"Add to all this, that civilisation, which sows dissension and
war on every side; which employs a great part of its powers in
unproductive labor or even in destruction; which furthermore
diminishes the public wealth by the unnecessary friction and
discord it introduces into industry; add to all this, I say,
that this same social system has for its special characteristic
to produce a repugnance for work--a disgust for labor.
"Everywhere you hear the laborer, the artisan, the clerk
complain of his position and his occupation, while they long for
the time when they can retire from work imposed upon them by
necessity. To be repugnant, to have for its motive and pivot
nothing but the fear of starvation, is the great, the fatal,
characteristic of civilised labor. The civilised workman is
condemned to penal servitude. So long as productive labor is so
organized that instead of being associated with pleasure it is
associated with pain, weariness and dislike, it will always
happen that all will avoid it who are able. With few exceptions,
those only will consent to work who are compelled to it by want.
Hence the most numerous classes, the artificers of social
wealth, the active and direct creators of all comfort and
luxury, will always be condemned to touch closely on poverty and
hunger; they will always be the slaves to ignorance and
degradation; they will continue to be always that huge herd of
mere beasts of burden whom we see ill-grown, decimated by
disease, bowed down in the great workshop of society over the
plow or over the counter, that they may prepare the delicate
food, and the sumptuous enjoyments of the upper and idle
classes.
"So long as no method of attractive labor has been devised, it
will continue to be true that 'there must be many poor in order
that there may be a few rich;' a mean and hateful saying, which
we hear every day quoted as an eternal truth from the mouths of
people who call themselves Christians or philosophers. It is
very easy to understand that oppression, trickery, and
especially poverty, are the permanent and fatal appanage of
every state of society characterized by the dislike of work,
for, in this case, there is nothing but poverty that will force
men to labor. And the proof of this is, that if every one of all
the workers were to become suddenly rich, nineteen-twentieths of
all the work now done would be abandoned."[7]
In the opinion of the Fourierists, the tendency of the present order
of society is to a concentration of wealth in the hands of a
comparatively few immensely rich individuals or companies, and the
reduction of all the rest of the community into a complete dependence
on them. This was termed by Fourier _la jeodalite industrielle_.
"This feudalism," says M. Considerant, "would be constituted as
soon as the largest part of the industrial and territorial
property of the nation belongs to a minority which absorbs all
its revenues, while the great majority, chained to the
work-bench or laboring on the soil, must be content to gnaw the
pittance which is cast to them."[8]
This disastrous result is to be brought about partly by the mere
progress of competition, as sketched in our previous extract by M.
Louis Blanc; assisted by the progress of national debts, which M.
Considerant regards as mortgages of the whole land and capital of the
country, of which "les capitalistes preteurs" become, in a greater and
greater measure, co-proprietors, receiving without labor or risk an
increasing portion of the revenues.