V.

What are the results of these revolutions in industrial methods, and

what are their tendencies?

Machinery is more and more seizing upon all industries, and, instead

of making use of his tool, the laborer is the servant of the machine.

The relative ease of work of this kind makes it possible to substitute

unskilled labor for skilled labor, women and children for men. By thus

throwing men out of work, the instrument of labor lowers wages and

expropriates the laborer from his means of existence. This machinery,

thanks to which the genius of Aristotle foresaw the possibility of the

emancipation of the slave, has as yet been merely a cause of

enslavement, and just as man is moulded by the economic environment

which is his own work, he is here enslaved by his own product.

With the extension of the system of mechanical industry, the product

ceases more and more to be the work of an individual. The individual

by himself alone no longer makes a product, but a fraction of a

product, and the owner no longer works with his instrument of labor,

or, in other words, uses his property himself, but turns this task

over to a certain number of laborers, to a group of wage-slaves. Thus,

when the possessor of a hand-saw works with it, the owner uses his

own property; with the machine-saw, it is used not by the owner, but

by the laborers, whom he has to employ to operate it. While the

operation of the means of production so largely augmented requires the

common action of a host of workers, the undertakings and

establishments grow to such dimensions that the vast sums of capital

necessary for their conduct are not to be found in the hands of a

single capitalist. Having become too gigantic for a single capitalist,

the title or nominal ownership of these means of production, and along

with it the profits, passes from the individual capitalist to an

association of capitalists, to a company of stockholders. This company

actually has, considered as a collective body, a particular tangible

property; but what does this property represent for each individual

shareholder? A fiction. The individual stockholder cannot lay his

finger upon any particular material object and say: that is mine.

While the means of production are thus ceasing to be in the strict

sense private property, and require for their actual operation a

collective body of laborers, while the product is becoming a social

product, the owners of the means of production and the products, are

becoming shareholders, and thus ceasing to perform any useful

function, to have any real utility. The success of a business in

former times depended upon the energy and skill of its proprietor,

just as it sometimes does to-day in small manufacturing or mercantile

establishments. Since the introduction of stock companies, the

producing organism is no longer affected by the personal traits of

those who own it; it does not know the shareholder, the present

multiple proprietor, any more than the latter knows his property; it

functions independently of him, and does not feel his influence, so

that even a change of ownership has no effect upon it. The former

functions of the proprietor are at the present time performed by

wage-workers, trained engineers or managers, more or less well paid,

but still wage-workers. In place of the managing proprietor, we have

then a salaried manager, and he is a better manager because he is only

a salaried employee, as M. de Molinari admits, when he writes: "All

that is requisite is for him to possess the ability, knowledge and

character demanded for his functions, and these are all qualities

which are more easily and cheaply obtained on the market, divorced

from capital than united to it."[5]

Not only is the proprietary class, "the haves," losing all social

utility, but, more than this, it is becoming baneful through its

exclusive pre-occupation with personal profits. Baneful it is

henceforth for all branches of social production which the mad and

unorganized pursuit of profits subjects to disastrous perturbations,

to periodical crises swamping the market and lasting amid failures and

shut-downs until the outlets for goods once more open up; baneful for

all the workers, worked to utter exhaustion in periods of business

activity and reduced to wretched poverty in periods of industrial

depression, during which they suffer from want of everything, because

there is, relatively to the purchasing power of the people, too much

of everything--(here we see once more the creator dominated by the

creation, the producers by their products, just as in the cases

formerly noticed of the human intelligence and the economic

environment, of the machine and the workman); baneful for all

consumers, who are victims of the adulteration of products begotten by

the mad strife for gain; baneful for the petty capitalists, the small

producers in constant danger of bankruptcy and ruin through the

intensity of the war of competition which always results in the

victory of the great capitalists or the great combinations of capital

(trusts, etc.).

To recapitulate, our economic movement tends toward labor in common,

since the operation of the means of production is passing from the

working-proprietor to a collective group of laborers, and toward the

elimination of the mode or form of private or individual ownership of

the means of production, since the nominal property in them is passing

from the individual proprietor to a collective body of shareholders

(stock-company or trust). It also tends to leave the proprietary class

no useful role or function, thus making them for the future not only

superfluous, but baneful.

At the same time that the organization of labor adapted to the present

form and state of the productive forces is escaping from the hands of

the proprietary class and is thus the signal that the close of its

historic career is at hand, it is concentrating and organizing men

everywhere in the same way that it concentrates material wealth. It

brings the laborers together and leads them, through their identity in

position and interests, to combine in groups or unions, it constitutes

them into a class more and more conscious of its situation,

disciplines their masses systematically arranged and graded in each

industrial establishment, and fashions out of their own ranks an

intellectual aristocracy upon which devolves the function of

super-intending and managing all industries.

And while the individual form of their petty tools or instruments of

labor, and their mode of production which keeps them in independent

isolation, engender in the workers in petty industries ideas too

individualistic and egoistic, wherever modern mechanical industry has

already wrested from the laborer his tool and transformed it into a

mechanical apparatus effacing individuality from the labor-process,

wherever individual labor merges into and blends with collective

labor, wherever the technical processes are such that the task of each

is of service only through the participation (co-operation) of all,

and is itself the condition of the performance of the collective task,

the strictly individualistic tendencies of the producers in the petty

industries are replaced by the spirit of solidarity, which, with the

progress of industrial development, is leading--nay, forcing the

working class every day more and more toward socialist ideas, ideas

which spring from the material necessities which inexorably force

their way into the minds of men.

These are facts against which our personal preferences are of no

avail. The material and intellectual elements of the collective (or

co-operative) form of production, elaborated by the capitalist regime,

are thus developing more and more every day, and socialism is, you

see, the natural consequence of existent conditions. It is not

something imported from abroad and added to our social movement,

neither is it an article of export good for any sort of economic

environment; it is the rigorous consequence of a certain orderly

sequence of facts, the result of a definite evolution whose progress

it has noted, but which has taken place independently of it; it has

not created it because it has been conscious of its existence.

And so, as M. Paul Leroy-Beaulieu recognizes: "the field of modern

mechanical industry is extending its boundaries more and more, and it

is difficult to see what limits can be set to its possible extension."

Now it is modern industry which lays bare the antagonisms immanent in

capitalist production, and at the same time renders their destruction

possible. The historic role of capital has been the development of the

productive powers, and, in the process of developing them, it has

created the weapons which are destined to kill it. Necessary during a

certain stage of economic development, it is not eternal, but

inevitably comes to an end with a change in the relations of the means

of production to the producers.