“Property is theft”
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Today’s Times is reporting this story under the headline “ALL PROPERTY IS THEFT SO I MAY AS WELL STEAL THESE SUNGLASSES”, starting:
“In the mid-19th century the French socialist and anarchist philosopher Pierre-Joseph Proudhon declared that property was theft.
Nearly two centuries later the leader of Norway’s rising Marxist party seems to have taken this maxim to heart, expropriating a pair of sunglasses from the duty-free section at Oslo airport.”Moxness is the leader of the Red Party which the paper describes as “boasting of a Trotskyite wing and an explicit commitment to communism in its programme”. It has 8 of the 169 seats in the 169 in the Norwegian parliament.
Proudhon did say “property is theft” but he was no socialist. By this he meant that property bringing in an income as rent or interest was theft. Small-scale property ownership by independent producers or co-operatives was alright and his anarchist ideal was a stateless market economy in which such producers bought and sold each other’s commodities. He was in fact an outspoken opponent of the common ownership of productive resources and production directly for use.
According to this, the Red Party is the political descendant of a Maoist group:
https://jacobin.com/2021/09/norway-election-red-party-labor-bjornar-moxnes-billionaires
The party’s programme does say that its ultimate aim is a classless society based on “from each according to ability, to each according to need” adding “what Marx called communism”. In the meantime there are plenty of reforms to pursue as well state capitalism called “socialism”. Which of course is Lenin not Marx.
Proudhon has been called the father of Anarchism, but he held the same view of Henry George
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