The Project Gutenberg eBook ofSocialism, Revolution and InternationalismThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: Socialism, Revolution and InternationalismAuthor: Gabriel Pierre DevilleTranslator: Robert Rives La MonteRelease date: April 25, 2011 [eBook #35962]Most recently updated: January 7, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Jeannie Howse, Adrian Mastronardi, Mark C.Orton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team athttps://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from imagesgenerously made available by The Internet Archive/AmericanLibraries.)*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIALISM, REVOLUTION AND INTERNATIONALISM ***
This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.
Title: Socialism, Revolution and InternationalismAuthor: Gabriel Pierre DevilleTranslator: Robert Rives La MonteRelease date: April 25, 2011 [eBook #35962]Most recently updated: January 7, 2021Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Jeannie Howse, Adrian Mastronardi, Mark C.Orton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team athttps://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from imagesgenerously made available by The Internet Archive/AmericanLibraries.)
Title: Socialism, Revolution and Internationalism
Author: Gabriel Pierre DevilleTranslator: Robert Rives La Monte
Author: Gabriel Pierre Deville
Translator: Robert Rives La Monte
Release date: April 25, 2011 [eBook #35962]Most recently updated: January 7, 2021
Language: English
Credits: Produced by Jeannie Howse, Adrian Mastronardi, Mark C.Orton and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team athttps://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from imagesgenerously made available by The Internet Archive/AmericanLibraries.)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIALISM, REVOLUTION AND INTERNATIONALISM ***
Transcriber's Note:Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved.Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For a complete list, please see theend of this document.
Transcriber's Note:
Inconsistent hyphenation in the original document has been preserved.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected. For a complete list, please see theend of this document.
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Socialism, Revolutionand InternationalismBy GABRIEL DEVILLE
Socialism, Revolutionand Internationalism
By GABRIEL DEVILLE
Socialism, revolution, internationalism—these are the three subjects regarding which I beg your permission to say what—with no pretence of being infallible—I believe to be the truth. At the risk of telling you nothing new, I will simply try to speak truth. Those who reproach the socialists for constantly repeating the same thing, have, no doubt, the habit of accommodating the truth to suit their taste for variety. On the other hand, to talk of socialism is to do what everyone else is doing at this time, but I will speak to you of it from the standpoint of a socialist, and—unhappily—that is not as yet equally common.
The signal and distinctive mark of modern socialism is that it springs directly from the facts. Far from resting on the imaginary conceptions of the intellect, from being a more or less utopian vision of an ideal society, socialism is to-day simply the theoretical expression ofthe contemporaneous phase of the economic evolution of humanity.
At this point we are met with two objections.
On the one hand, because we say that socialism springs from the facts, we are accused of denying the influence of the Idea and the liberal defenders of the Idea rise up in revolt; they can calm themselves again. How could we deny the influence of the Idea, when socialism itself is as yet, as I have just pointed out, only a theoretical expression,i.e., an idea, which we nevertheless believe has a certain influence?
We merely assert that a truth, irrevocably established by science as a valid generalization, does not cease to be a truth when it is applied to human history and socialism. This truth is the action of the environment: all living beings are the product of the environment in which they live. To the environment, in the last analysis, to the relations necessarily created by the multiple contacts, actions and reactions of the environment and the environed are due all the transformations of all organisms and, in consequence, all the phenomena that emanate from them. Thought is one of these phenomena, and, just like all the others, it has its source in actual facts. To say that socialism springs from the facts, is then simply to place the socialist idea on the same plane with all other ideas. In socialism, as in all subjects, the idea is the reflex in the brain of the relations of man with his surroundings, and the greater or less aptitude of the brain for acquiring, retaining and combining ideas, constitutes intelligence. The latter, in making various combinations out of the elements provided by theenvironment, may obviously lose sight of the reality which serves as its foundation, but our socialism aims never to depart from the data drawn from unbiased observation of the facts.
We are accused, on the other hand, because we believe that the economic question contains the whole of socialism, of denying the existence and influence of the intellectual factor, the sentimental factor, the psychological factor—in short, a whole collection of factors. Now, as I am going to try to show you, our only error, if it is an error, is that we wish to put the cart behind the horse, and to accuse us of wishing to suppress the cart because we refuse to put it in front or alongside of the horse, proves, at once, the incontestable desire to find us at fault, and the difficulty of gratifying that desire.
