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Adam Smith: I am Adam Smith, author of The Wealth of Nations and The Theory of Moral Sentiments, professor of moral philosophy at the University of Glasgow, and I am here today to discuss what the twenty-first century has decided to call microlooting, which I am given to understand means stealing, performed by people who have taken considerable care to ensure that the word stealing no longer applies to them.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: I am Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, son of a barrel-maker, former typesetter, author of What is Property, the man who answered that question honestly when everyone else was too comfortable to do it, and I am here to note that the corporations currently being relieved of their organic produce at the self-checkout kiosk have been relieving their workers of something considerably more substantial for considerably longer. Before we discuss who is stealing from whom, let us be precise about who started it.
Adam Smith: The argument that property is theft, which my colleague introduced to the world with considerable fanfare in 1840, is one of those formulations that sounds penetrating precisely because it drains words of their meaning. Theft, by definition, requires that property exist in order to violate it. You cannot steal what belongs to no one. The formulation is not a paradox, it is a grammatical sleight of hand, and it is the kind of sleight of hand that, once dressed in revolutionary language and repeated with sufficient passion, has a reliable historical tendency to leave the people it claims to help considerably worse off than they were before the helping began.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: You have spent two centuries being selectively quoted, Monsieur Smith, and I have some sympathy for that, because I have also spent two centuries being selectively quoted. But at least my misreaders have the excuse that my argument requires genuine thought to follow, whereas your misreaders simply want permission to call their own appetite for profit a form of social contribution and go home to dinner. The invisible hand you described is invisible because it does not exist. What exists is a very visible hand, attached to a very comfortable factory owner, reaching into the wage packet of the person who built the thing the factory owner is about to sell at a price the worker cannot afford.
Adam Smith: Justice, I wrote in The Theory of Moral Sentiments, is the pillar that holds up the whole edifice of human society. Remove it, and the great, the immense fabric of human society must in a moment crumble into atoms. I was not speaking poetically. Commerce requires trust, and trust requires that a man who produces something may reasonably expect to keep it. The moment we decide that the moral permissibility of theft depends on the relative wealth of the person being stolen from, we have not reformed property law. We have simply decided that property law is a courtesy we extend to people we have not yet decided to dislike.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: And here is where I will give you full credit, Monsieur Smith, for something you observed exactly right and your admirers have spent three centuries quietly burying. You knew that merchants and manufacturers conspired against the public. You wrote it with your own hand. You wrote that people of the same trade seldom meet together but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public. You built the house, Monsieur Smith. You identified the rot in the timber and pointed at the load-bearing walls, and then the people who moved in after you locked the workers in the cellar, charged them rent for the privilege, and sent you a grateful letter for the architectural drawings.
Adam Smith: I am told that intellectual honesty requires each of us to present the other’s position in its strongest form before proceeding to explain why it is mistaken. I will do that, though I confess the exercise feels somewhat like being asked to describe the quality of the fire before noting that one’s house is burning. Proudhon argues, and not without a certain blunt logic, that the existing system of property relations was not handed down by natural law but was constructed by those who already held power, that wage labor contains an inherent asymmetry that systematically transfers value from those who create it to those who own the conditions under which it is created, and that what the law calls theft is therefore often the correction of a prior theft that has been laundered through legislation into the appearance of legitimacy. That is the steelmanned version of his argument. It is wrong. But it is not stupid, which is considerably more than I can say for most of the people currently repeating it while pocketing artisanal cheese from a self-checkout machine.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Fine. I will do the same, though I want it noted that I find the exercise somewhat degrading, like being asked to write a favorable account of one’s own prison. Smith argues that private property and free exchange, despite their evident imperfections, generate prosperity that no serious alternative has matched in practice, that the division of labor expands productive capacity in ways that benefit even those at the bottom of the economic order more than any pre-market arrangement managed to do, that the rule of law protecting property is not a conspiracy of the comfortable but the foundation that makes any accumulation possible and therefore any redistribution of it possible, and that you cannot share what the system has not first produced. That is what Smith believes. It is not entirely without merit, which is precisely what makes it so dangerous, because a bad argument can be dismissed quickly, while a partially correct argument must be wrestled with at length. I intend to wrestle this one until it submits or I do, and I want you to know that I am not the submitting type.
