Far from being a material upheaval, the advent of socialism will be
simply the culmination of the economic evolution now going on. Born,
in its contemporaneous form, from the study of facts, socialism sees
in the facts the controlling elements of the modifications to be
effected. It makes no pretence of going in advance of the economic
phenomena, it limits itself to following them, to adapting itself to
conditions which it does not create and which it is not its part to
create. Now, if, in all those cases where the means of production are
already collectively owned by companies or trusts or are concentrated
in the hands of single individuals, they can be placed at the
disposition of ALL only by the substitution of society as a whole for
their present capitalist possessors, in those cases in which the form
of ownership of the means of labor is still truly individual, _i.e._,
where they are still in the hands of those who themselves directly
make use of them in actual work, it is not for society to force itself
into the place of the present proprietors. The purpose of the
interference of society, indeed, is to give, in the only form to-day
possible, the means of production to the laborers who have them not,
it is to restore the tools and materials of labor to those who have
been robbed of them. It is not its business, then, to interfere in
those cases where the laborers are still in possession of their tools
and materials. And so the peasant will retain the patch of land he
possesses and tills, the petty tools and implements will continue to
belong to the artisan-manufacturer who himself works with them, until
the facts shall lead them to renounce voluntarily this form of private
ownership, no longer to their advantage, in order to enjoy the far
more fruitful benefits of collective ownership and production.
Moreover, just as, in the capitalist period, the changes brought about
by the development of machinery re-acted upon even those branches of
production in which machinery had not as yet been introduced, by
developing, for example, in all branches the exploitation of women and
children, in the same way, the advantages of the socialization of the
means of production previously centralized by the capitalists, will
re-act upon the petty proprietors of the means of production not yet
socialized. The petty producer, who remains master of his own
instrument of labor, will, through the simultaneity and propinquity of
the embryonic co-operative commonwealth, get the help he needs.
Notably, he will be freed from the clutches of the financial middlemen
whose victim he is at present; his labor, freed from their
exploitation, will be in its turn emancipated, just as truly, although
in a different way, as will be the labor of those who, exploited
to-day because they lack the means of labor, will have these means,
socialized, placed at their free disposition. The result for all will
thus be the emancipation of labor, in the one case, by placing the
socialized means of labor at the free disposition of all laborers, in
the other, by leaving to the individual laborer his individual tool.
In both cases, the tools will be owned by those who use them.
And, though it displeases our opponents, this way of proceeding is
very logical, although it does not conform to their pretended
conception of logic. The logic of the Socialists does not consist in
forcing a solution demanded by a certain set of facts upon other facts
which do not yet require that solution, it does not consist in making
fish live out of the water because that mode of life agrees with men.
It consists in adapting itself in all cases to the environment, to the
facts, in always acting with reference to the facts, instead of
requiring the same kind of action in the face of different
combinations of facts. To those who assert that this position is in
conflict with the "pure dogma of the socialist church," you have only
to reply that there is neither a socialist church nor a socialist
dogma, but that there are far too many bourgeois imbeciles who attempt
to palm off ideas made by themselves out of the whole cloth as the
dogmas of socialism.
During the sixteen years that our socialist theory has been developing
in France, it has never varied upon the subject of the petty
producers. Those who assert the contrary follow their own imaginations
and not the facts. I defy them to prove that we have not always spoken
in the same way in regard, for example, to the small farms of the
peasants. They now accuse our opinion on this subject of opportunism,
using the word in its political meaning; they could, more correctly,
accuse us of having always professed opportunism, but this time using
the word in the sense implied by its derivation. You know how
necessary it is to avoid the confusion--opportune for some, it is
true--of the political meaning of a word with its true meaning. The
political radicals are far from being radical in the ordinary sense,
and their brothers (nominally opponents) the opportunists, instead of
wishing that which is opportune, find nothing opportune except the
satisfaction of their own appetites and the postponement of all else.
In the true meaning--the time has come to say it--of the word, there
cannot be a party more thoroughly opportunist than the socialist party
which--I will not cease repeating--must simply adapt itself to the
facts and which has no guide, save the facts, to point the way in the
transformation of property.
When we talk of the transformation of property which is nothing, as they
are obliged to confess, but "a social institution,"[8] our opponents,
with their strange fashion of doing us justice, change our words into
"suppression of property." "Socialists of all schools have decreed the
suppression of property"[9] is the notable affirmation of "a certain
number of young men, strangers hitherto to politics"[10]--this part of
the phrase is not mine, it is, possibly, the least open to criticism of
any part of the work of the young men in question, who have felt
impelled to speak on a question that they confess is foreign to them.
