One concept that Proudhon makes much of in various works, but that other mutualists did not consider especially important, is the concept of collective force. The concept, according to Proudhon, is the corollary of the division of labor. Or rather, he thinks the division of labor is the corollary of collective force. Because two persons working together can often accomplish more than a single person working twice as long, there is an additional productivity gain. This applies both to specific industrial projects and to economic production within society. Recently, a group of revisionist historians have claimed that this neglected concept is the most important key concept in mutualism.
Far from this being true, all English-speaking mutualists either did not know this idea or, if they did, did not consider it especially important. Even those who took their inspiration from Proudhon thought that some of his other ideas were much more important and never, or hardly ever, referenced the idea of collective force.
Beginning with Josiah Warren, he does not use the term “collective force” in any of his works, nor does he make use of the concept by any other name. His disciple Stephen Pearl Andrews is the same. If collective force is the fundamental concept of mutualism then Warren and Andrews were not mutualists. As Proudhon’s thought began to be brought to the English-language audience, did the situation change and collective force become a well-known and important concept? It did not.
The earliest important statement of Proudhon’s ideas in English are “Proudhon and His ‘Bank of the People,’” a series of articles written in 1849 by Charles Dana for the weekly periodical The Spirit of the Age. In it, Dana recounts Proudhon’s views on property, labor, capital, credit, money, and banking, all without reference to the idea of collective force, whether by name or otherwise. Dana’s account of what was important to take from Proudhon remained the standard for all American mutualists for the next 50 years and really until the 1990s.
The next important mention of Proudhon in American circles does not occur until 1873. Throughout the year a 19-year old radical had been arguing in a Free Religionist periodical The Index in support of Josiah Warren’s idea that goods and services should be sold at cost and therefore that profit and interest were morally wrong. Tucker faced pushback by multiple others who, while radical on the religion question, were not quite so radical on the economic.
In October of that year, the editor of The Index, Francis Ellingwood Abbot wrote “The justice of taking interest, of charging profit, of levying rent, and of demanding wages, depends on the answer to be given to a deeper question than Mr. Tucker has yet considered namely.—has anybody a right to say he owns anything? Did he ever reflect that to challenge the right to make a reasonable profit is at bottom to challenge the right to own property of any sort? By what right does the seller charge even cost to the purchaser? Why is not property common to all? Why was not Proudhon right when he declared all property robbery? Mr. Tucker does not seem to be aware that when he denies all right to take interest, he logically denies all right to demand wages or even to charge original cost; for he is in fact denying the right to property itself, and should plant himself on the most extreme ultra communism.”
In response to this article by Abbot, the American mutualist Ezra Heywood wrote to fellow mutualist William Batchelder Greene to explain what Proudhon had meant by “Property is robbery.” Greene knew French and had personally met Proudhon. Greene responded to Heywood and provided him with a translation of the pages of What is Property? that Greene thought were most relevant to the question.
Thus satisfied, in December, Heywood wrote “Mr. Abbot shares the common misapprehension of the great French labor reformer’s property idea which we shall explain in our next, by asking Proudhon to speak for himself.”
To give the principal idea of Proudhon regarding property then, in January 1974, the first partial translation of Proudhon’s What Is Property appeared in English. The translation was accompanied by footnotes from Greene and the explanatory letter by Greene giving his understanding of Proudhon’s meaning.
Included in the translation given by Greene is a statement of ten principles of Proudhon. The fourth of these reads “All human labor being the result of a collective force property becomes for that reason, collective and undivided: or, in more exact terms, labor undermines and destroys property (by transferring it from the individual to society).” No mention is made of the concept of collective force in Greene’s explanatory article, but he does write “Proudhon’s ten propositions, although plain enough to you and to Josiah Warren, will inevitably appear to the uninitiated reader, obscure—not to say, muddy. They are in fact, muddy. Why Proudhon gives the answer when he says, that, ‘before HIS REASON was competent to comprehend it God had put the sentiment of justice into HIS HEART.’ Proudhon wrote these ten propositions without having any practical methods of application present to his mind. It was not until several years after he wrote his book on ‘property,’ that he suspected the feasibility of transforming property into possession by a simple reform of the circulating medium—by a transfiguration of MONEY.”
This sequence of events made an impression on the young Benjamin Tucker, who had started this controversy, and he began to read Proudhon’s works for himself in the original French. Enthused with what he was reading, Tucker asked Greene if Greene would translate more of Proudhon’s work into English, in order to give them the wider audience Tucker thought they deserved. Greene replied “why don’t you” and so Tucker translated and published What is Property? in 1876.
Now in What is Property? the concept of collective force is stated and some considerable emphasis is laid upon it, and it appears in Tucker’s translation. In a review of the translation, published in The National Quarterly Review, the anonymous reviewer gives a lot of space and importance to Proudhon’s concept of collective force.
The lack of sales of the translation however was disappointing for Tucker. It did not prove popular enough to warrant further translation efforts. In 1881 he therefore endeavored to put what he understood to be Proudhon’s most important ideas in his own words and thus started Liberty, which ran until 1908 and quickly became the most important discussion forum for mutualists in the world.
It is therefore interesting that Benjamin Tucker, who must have been familiar with Proudhon’s concept of collective force, never uses the phrase, even a single time throughout the entire run of Liberty. Nor does he use a different phrase for the same concept. And not only does Tucker not do so, but none of the myriad of other mutualist contributors ever do so. In addition, in none of the books spawned by Liberty such as Swartz’s What Is Mutualism? or Tandy’s Voluntary Socialism or Robinson’s The Economics of Liberty does the phrase or concept appear.
Since the birth of anarcho-capitalism in the 1950s, the number of mutualists remaining has been dwarfed by anarchists who favor capitalism. The single work which has essentially revived mutualism in the 21st century is Studies in Mutualist Political Economy by Kevin Carson and published in 2005. This work lays out the traditional mutualist understanding of economics and responds to criticism that had been made by Rothbard. The book nowhere mentions collective force.
Where then does the idea that this concept of collective force, which hardly spoken of in historical mutualist thought, come to be thought of as essential to it?
In 1910 the French Sociologist Célestin Bouglé wrote an article “Proudhon the Sociologist,” in which he wrote, “Which theories do we call sociological theories? Those that share this premise: from the meeting of individual units there results an original reality, something greater than and different to their mere sum. Arguably no thinker has made greater use of this premise than Proudhon… as early as his first memoir on property, Proudhon exploits the distinction between the collective force and the sum of the individual forces; he would go so far as to declare that this distinction is the cornerstone of his thought.”
Bouglé appears to have had no connection to the mutualist movement. Since then, in French sociologist circles, this has come to be a popular understanding of Proudhon.
In the English language in modern times, there are two persons most responsibly for trying to emphasize collective force as the central idea of mutualism. They are the communist Iain McKay, primary author of the 1996 An Anarchist FAQ. And Shawn Wilbur, the only other modern mutualist of note aside from Kevin Carson.
The conclusion is therefore inevitable that the concept of collective force and especially its importance is an idiosyncrasy of Proudhon’s and not shared by the rest of the historical mutualist movement. Those who became aware of Proudhon’s work did not hold the idea of collective force to be of especial importance. Proudhon was appreciated for other ideas instead, especially his banking reform proposals.
In addition to the lack of historical interest in collective force, if you want to learn about its irrelevance for economic and political solutions check out our video “Marginalist Economics: The Completion of Anarchism.”