Man, as I said just now, is the product of the environment. But, to the influence of the cosmic or natural environment, which affects all beings, there was soon joined in his case the influence of the special environment created by him, an environment resulting from the acquired means of action, from the material of the tools used, from the conditions of life added by him to those furnished him by nature, or else substituted for them, the influence, in a word, of the economic environment, an influence which has gradually become predominant because the conditions of life, determining in all orders of society man's mode of life, have finally become less and less dependent upon the purely physical capabilities of the cosmic environment, and more and more dependent upon the means of action acquired by human exertions,upon the artificial capabilities of the economic environment, upon human thought materialized in various innovations.
We find at the foundation of everything affecting man the influence of the natural and economic environments, and, if it is quite true that we recognize the preponderant influence of the economic environment, it is passing strange to accuse us of not recognizing the action of human intelligence, which we assert is the creator of this environment. Only we do not forget that, at any stage of development whatever, intelligence does nothing by its creations except to elaborate the elements which it finds "ready made," as it were, in the environment.
Therefore, intelligence can, by working with the elements furnished by the existing environment, produce a change in this environment. This new environment thus changed becomes the determining environment of future intelligence. You see that, far from degrading the role of intelligence, we attribute to it a considerable importance; we only refuse to see in it a spontaneous phenomenon.
Having replied to the reproach of not taking into consideration what is called intelligence and is paraded as the intellectual factor, it is scarcely necessary for me to honor with special replies all the other factors mobilized against us, as they are all merely products of intelligence. I will remark, however, that if it is true that we do not deduce our theory from this association of factors, this does not authorize the conclusion that morality, right, justice, psychology, and sentiment are for us words devoid of meaning. To refuse to elevate them to the rank ofscientific proofs, which is what we do, and all that we do, is not to deny them; it is simply to avoid employing them for a use for which they are not and could not be destined. Because, to uphold our theory, we prefer to have recourse to the observation of facts and their tendencies, we have never proscribed the conception or sentiment of justice as motives for adhesion to that very theory, and we do not hesitate to declare that that which is unfitted to serve as a scientific proof, may be utilized as a motive for action.
Moreover, even those who attribute to the "syndicate" of factors a preponderating power over historical progress do not attribute to intelligence a greater influence than we recognize as belonging to it. In fact, the controversy here is not concerning the influence of ideas. The controversy arises when we attempt to determine which ideas are influential. On either side it is simply a matter of choosing from among the products of intelligence. Our opponents insist upon the claims of the factors in combination, instead of recognizing, as do we, the predominant influence of the ideas which clothe themselves in the phenomenal form of acts, such as inventions, etc., which lead to the modification of the economic environment and consequently, as we believe, to the modification of man himself, in his mode of life first, in his habits and methods of thought afterward.
As soon as it is seen that the transformation of the economic conditions, of the conditions of life, is the fundamental transformation, that upon which all the others are more or less dependent, it will be recognized that to say that socialism is simply the expression of the contemporaneous phase of economic conditions is not tonarrow, in the slightest degree, its field of action, but only to define more accurately its immediate goal. The affirmation that there is in progress an evolution of the economic environment implies necessarily a corresponding evolution of the various branches of human knowledge, which are all influenced by this environment, just as the apple-tree implies the apple without its being necessary to speak of the integral apple-tree.[1]If socialism is contained "in a purely economic formula," it is just as the apple-tree is contained in the seed. Let us be vigilant to see that this "economic formula" and this seed are not thwarted in their normal development, and we shall have all the fruits that may be desired, even if we refrain from heaping qualifying or complemental adjectives upon the apple-tree and socialism.
Some have thought that they have discovered an argument against this predominance of the economic environment and of the economic question, in the fact that some events which are not economic in nature—and they cite, most frequently, the invention of gunpowder and therevocation of the edict of Nantes—have had a great influence on human history. They forget that, if such or such an important event was not directly in itself an economic phenomenon, it is chiefly by the consequences that it had from the economic point of view that it became important; like all human discoveries, all historic events, it reached a point where it became a modifying element of the economic environment.
To recapitulate, if we insist upon the influence of the surroundings, and, particularly, upon the preponderant influence of the economic environment—the creation of man—this does not justify representing us as attributing an exclusive influence to the economic environment and as holding that this environment itself is created and influenced only by facts properly classed as economic.
I return then to my first proposition: socialism must have and has for its foundation the economic environment, the economic facts. What are those facts?