Their confession is superfluous; we would have readily perceived,
unaided, that they spoke of socialism after the fashion of those who
know nothing of it.
These young men, in founding the "_comite d'action de la gauche
liberale_,"[11] wrote: "We are partisans of individual liberty and of
individual property." I assume, until proof to the contrary is
forthcoming, that they are not partisans of these things for
themselves and their friends alone. If they advocate them for every
one, I beg them to tell us what they think of the liberty of the man
who has, as his source of livelihood, only his labor-power without the
means of utilizing it.
Either they recognize that every man ought to have the means of labor
at his disposal, and, in that case, I will ask them how, with the
system of mechanical industry, they hope to put at the disposal of all
these means so necessary to the liberty of all.
Or, they do not recognize that every man, to be free, must dispose of
the tools and materials of labor, and then I will ask them what
becomes of the liberty of the man to whom the employer can say: if you
do such or such a thing, if you do not accept such or such a thing,
you shall have no work, that is to say, it shall be impossible for you
to eat. And that they may not accuse me of describing hypothetical
cases blacker than nature, I will submit for their meditation the
following fact related by the _Temps_ (Times)[12] at the time of the
strike of Rive-de-Gier.
"An engine-stoker fell ill. He was replaced, all the time of his
illness, by a common laborer at 50 cents a day. The regular stoker
having gotten well, resumed his duties. He was completely surprised,
at the end of the fortnight, to receive only 50 cents a day, when he
had been paid, before his illness, 80 cents. He protested. 'There it
is. Take it or leave it,' he was told; 'we have found out that a
common laborer at 50 cents does this work just as well as you; we cut
you down to 50 cents. Get out or accept it.' The man had a family, and
choice was forbidden him. He accepted it."
In the face of such facts, M. Celestin Jonnart has the
assurance--which I will describe, returning one of the epithets he
applies to us, as "villainous"--to assert that the socialists "are
working for conditions which will produce generations of men who will
know nothing but abject submission and will be ready for every
degradation." These generations, sir, are not to be made; they are to
be raised from their degradation, and that is the task at which
socialism is working.
If I have cited only one fact, this is not because facts of this kind
are rare, it is because the one I have cited has the advantage of
coming from the _Temps_ which may be suspected of anything you like
except socialism. Then, besides proving how free the laborer is in his
choice, this fact shows how the free contract between capitalist and
laborer is concluded. When the stoker resumes his place, he naturally
imagines that he is resuming it upon the former conditions, and no one
undeceives him. On pay-day, which does not come till a fortnight
later, he perceives that he must conclude a new free contract
different from the one he had a right to believe in force, and accept
50 cents instead of the 80 cents expected and agreed upon.
Are these men free, the stoker and his like? I would gladly have on
this point the opinion of M. Leon Say who not long since posed as the
champion, against the socialists, of "human liberty and dignity." The
truth is that the laborer is free, only when, to the right of being
free, he joins the effective power of being free, only when he has at
his disposition the things necessary to the realization of his labor,
only, in other words, when he does not have to throw himself upon the
mercy of the possessors of those things. Whatever the law may say, the
man who depends upon another for his subsistence is not free. What is
requisite is to furnish means of labor to the laborers who have them
not; now, on the basis of the present form or character of these
means, society can assure possession of them to all, only when these
means shall have been socialized, shall have become social property.
As regards the laborers who still possess their means of labor, they
will retain them, as I explained just above. In fact, only through
socialism can individual liberty be made a reality for all.
It is the same with individual property as with individual liberty.
From all that I have just stated it is clear that the only property
that socialism wishes to transform, is the property no longer made use
of by the individual owners thereof; it is the property which is
formed by the agglomeration of petty scraps of property wrested from
the immense majority, and which exists only to the detriment of that
very majority.[13] And even in this case there will be no suppression,
since the present holders will be granted the use of their transformed
property on the same terms as others.
What, then, is the property of "those silent multitudes who toil and
struggle so hard for existence and who are in truth the artisans of
our greatness?"[14] Is not your capitalist society stripping them more
and more every day of the means of labor and of individually owned
dwellings, and leaving to them in individual ownership only the things
indispensable to the bare support of life? It is the capitalist regime
which, by increasing immeasurably the property of the few, contracts
the limits within which the personal acquirement of property by the
many is possible. It is the socialist regime which will increase this
possibility of the personal acquirement of property, by assuring to
each the share earned by his labor. It is only under the regime of
socialism that individual property will be a reality for all, as this
regime alone will suppress--though suppressing nothing else--the
possibility of using this property to exploit the labor of others.