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Title: Joseph DĂ©jacque Author: Nick Heath Date: December 28, 2017 Language: en Topics: Joseph DĂ©jacque, libertarian, anarcho-communism Source: Retrieved on 2020-04-10 from https://www.anarchistcommunism.org/2017/12/28/joseph-dejacque/
We reproduce here a brief excerpt taken from the projected book The
Idea: Anarchist Communism Past, Present and Future written by Nick
Heath. The text below describes how Joseph DĂ©jacque was the first person
to use the word libertarian as a term interchangeable with anarchist.
Nick Heath also outlines how DĂ©jacque was an early and significant
theorist of communist anarchism.
The first two chapters of The Idea are currently available in full on
Libcom.org.
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Joseph DĂ©jacque also participated in the 1848 events as well as in the
insurrection the following year. In often extremely violent and poetic
language, he attacked religion, property, the family and the State, and
advocated action by small groups who would hasten the end of the old
hierarchical order.
The massacres of June 1848 brought him not only to a rejection of
exploitation and economic privilege, but equally to a rejection of all
forms of authority. In exile in the States he produced a journal in
French, Le Libertaire, the first recorded use of the term libertarian as
an alternative to that of anarchist.
He continued the trailblazing work of the Humanitaire Group in his
development of a kind of anarchist communism –“the anarchist community”
(communauté anarchique). He rejected the strategy of Blanquism with its
secret societies. Unlike Proudhon, he was able to reject the idea of the
family. Indeed, he was able to offer fraternal criticisms of Proudhon
himself, for his failure to carry his thoughts through to their ultimate
conclusion.
He rejects Proudhon’s mutualism as much as he rejects the Statism of the
inheritors of the Jacobin tradition. In reply to Proudhon’s belief in
the individual ownership of the products of labour, DĂ©jacque replied
that “it is not the product of his or her labour that the worker has a
right to, but to the satisfaction of his or her needs, whatever may be
their nature”(“l’Echange”, article in Le Libertaire no 6, September 21,
1858, New York). It is true that he owed a great debt to Fourier, – and
this becomes apparent in his pamphlet L’Humanisphere: utopie anarchique
– but his Fourierism is one stripped of all its reformist and
authoritarian traits and he often makes criticisms of the prophet of
social harmony.
He may be correctly cited as one of the grandfathers of anarchist
communism, his project of collective class emancipation was linked to
complete liberty for the individual, thus being one of the first to
re-define communism in opposition to the authoritarian concepts of Cabet
et al.
Importantly, in opposition to Proudhon, he was deeply concerned with
linking the emancipation of women to that of the working class.
Castigating Proudhon for his rampant misogyny he was to say:
“Is it possible, great publicist, that under your lion’s skin so much of
the ass may be found?…Father Proudhon, shall I say it? When you talk of
women you appear like a college boy who talks very loudly and in a high
key, at random and with impertinence, in order to appear learned, as you
do to your callow hearers, and who like you knows not the first thing of
the matter he is talking about …Listen, Master Proudhon! Before you talk
of woman, study her; go to school.”
“Stop calling yourself an anarchist, or be an anarchist clear through.
Talk to us, if you wish to, of the unknown and the known, of God who is
evil, of property which is robbery; but when you talk of man do not make
him an autocratic divinity, for I will answer you that man is evil.
Attribute not to him a stock of intelligence which belongs to him only
by right of conquest, by the commerce of love, by usury on the capital
that comes entirely from woman and is the product of the soul within
her. Dare not to attribute to him that which he has derived from another
or I will answer you in your own words: “Property is robbery!” …Raise
your voice, on the contrary, against the exploitation of woman by man”.
…”centre right anarchist, liberal and not libertarian you want free
trade for cotton and the candle, and you advocate protective systems of
man against woman in the movement of human passions; you shout against
the barons of capital, and you want to rebuild the high barony of male
over female vassal; … ” (On The Human Being, Male and Female, 1857).