[1]A word is needed to make the force of this sarcasm clear to American readers. There was formed around the late Benoît Malon, the founder ofLa Revue Socialiste, a small but very intelligent and influential school of socialists, who loved (and still love) to prate about the inadequacy of Marxism, its neglect of various "factors," etc., etc. They regard Marxian economics as being true so far as they go, but as constituting a very inadequate and incomplete socialism, which it was reserved for them, by a beneficent Providence, to complete. Their own socialism they call "integral socialism." We have their like in America—men who use Marxian ammunition and belittle Marx.—Tr.
[1]A word is needed to make the force of this sarcasm clear to American readers. There was formed around the late Benoît Malon, the founder ofLa Revue Socialiste, a small but very intelligent and influential school of socialists, who loved (and still love) to prate about the inadequacy of Marxism, its neglect of various "factors," etc., etc. They regard Marxian economics as being true so far as they go, but as constituting a very inadequate and incomplete socialism, which it was reserved for them, by a beneficent Providence, to complete. Their own socialism they call "integral socialism." We have their like in America—men who use Marxian ammunition and belittle Marx.—Tr.
In order for man, who can live only on condition that he works, to be able to perform any sort of work, he must have at his disposition the instruments and the subject of labor. Now, these tools and this material, in one word, the means of labor, are, more and more, becoming the property of the capitalists. Those who are despoiled of the means of utilizing in work their own labor-power (or physical capacity for work) are, henceforth, compelled, being unable to live otherwise, to sell the use of that power to the capitalists who hold in their possession the things indispensable for labor. Through their possession of the things indispensable for the functioning of labor-power, the capitalists are, in fact, masters of all who cannot utilize their own power themselves, nor live without utilizing it. From this economic dependence flows the existence of distinct classes, distinct in spite of the civil and political equality of their members; and, as the capitalist regime expropriates the Middle Class more and more, it tends to accentuate the division of society into two principal classes: on the one hand, those who control the means of labor; on the other, those for whom the actual use of those means is the sole possibility of life.
I will ask you to note that I speak of classes and not oforders or estates, because these last expressions imply a legal demarcation between the categories of persons which they indicate; while the wordclasssimply denotes, according to Littré,[2]the "grades established among men by the diversity and inequality of their circumstances." This is the reason that some among us refuse to make use of the expression "Fourth Estate." There are no longer any Estates, it is true, but it is not the less true that there still are classes. As no one among us any longer dares to approve of their existence, to deny it is the only way to avoid combatting it. And so it is this denial that is resorted to by those adversaries of socialism whose only weapons are falsehood and hypocrisy. Socialists are not the cause of the existence of classes because they recognize their existence. They limit themselves to establishing that which has been, that which is and that which is destined to be: the origin of classes, their present persistence and their approaching disappearance.
As soon as, thanks to the development of the faculties of man and to his industrial discoveries, the productivity of labor became great enough for an individual to be able to produce more than was indispensable for his maintenance, the division of society into two great classes, the exploiters and the exploited, was effected. And this division had its justification, so long as production was not sufficient to render comfort for all a possibility. But, thanks to machinery and to scientific appliances which facilitate labor, while vastly multiplying the supply of articles of consumption, the exhausting labor of themasses and the monopolization of comfort by a minority can henceforth give place, must henceforth give place, and will give place in a future which no longer seems distant, to the universalization of labor and its inevitable consequence, the universalization of comfort and of leisure, that is to say, to social conditions under which there will be no classes, because their existence will (as now) serve no useful end as it has done in the past. We will soon see that our present ruling class, far from being useful, is already becoming baneful.
To-day, if the existence of distinct classes has, apparently, lost all legal sanction, it is just as real a fact as ever. To deny it, one must have—pardon me the expression, but I can find no other defining as accurately this state of mind—the desire to play the fool, or the interest to do so. It is impossible to deny seriously that a part of the population is, in fact, through the form of the economic relations, through their material self-interest, through their need of food, placed in a position of dependence upon another portion of the population, and that there is an antagonism between those who must struggle to exist by working and those who can bargain out to them the means of labor.[3]
By proclaiming the existence of classes and their antagonism, by divulging that antagonism, which is not their work, on the political rostrum, socialists are not creating factitious distinctions, they are not resuscitating and donot dream of resuscitating any of the social forms so fortunately and so energetically annihilated by the French Revolution, they are only adapting themselves to the situation as it presents itself to them now.
