the right that rules over us to this day, is not the right of labour, which has yet to secure recognition, nor the right of intelligence, that source of so many disappointments, it is still, whatever we say, the unadulterated right of force.

And:

To be sure, I need to be careful here not to refute my own argument and combat the very thing that I have set myself the aim of rehabilitating, when I stand up on behalf of the Blacks against the hypocritical notion which, under the pretext of emancipating them, tends to do nothing less than to cast them back into the pure domain of force and turn them into a proletarian sludge a hundred times more hideous than that of our capital cities. It is, rather, because I want to restore the honour of the long-misconstrued right of force that I speak out against the unintelligent, odious application that would be made of it in respect of slavery. What! The working man of the English race, the strong race par excellence, is dying of hunger on the streets of London, so what fate awaits the black man on the streets of Washington and Baltimore?

And:

What needs doing, therefore, is not a pure-and-simple emancipation of the slave; that would be tantamount to displaying him at the Gemonian Stairs. Rather the state must intervene adroitly and impose a serious responsibility upon the master, to make him an educator, a tutor, a patron for the slave, not the consumer of the slave, the property which the right of force made him.

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So here it seems Proudhon is saying with respect to slavery in the South that slavery is reprehensible but abolishing slavery would not itself end the exploitation of slaves but rather transform them into proletariat and, moreover that Europeans on the count of their "superiority of physical, intellectual and moral strength" which Proudhon appears to ascribe to their individual qualities rather than social organization because he says it is "increased tenfold by the social state" rather than facilitated solely by it. And this is connected to the right of force since it means that Europeans have a greater capacity to enslave others than other races. And he proposes that the solution to slavery would not be the turning of slaves to proletariats but rather making their masters responsible for "uplifting slaves".

Is this an accurate understanding of what Proudhon is discussing here?

[u/Haunting_life_Always → u/DecoDecoMan]

I’m not too sure on what the right of forces is about.
On the slavery bit reads like he saying that if slavery is just abolished straight away without any plans put in place
then black people would be worse off than the white proletarian that are starving in the streets, and instead the relationship between the slave master and the slave should be transformed into something like the master and apprentice relationship in the old guild system

[u/DecoDecoMan → u/Haunting_life_Always]

Here is my critique of the section based on my understanding.

First, the position on slavery is an internally contradictory one. Insofar as, in the Federative Principle, Proudhon appears to go backwards on this position with respect to slavery. While Proudhon, nonetheless, remains weird on the topic of race (positing that the black race could, with education, also become equal to the white through "interbreeding"), nonetheless he supports the emancipation of slaves and their taking control of the land under which they had labored along with that of the proletariat. In other words, the mass expropriation of land and the means of production by both slaves and the proletariat.

This is in stark contract with the proposal made in War and Peace wherein Proudhon favors instead for slave masters to take on the role of educators to create equality between white freedmen and slaves. It's almost entirely opposite with exception to education being one cause of equality between African-Americans and white Americans. The remnants of the prior position remain insofar as statelessness and proletarization is viewed as more miserable than even slavery (i.e. "the condition of pariah, to which the Lincoln plan would doom the blacks, would not be worse for that minority race than servitude"). Given that War and Peace was written in 1861 and The Federative Principle was written in 1863, there seems to be a change in heart here but the contradiction ought to be noted.

Second, there are further critiques, on the basis of Proudhon's own ideas presented in War and Peace which can be levied against this position.

For one, the capacity or "right to force" of European societies which allowed for the establishment of slavery cannot be attributed solely to some innate disposition of a race. This is an entirely unsubstantiated position, contradicted by Proudhon's own words here. He, for instance, notes how proletarization has reduced "the working man of the English race" which is "the strong race par excellence" to impoverishment.

If we could attribute the conquest of India by the English to the "superiority of physical, intellectual, and moral strength", to these great powers bestowed by nature onto the English people, something akin to proletarization would not be possible to subject the English to even amongst themselves. Hindsight also shows Proudhon to be wrong as anti-colonial movements of the 20th and 21st century show that the power of Europe is not ironclad and now the continent has become defunct. Even the US, which had remained a global superpower for much of the mid-20th century to the early 21st is declining quite rapidly as a global player.

So what then is the source of Europe's supremacy over the rest of the non-European world? The answer lies in Proudhon's own views within War and Peace.