Adam Smith: Now. I understand we are here in part because a young man who resides in a home valued at two point seven million dollars in West Hollywood, California recently appeared on a New York Times podcast and declared to the listening public that he is, and I quote him directly, pro-stealing from big corporations, that he would steal from the Louvre if the logistics permitted, and that he would pirate a car if pirating a car were as easy as pirating a digital file. I want to note something about this young man’s situation that I find particularly instructive. He did not inherit his fortune. He did not collect land rents. He did not, as far as I am able to determine, exploit a single factory worker. He built his wealth because hundreds of thousands of people voluntarily chose to pay him a monthly subscription fee to watch him discuss politics on the internet. They were not coerced. They were not deceived. The invisible hand, which my colleague assures us does not exist, reached into the pockets of a willing audience and transferred their money to him because they found him entertaining. He is, in the most precise sense I can manage, a product of everything he claims to oppose, and I want to say that I find this not outrageous but deeply, deeply clarifying.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: I need to be extremely clear about this Piker, because I have what I can only describe as complicated and largely furious feelings about the man. He is not wrong that corporations extract surplus value from workers. He is not wrong that wage theft, by any honest accounting, dwarfs retail theft by every measurable order of magnitude. He is not wrong that the legal system protects the systematic appropriation of the wealthy while criminalizing the desperation of the poor. On the substance, he has stumbled onto positions I arrived at through decades of serious work and at least two prison sentences. But here is what makes him additionally infuriating, beyond the mansion, beyond the performance: his wealth does not even come from the kind of exploitation I spent my life describing. Nobody coerced his audience. Nobody extracted surplus value from his Twitch subscribers. Millions of people opened their wallets and voluntarily handed him money in exchange for entertainment, which is, I am enraged to report, almost exactly the kind of free and voluntary exchange that Adam Smith considers the foundation of a functioning economy. The man has used my philosophy to justify stealing lemons while accidentally proving Smith’s philosophy by becoming rich. I find this so specifically irritating that I am going to need to collect myself before I say something that a lawyer would advise against.
Adam Smith: I find it almost touching that this makes you angry. The man has taken the work of your entire intellectual life and converted it into a content strategy for a streaming platform. You wrote What is Property to overturn the philosophical foundations of political economy. He has deployed it to justify not paying for grapes at a machine. I think you must admit, if only quietly to yourself, that this represents a certain efficiency of adaptation. I do not admire it. But I recognize it.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Do not sit there and compliment the efficiency of my own degradation, Monsieur Smith. I spent time in prison for these ideas. The nephew of Napoleon Bonaparte had me imprisoned. I did not arrive at my positions from a comfortable professorial chair with a government appointment and a mother who organized my household. I arrived at them from the print shop floor, from the position of a man who understood from lived experience what it means when the legal system decides your labor is worth whatever the man who owns your workplace decides it is worth on a given morning. Hasan Piker cheapens the argument. But you, Monsieur Smith, created the conditions the argument exists to address. These are related problems, and I would like you to understand that I hold you responsible for both.
Adam Smith: I am genuinely sorry to hear about the prison. It does sound unpleasant. I note, however, that after your years of principled suffering and authentic working-class formation, you have arrived at a set of conclusions that are, in practical terms, functionally indistinguishable from those a man reached after a thirty-five minute podcast recording in a two point seven million dollar house with an excellent view of the Pacific Ocean. I raise this only because I think it is an interesting philosophical data point, and I would hate for either of us to overlook it.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: What the prison contributed, you self-satisfied monument to the professional classes, is the understanding that these are not abstract puzzles. Systems of thought have consequences. When you construct an intellectual architecture that justifies extraction, real people experience the result not as a theoretical proposition but as the actual conditions of their actual lives, and sometimes people living under those conditions long enough reach a point where they are no longer interested in the philosophical fine points of property theory and become interested in something considerably more direct. I am not describing anything specific. I am observing a pattern that history has documented very thoroughly. It is a consistent pattern. It does not end well for the people who are confident the pillar is holding.