In fact, modern industry is forcing the workers more and more every day to comprehend the necessity of association or combination in their disputes with the possessors of the means of labor, and thus the interests to be defended have to the workers less and less the false aspect of individual interests; they appear to them in their naked reality as class interests. Born of strikes, of coalitions of every kind imposed upon them by the customs and conditions of life in a capitalist society, their class activity soon takes an a political character. To this then are due the working-class agitations resulting in the recognition of political equality and the establishment of universal suffrage. In possession of political rights, the workingmen are obviously led to make use of these rights in behalf of their own interests. Inevitably, therefore, the political struggle is becoming more and more a class struggle which cannot end until the political power, in the hands of the workingmen, shall at last place the State at the service of the interests of all the exploited, and thus enable the latter to proceed to the economic reforms which will lead to the disappearance of classes as a direct consequence.
Therefore, the Class Struggle is not an invention of the socialists, but the very substance of the facts and acts of history in the making that are daily taking place under their eyes.
[2]The French Webster.
[2]The French Webster.
[3]"In fact the different classes dove-tail into each other, and there are always between two classes a multitude of unclassifiable hybrids, belonging wholly to neither class, in part to both."—Karl Kautsky.
[3]"In fact the different classes dove-tail into each other, and there are always between two classes a multitude of unclassifiable hybrids, belonging wholly to neither class, in part to both."—Karl Kautsky.
We know that those whose activity is subordinate in its exercise to a capital which they have not—and these compose the working-class—are compelled to sell their labor-power to some of the possessors of this capital who form, on their side, the bourgeois[4]class.
What is sold by him who has to labor in order to live, and who has not in his possession the means of labor, to the possessor of those means is simply labor in the potential state, that is the muscular or intellectual faculties that must be exerted in the production of useful things. In fact, on the one hand, before these faculties are brought into active exercise, labor does not exist and cannot be sold. Now, the contract is made between the buyer and the seller before any action takes place and has for its effective cause, so far as the seller is concerned, the fact that the seller is so situated that he can not by himself bring his capacity for labor into productive use. On the other hand, as soon as the action (labor) begins, as soon as labor manifests itself, it cannot be the property of the laborer, for it consists in nothing but the incorporation of a thing which the laborer has just alienated bysale—capacity to perform labor—with other things which are not his—the means of production.
To sum up, when the labor does not exist, the laborer can not sell that which he does not possess and which he has not the means of realizing; when the labor does exist, it can not be sold by the laborer to whom it does not belong. The only thing which the laborer can sell is his labor-power, a power distinct from its function, labor, just as the power of marching is distinct from a parade, just as any machine is distinct from its operations.
What is paid under the form of wages by the possessor of the means of labor, the purchaser of the labor-power to the possessor of that power, cannot, therefore, be, and is not, the price of the labor furnished, but is the price of the power made use of, a price that supply and demand cause to oscillate about and especially below its value determined, like the value of any other commodity, by the labor-time socially necessary for its production, or in other words, in this case by the sum which will normally enable the laborer to maintain and perpetuate his labor-power under the conditions necessary for the given kind and stage of production.
But, even when the laborer gets a value equal to the value of his power, he furnishes a value greater than that which he receives. The duration of labor required for a given wage, regularly exceeds the time necessarily occupied by the laborer in adding to the value of the means of production consumed, a value equal to that wage; and the labor thus furnished over and above that which represents the equivalent of what the laborer gets, constitutessurplus-labor.Surplus-labor then is unpaid labor.
And here let us be clearly understood. When we speak of unpaid labor, we are stating a simple fact, and do not at all intend to say that capitalists, in the existing state of things, are personally guilty of extracting from the laborers labor for which they do not pay them. We are not of the number of those who think that "the causes of the ills from which we suffer are to be found in men rather than institutions," as M. Glasson declared before the members of the Le Play School. We say exactly the contrary; for us the evil is due to institutions rather than to men and, in society as it is at present constituted, things cannot possibly take place in any other or different fashion.
