Property is Theft

Discipline: Political Science

Argument of French anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809-1865).

In translation the claim is self-contradictory, since without the concept of property 'theft' is meaningless.

What Proudhon meant was that purely legal ownership without any of the responsibilities which went with it was a theft from those who actually worked the land, or the raw materials, from which the owners profited.

Source:
George Woodcock, Anarchism (Harmondsworth, 1963)

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