Exh phplkk

 https://libcom.org/article/pierre-joseph-proudhon-uncomfortable-thinker-nicola-chiaromonte

The claim:

Here is the post the comments was commenting on: https://libcom.org/article/pierre-joseph-proudhon-uncomfortable-thinker-nicola-chiaromonte

Here is the comment: “Proudhon didn't think the working class should organize autonomously, he was against strikes. He (as clarified in the above cited essays, filled with Proudhon's own mad scribblings) advocated the combination of society into one great firm, of which he was to be the head manager. Wow what a great anarchist.”

What the hell is he talking about?

I did find some quotes another user brought up.

"Association – Determine my line of conduct and my plan in advance: utilizing men and sacrificing them as soon as they become an obstacle and don’t work anymore, or as soon as they want to drag the Society along a false road. No politics of liberalism... " [1:270]

"Association – After the first criticisms, carry out the repression of the publications and utopias of the Cabetists, Fourierists and of L'Unité. (...)

Place a prohibition on meetings, banquets, private gatherings, lectures, propaganda, subscriptions, magazines, newspapers and pamphlets." [1:275]

"No compromise with parties: Communists, Fourierists, etc, annihilate around us, or assimilate." [1:270]

"Eliminate men of every opinion, who by manifestations of opinion have pronounced their own downfall. (...)

No hatred! No, no hatred. Eliminate as a matter of principle." [1:283]

"... if I had to sacrifice the human race, I would sacrifice it to what seems the truth to me, and I would take pride in thinking, while making this sacrifice, that I represent humanity by myself alone, and that though losing a million millions of men, nothing has been lost." [1:185]

"The representative of the people – that is Me. For I, I alone, am right." [2:307)

Truth:

I’m not extremely well versed in PJ Proudhon. But I see enough to know he was a socialist who promoted collective managed worker cooperatives. And Mikhail Bakunin and Peter Kropotkin each cited Proudhon as a huge influence. Were they attempting to take over the world also? I very much doubt it. These quotes are likely taken out of context.

There is a tradition as old as Marxism itself where Marxists and other enemies of anarchism use out-of-context scraps from PJ Proudhon's private notebooks to label his work and anarchism more in the  general sense. Sometimes particularly sectarian anarchists join the action as well.

All of these things are actually defined by the messiness. It is generally forwarded by people who don't know jack about Proudhon and pointed it toward an audience that is likewise ignorant. 

Hardly any critics seem to have even read the notebooks for themselves. If they did so, they would have found out that Proudhon, who engaged in way little self-censorship in those notebooks, discussed quite a range of often extreme thoughts—typically in such fragmentary form that forming any conclusions from his entries is next to impossible. 

Had it served the interests of PJ’s critics who did even consult the notebooks to frame Proudhon as too revolutionary or too respectful of "the People," they might have cherry-picked a selection not unlike that one.

The critics also seem to me to demonstrate an ignorance of the published works by Proudhon, which would appear to be simple for anyone to consult, now being nearly fully on the internet—the critical exception really being the notebooks. If they had knowledge of the published works, they would come to the conclusion that enough about Proudhon's at times shifting ideas and his characteristic m.o of using language to understand simply how puny their attempt at dismissal actually is.

This stuff simply isn't serious.