On the side of the laborer, the thing sold, as I have proved, cannot be his labor. It is his labor-power. The sum paid cannot be the price of his labor. It is the price of his labor-power, a price which, in view of the number of applicants for work, can only very rarely be equal to its value; but, even in this case, he furnishes a greater value than he receives. If he does not, his remuneration is not, strictly speaking, wages, for the furnishing of surplus-labor by the worker is a conditionsine qua nonof wages. When his compensation is split up into wages and supplementary remuneration under the form of profit-sharing or under any other form, the workingman does not furnish less surplus-labor, less unpaid labor; quite the contrary, we may say, for it is clear that this supplementary remuneration, for the laborer, is a mere delusion, mere supplementary moon-shine. All that the workingman can hope to achieve, under, I repeat, the existing organization of society, isthe curtailment of his surplus-labor, and that is the explanation and justification of the struggle for the reduction of the working-day, of the Eight Hours movement.
On the side of the capitalist, on account of the fierce war of competition with low prices as weapons which rages throughout the field of production, it is financial suicide for the employer to extract from his work-people less unpaid labor than his competitors do; and that is why it is necessary to strive to obtain the reduction of the day by legal enactment. I add that so long as the employer, so long as the capitalist keeps within the bounds of what may be called the normal conditions of exploitation, he cannot reasonably be held responsible for the economic structure which is so advantageous to him, but which the best of intentions on the part of individuals would be powerless to modify. On the other hand, if capitalists are personally powerless to ameliorate the state of affairs, it would be rash to rush to the conclusion that they are capitalists in the interest of the workers. We must avoid exaggeration in either direction.
Surplus-labor was not invented by the capitalists. Ever since human societies issued from the state of primitive communism, surplus-labor has always existed; and it is the method by which it is wrung from the immediate producers, which differentiates the different economic forms of society.
Before man was able to produce in excess of his needs, one portion of society could not live upon the fruits of the toil of another portion. How could a man work gratuitously for others when his entire time was barelysufficient to procure him his own necessary means of existence? When, in consequence of human progress, labor had acquired such a degree of productiveness that an individual was enabled to produce more than what was strictly necessary for his needs, it became possible for some to subsist upon the toil of others and slavery could be established.
That it was established by force is not doubtful; but it must be confessed that its establishment promoted human evolution. So long as the productiveness of labor, although sufficient to make surplus-labor possible, was not sufficient to render participation in directly useful labor compatible with other occupations or pursuits, the toilsome drudgery and exploitation of some was the necessary condition of the leisure of others, and, thereby, of the development of all. For, if none had had leisure, no progress could have been made in the sciences, the arts and all the branches of knowledge, the benefits of which we all enjoy in some degree. And the fact that the thinkers of antiquity and the greatest among them, Aristotle, excused slavery, is a proof that the mode of thought is determined by the exigencies of the economic organization of society. To reproach Aristotle, in particular, because he did not regard slavery and property as it is natural for us to regard them, is equivalent to reproaching him for not having applied the processes of our modern production to ancient industries.
Slavery did not appear to lack a rational foundation, and did not begin to disappear until the external conditions were profoundly transformed and thus rendered another kind of labor and of surplus-labor more inharmony with the material requirements. Following upon the economic environment in which slavery was the rule there came then the economic environment in which serfdom predominated, and the latter, in its turn, has been superseded by the economic environment in which the wage-system has become the general rule. Each of these environments has had or has its own habits and modes of thought which may be in contradiction with ours, but which are the natural consequences of the modes of life in vogue in their respective eras.
An examination of the aspect of surplus-labor in these three environments shows that it has the appearance of being all labor in the first, a larger or smaller fraction of the whole labor in the second, and apparently falls to zero in the third. In fact, in slavery, during a part of the day, the slave only replaces the value of what he consumes and so really works for himself; notwithstanding, even then his labor appears to be labor for his owner. All his labor has the appearance of surplus-labor, of labor for others. Under serfdom or thecorvéesystem, the labor of the serf for himself and his gratuitous labor for his feudal lord are perfectly distinct, the one from the other; by the very way in which the labor is performed, the serf distinguishes the time during which he works for his own benefit from the time which he is compelled to devote to the satisfaction of the wants of his lordly superiors. Under the wage-system, the wage-form, which appears in the guise of direct payment of labor, wipes out every visible line of demarcation between paid labor and unpaid labor; when he receives his wages, the laborer seems to get all the value due to his labor, so that all hislabor takes on the form or appearance of paid labor. While, under slavery, the property-relation conceals the labor of the slave for himself, under the wage-system the money-relation conceals the gratuitous labor of the wage-worker for the capitalist. You will readily perceive the practical importance of this disguised appearance of the real relation between labor and capital. The latter is deemed to breed or expand by its own virtue, and the former to receive its full remuneration.
