THE PRINCIPLE OF HOPE

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1846, but above all in his major work ‘On Justice in Revolution and in the Church’, 1858, Proudhon develops this notion of ‘consistent future harmony’. It will bring a
social existence which has found its centre, its middle class, and runs as smoothly here as a wheel around a hub; it will bring a society without friction, therefore without
power, and therefore without a state. All this is constructed on the basis of the two ‘axioms’: on the individual independence of the producers conceived as smallholders
and petit bourgeois; on the reciprocal appreciation of the individual and of the mutualité or mutual aid which springs from it. Private property, which is derived from the
axiom of the self­satisfied individual just as much as it guarantees this individual freedom again, must of course be purified. It is polluted firstly by the phenomenon of
minted money, and secondly by the interest on capital loans. Both desecrations of private property are to be remedied by means of an extensive social credit, precisely
in the spirit of mutual aid. To be more exact: in the shape of an exchange bank which issues circulation vouchers instead of money, to the value of the goods deposited.
Proudhon's utopia thus seeks to abolish capitalism and the proletariat at one and the same time, and hence not first capitalism for example (by proletarian action), and
then the proletariat (by the self­cancellation of this final class into the classless society). But a levelling or harmony of the centre occurs: the bourgeoisie and proletariat
dissolve into the petit propriétaire rural ou industriel. Marx once speaks of the petit bourgeoisie as the stratum in which the contradictions of two classes simultaneously
blunt one another: this very situation is immortalized in Proudhon's ideal, the de­proletarianized, de­capitalized centre. Or as Marx said more specifically of Proudhon
and his proclaimed ‘equality of possessions’: he removes national­economic alienation within — national­economic alienation. Though anarchy in particular certainly
does not remove all contradictions, namely that of the bourgeois bough on which it is sitting and which it is sawing off at the same time. The anarchists do of course
reject the external features of bourgeois justice: state constraint and laws, but they allow its internal essence to persist: the free contract between independent producers
or those feigned to be independent. This becomes very clear in the case of Proudhon in particular, as the theorist of the ‘lone individual and his association’; in the case
of Bakunin or Kropotkin this sort of thing is blurred in the larger world of fire or love. Proudhon, in his ‘General Idea of the Revolution’, declares at one point: ‘I want a
contract and not laws; in order for me to be free, the whole social edifice must be rebuilt on the basis of the mutual contract’ (p. 138). Later however,