[668] “Money is simply a supplementary kind of capital, a medium of exchange or a credit instrument. If this is the case what claim has it to payment? To think of remunerating money for the service which it gives!” (Ibid., p. 113.)
[669] Cf. Résumé de la Question sociale, p. 39.
[670] Moreover, the advances will take the form of discount. The entrepreneur who has some scheme which he wishes to carry out “will in the first place collect orders, and on the strength of those orders get hold of some producer or dealer who has such raw material or services at his disposal. Having obtained the goods, he pays for them by means of promissory notes, which the bank, after taking due precaution, will convert into circulation notes.” The consumer is really a sleeping partner in the business, and between him and the entrepreneur there is no need for the intervention of money at all. (Organisation du Crédit, Œuvres, vol. vi, p. 123.) Discount was the fundamental characteristic of the bank, and no criticism is directed against this feature of its operations.
[671] “How to resolve the bourgeoisie and the proletariat into the middle class, the class which lives upon its income and that which draws a salary into a class which has neither revenue nor wages, but lives by inventing and producing valuable commodities to exchange them for others. The middle class is the most active class in society, and is truly representative of a country’s activity. This was the problem in February 1848.” (Révolution démontrée par le Coup d’État, p. 135.)
[672] “Reciprocity means a guarantee on the part of those who exchange commodities to sell at cost price.” (Idée générale de la Révolution, pp. 97-98.)
[673] “The very existence of the State implies antagonism or war as the essential or inevitable condition of humanity, a condition that calls for the intervention of a coercive force which shall put an end to the struggle continually waging between the weak and the strong.” (Voix du Peuple, December 3, 1849; Œuvres, vol. xix, p. 23.) “When economic development has resulted in the transformation of society even despite itself, then the weak and the strong will alike disappear. There will only be workers; and industrial solidarity, and a guarantee that their products will be sold, will tend to make them equal both in capacity and wealth.” (Ibid., p. 18.)
[674] “Consequently we consider ourselves anarchists and we have proclaimed the fact more than once. Anarchy is suitable for an adult society just as hierarchy is for a primitive one. Human society has progressed gradually from hierarchy to anarchy.” (Œuvres, vol. xix, p. 9.) A little later, in Idée générale de la Révolution, he states that the aim of the Revolution was “to build up a property constitution and to dissolve or otherwise cause the disappearance of the political or government system by reducing or simplifying, by decentralising and suppressing the whole machinery of the State.” This idea was borrowed from Saint-Simon, and Proudhon has acknowledged the debt in his Idée générale. This conception of industrial society rendering government useless or reducing it to harmless proportions is a development, though perhaps somewhat extravagant, of the economic Liberalism of J. B. Say. The first edition of the Mémoire sur la Propriété contains an admission of anarchical tendencies. “What are you, then? I am an anarchist.—I understand your doubts on this question. You think that I am against the Government.—That is not so. You asked for my confession of faith. Having duly pondered over it, and although a lover of order, I have come to the conclusion that I am in the fullest sense of the word an anarchist.”
[675] “The whole problem of circulation is how to make the exchange note universally acceptable, how to secure that it shall always be exchangeable for goods and services and convertible at sight.” (Organisation du Crédit, Œuvres, vol. vi, pp. 113, 114.)
[676] Organisation du Crédit.
[677] Proudhon always maintained that his reform merely consisted in transforming a credit sale into a cash one. But he might as well have said that black was white. Far from giving mutual benefit, the borrower will be the one who will gain most advantage. Elsewhere he says that to give credit is merely to exchange. This is true enough, but discount is employed just to equalise different credit transactions.