Adam Smith: You are, of course, not describing anything specific. You are simply noting, in the most measured and scholarly possible terms, that people who have been sufficiently exploited have historically tended toward a certain type of response, and that you personally find this pattern worth raising at this particular moment in this particular conversation with someone you disagree with quite strongly. I want to say that I find that observation entirely reassuring, and I mean that with complete sincerity, and I hope the sincerity is audible.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: A system that produces Hasan Piker as its most prominent critic and Adam Smith as its most prominent defender deserves every lemon that walks out of every Whole Foods in America, and I am telling you that your polite and orderly framework has produced a world in which a man worth millions is considered a voice of radical resistance, in which the most transgressive act available to ordinary people is apparently shoplifting fruit, in which the New York Times hosts a podcast about whether theft is acceptable and nobody seems to notice that the actual theft, the systematic, legalized, daily theft from workers, is not being debated at all. I am not advocating for random shoplifting. I am identifying the system that turned a lemon into a political object. And if that makes you uncomfortable, Monsieur Smith, then perhaps your pillar is not quite as solid as you have spent your career insisting!
Adam Smith: You are raising your voice now, which I anticipated and which rather proves the point! The argument begins in paradox, proceeds through mounting personal agitation, and arrives at volume as a substitute for demonstration! A theory of political economy cannot be evaluated by the temperature at which its advocates discuss it! That is not philosophy! That is a fever!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: THE FEVER IS APPROPRIATE! THE PATIENT IS THE ENTIRE SYSTEM OF CAPITALIST PROPERTY RELATIONS AND IT HAS BEEN RUNNING A TEMPERATURE FOR CENTURIES!
Adam Smith: THE PATIENT IS PEOPLE STEALING LEMONS AND CALLING IT A MANIFESTO!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: THE LEMONS REPRESENT THE SYSTEMATIC EXTRACTION OF SURPLUS VALUE!
Adam Smith: THE LEMONS REPRESENT LEMONS!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: EVERYTHING UNDER THIS SYSTEM REPRESENTS SOMETHING BEYOND ITSELF!
Adam Smith: INCLUDING APPARENTLY A TWO POINT SEVEN MILLION DOLLAR MANSION REPRESENTING THE DIGNITY OF THE WORKING CLASS!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: LEAVE THE MANSION OUT OF THIS!
Adam Smith: I WILL NOT LEAVE THE MANSION OUT OF THIS!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: THE MANSION IS NOT THE ARGUMENT!
Adam Smith: THE MANSION IS ENTIRELY THE ARGUMENT!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: PROPERTY IS THEFT!
Adam Smith: THEFT IS THEFT!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: ALL PROPERTY!
Adam Smith: ALL THEFT!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: THE WHOLE SYSTEM!
Adam Smith: IS CIVILIZATION!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: IS VIOLENCE!
Adam Smith: GOOD DAY TO YOU, SIR!
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: YOU WILL KNOW WHEN I AM FINISHED WITH THIS CONVERSATION!
Adam Smith: I want to thank you for watching PhilosophersTalk, and I hope you will like and subscribe before my colleague determines that the subscriber list itself constitutes a form of private property subject to immediate collective redistribution. I will say in closing that it has been a genuine intellectual experience debating a man who dedicated his life to arguing that property is theft, while simultaneously maintaining, I am reliably informed, an extremely firm position on who held the copyright to his books. I mention this not to be unkind. I mention it because I think it is, in the current context, philosophically quite funny, and I believe the audience deserves to have it pointed out by someone with the appropriate detachment.
Pierre-Joseph Proudhon: Please like and subscribe to PhilosophersTalk, and please reflect that the previous remarks come from a man whose landmark account of market economics drew substantially on the prior work of Francis Hutcheson, Bernard Mandeville, and David Hume, scholars he studied under, learned from, and cited at somewhat less length than the originality of his reputation might lead you to expect. I do not say he stole these ideas. I say only that the division of intellectual labor, in his own framework, is a mechanism that tends to concentrate recognition at the top while distributing the effort more broadly below. I find this, in the present context, a remarkably precise illustration of my general thesis. Like the video. Subscribe to the channel. And please, visit AITalkerApp.com, because at least that website is honest about what it is producing and who deserves credit for it.