[4]In America where, since 1865, we have had no landed aristocracy, bourgeois and wealthy are well nigh synonymous.—Tr.
[4]In America where, since 1865, we have had no landed aristocracy, bourgeois and wealthy are well nigh synonymous.—Tr.
Wage-labor as an economic form existed before the actual appearance of industrial capital which in fact only dates from the day when production by the aid of wage-labor became general. Capital, in fact, is not a quality with which the means of production are naturally endowed, which they have always had and which they are destined always to have. It is a character which they possess only under definite social conditions. The means of production are no more naturally capital than a negro is naturally a slave. And when socialists talk of suppressing capital and capitalists, those who do not wish to make a ridiculous confusion, ought to remember that it is simply a question of taking away from the means of production and those who hold possession of them a character which they now have, and which can be taken from them without destroying an atom of their material substance, just as in suppressing slavery, it is not necessary, in order to take away the slave-character from the negro, to kill the negro.
For a long time capital was known only under the form of merchants' capital and usurers' capital; for it was only, or almost only, under those two forms that money bred its like, and it is this possibility of money's breeding which constitutes capital. This possibility could notexist, except as an exceptional fact, for money invested in the means of production, so long as industry remained more or less domestic in character. In order for capital to spread beyond the domain of commerce in goods and money and appear in the domain of production, it was necessary for the wealth accumulated in commerce and usury to effect on a large scale the concentration of the scattered petty producers and their petty individual tools; the workshop had to be enlarged; it was necessary to bring together a large number of workers working at the same time, in the same place, under the orders of the same "captain of industry," in producing on a large scale the same kind of commodity, and to find for the disposal of the latter a sufficiently extended market.
The money advanced in production can, in fact, realize an appreciable profit by the sale of the objects produced, only when its possessor is able to realize a certain quantity of surplus-labor; now, to accomplish this he must have a certain number of laborers. For it is the surplus-labor realized, we know, that forms the excess of the value produced over that of the money laid out in production, or, in other words, the surplus-value which incessantly swells the capital and continually increases its power to dominate labor.
The capitalist mode of production, the mode of production in which the means of labor function as capital, owes to capital its specific character, which is its power of making money breed money, of giving birth to surplus-value. The capitalist purchaser of labor-power has only one object, viz., to enrich himself by making his money breed or expand, by the process of making commoditiescontaining more labor than he pays for, and by selling which he therefore realizes a value greater than that of the sum of the advances or outlays made.
If, since the productiveness of labor has made it possible, one part of society has, under various economic forms, been forced to add to the labor-time required for its own support, a certain amount of surplus-labor-time, for which it has received no equivalent and the benefit of which has been enjoyed by another part of society, it is likewise true that so long as the aim of production was to enable the privileged class to appropriate the means of consumption and enjoyment, the surplus-labor of the immediate producers reached its limit with the full satisfaction of those needs and desires, as extensive as they might be, to gratify which was the object of this appropriation. But as soon as it becomes a question of obtaining, instead of a certain mass of products, the production at any cost of surplus-value, the incessant multiplication of money, the possessor of the means of production strives relentlessly to make those means of production absorb the greatest possible quantity of surplus-labor.
If this insatiable thirst for and headlong pursuit of surplus-value has been for the laborers and their families the cause of an exploitation of their labor-power, more burdensome than any form of exploitation previously known, it must be recognized that it has contributed to the development of the means of production. It is with capital as with slavery. Both, sources of sufferings for their victims, they have been, on the whole, sources of progress for humanity. The history of human progress is far from being an idyl. Our too forgetful andtoo proud civilization is the result of a long series of torments and miseries endured by the nameless and forgotten masses.
Therefore capital has had its utility, and the era of capitalist production constitutes a great step forward in the evolution of the productive powers. Beginning with the enlargement of the small guild workshop, passing through action in common, the co-operation of a large number of laborers in the enlarged workshop through the manufacturing stage, by the division of labor within the workshop, by the introduction and general adoption of the machine-tool, by the employment of steam as a motive power, capitalist production has finally developed into modern mechanical industry which has revolutionized the mode of production more radically than had any previous change. It is its continuous and radical alteration of the technical processes which distinguishes the capitalist period from all the preceding periods, and prevents it from having the relatively permanent conservative character which they had.
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 hisown 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 latterknows 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 theirproducts, 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 industrialestablishment, 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 rigorousconsequence 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.