Property is Theft
According to Proudhon, the aim of economics is justice (1846, II: 510). The first question is that of property. To justify its existence, liberals maintained that the basis of property is labour.
Charles Comte (1834, I: 61) justified this statement, writing that labour was a pain to which people voluntarily submit themselves only in order to obtain its fruits. Proudhon objected, one cannot justify in this way the appropriation of natural resources. People who cleared land, improved and cultivated it, have the property of the products of their labour, but not of land itself. “To whom belongs the rent of land? To be sure, to the producer of land. Who made the land? God. In this case, landowner, go away” (Proudhon 1839: 70).However, if one admits, with Comte (1834, I: 60), that the values a man created can only belong to him, how is it possible to maintain that the value of the products made by the workers do not belong entirely to them? How can Comte affirm that, if the workers increase the value of a piece of land by clearing it, “it is paid to them with the food they get and the price of their working days: land becomes the property of the capitalist”? (ibid.: 155-6) It is true that the capitalist who advanced the raw products and the subsistence of the workers should have a part of the product. However, this right does not suppress that of the workers: “the worker keeps a natural right on the property of the product he made, even after the payment of his wage” (Proudhon 1839: 90).
For Proudhon, “property is theft”, but it has a function: if men had benefited from the progress of their productivity, they had soon ceased to work. “Man must work! It is for this purpose that theft... was instituted, organized, sanctified! If the owner had become tired to take, the proletarian had soon become tired to produce” (Proudhon 1846, II: 517).