In War and Peace, Proudhon discusses the circumstances under which communities or States amalgamate and divide from each other. Amalgamation, for Proudhon, occurs as a consequence of increasing interdependence between different communities. He states:

Previously isolated tribes soon come into contact as they expand. Straightforward neighbourly relations, though not yet rights nor conventions, are established; they trade with one other; then, driven by the very same rationale that ensured that they provided services for one another, it turns out that there is a problem, and they notice that their initial independence is daily becoming more and more difficult to maintain until in the end it becomes impossible. Amalgamation or elimination is inevitable.

By virtue of increasing interdependence, communities and the associations of which they are composed find themselves increasingly coordinating more closely with each other, relying more on each other, combining functions, etc. In hierarchical societies, relations are externally constituted by a "head" which serves as the mediator for all social relations underneath it. And there can only be one supreme "head".

In the case of two or more communities that find themselves amalgamating with each other, the heads of each respective side finds itself in opposition to one another. Rather than sharing power, which is at odds with the incentives of their own social positions, they fight. And the community which wins is that which exercises a greater "centre of attraction". Communities themselves are amalgamates of different associations and therefore collective forces.

The higher the complexity of social relationships, their intensity, and overall productivity constitutes what causes one society to win out over the other. Such a society is more likely to win in conflict (i.e. have a greater strength) and, moreover, even if they were lose the war and the lesser attractive force were to take over, these new rulers would become completely captured by the more complex social relations they have acquired. We may observe this with respect to nomadic groups taking over sedentary civilizations.

Within Europe, due to industrialization both in its technological aspects and social aspects, had changed profoundly compared to neighboring non-European societies. Industrialization, through division of labor, specialization, higher geographic concentrations of people, and the growth of powerful collective forces allowed for the creation of a centre of attraction which has outsized the most strongest of these centres that have existed historically.

Compared to human society before industrialization, relations between groups were much more weaker and less interdependent. Rather than large centres of attraction, there were more localized centers. "Subordination" by a head took more the form of a kind of loose taxation rather than direct administration which was not logistically feasible at the time.

With industrialization, what were local centres of attraction or amalgamations that exercised a limited power over other amalgamations became one singular amalgamation. The aristocracy, rather than being independent powers in their own right with their royal household and administration and a soft subordination to the king, increasingly became nothing more than an extension of the king's household. These "national amalgamations" was reflected in increasingly centralized governmentalism.

And the gravity that European nations, as a result of organic solidarity, exercised upon the world did not end there but rather extended to all other parts of the world. Colonization, of all stripes, was preceded by economic relationships. Trade, contracts, the acquisition of property, participation in European financial markets. Non-European societies were sucked in by the attraction of European production, of European collective force, of European collective reason.

It is dubious that this organic solidarity has necessarily lead to the "physical, moral, and intellectual strength" of European people in general. Proudhon treating proletarization as worse than slavery would imply that it did not. That the benefits of this solidarity have been reaped primarily by the capitalists and state authorities who mediate it. However, it explains the "strength" of European society relative to non-European society. It is not as though there is some innate qualities of Europeans that give them strength which the "social state" amplifies. Rather it is the "social state" which gives European society, collectively, strength.

This can be seen in the national liberation movements that followed after World War 2. Proudhon states, when large amalgamations or states break-up, the communities that once were components of it "have a tendency to go their own way, no longer responsive to the attractions of the centre, more to their own particular attractions and revulsions". In other words, the component parts develop their own independent centers of attraction.

In the case of India, the gravity of Britain had diminished due to the aftermath of World War 2. Britain was economically and socially exhausted. What did this mean? It means that its "collective being" had reduced itself in complexity, many associations which comprised it had been destroyed or diminished in the intensity of their relations. This translated into being exhausted militarily as well, into poor finances. Due to the state of their economic relations, the state lacked the money or productive forces to maintain the empire it had built.

In the meantime, India had been industrializing and building its own centre of attraction which cut itself off from Britain. The gravity of India's amalgamation proved stronger than that of Britain's and this is what led to the overall success of India's, as well as many other, anti-colonial movement.

then black people would be worse off than the white proletarian that are starving in the streets, and instead the relationship between the slave master and the slave should be transformed into something like the master and apprentice relationship in the old guild system

I disagree with this as well. In Federative Principle he asserts that slaves should be given control of their master's property. That's far more better as a kind of solution than what Proudhon suggests here which is paternalistic.

[u/DecoDecoMan → u/humanispherian]

Interestingly, Proudhon does seem to cover perhaps a similar question to why the US has failed so spectacularly in the Iran-US war (and in Afghanistan and other Middle Eastern military interventions) in War and Peace.