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Yeah, I noticed the context. This is the guy who coined the phrase, "property is theft".

And actually, he is exactly talking about 'camping in a natural park':

> Let us complete the argument of M. Ch. Comte. A man who should be prohibited from walking in the highways, from resting in the fields, from taking shelter in caves, from lighting fires, from picking berries, from gathering herbs and boiling them in a bit of baked clay, — such a man could not live.

If 'a man' is free to do what he describes above, the ultimate basic human life, then he is free. You're adding onto that, somehow claiming Proudhon is also advocating for a free life with creature comforts. Proudhon is describing the basic freedom that someone without money and without assets should be able to exercise in the world - they can move about, they can sleep in a field, gather naturally growing wild food, and cook over a fire. He is absolutely not talking about some 'minimum level of comfort' that the rest of the world owes them.




The confusion here is that you're interpreting him as intending to say that man should only have those rights, but Proudhon already knows about those rights, those rights existed in his time too - yet he clearly thought there was some issue with property. So to him, and many others in that tradition, the question of freedom is not simply answered by the ability to camp in natural parks and walk on roads. Both the title of the work and its argument against property in general, not to mention the second paragraph I quoted shows that he clearly has an issue with property, not merely private appropriation of the public goods he mentioned.

Proudhon's theory of mutualism entails only usufructary use of property, that is to say, only property in possession rather than a title to land in perpetuity to do what you want with it. The theory doesn't see it as a good way to run society to profit from loans and rent.

If you had any more doubt about Proudhon's direction:

>But property, in its derivative sense, and by the definitions of law, is a right outside of society; for it is clear that, if the wealth of each was social wealth, the conditions would be equal for all, and it would be a contradiction to say: Property is a man’s right to dispose at will of social property. Then if we are associated for the sake of liberty, equality, and security, we are not associated for the sake of property; then if property is a natural right, this natural right is not social, but anti-social. Property and society are utterly irreconcilable institutions. It is as impossible to associate two proprietors as to join two magnets by their opposite poles. Either society must perish, or it must destroy property.




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