Nowadays, however, it is more usual to characterise the aim of collectivism as an attempt to abolish the wage-earning class—abolition of property being simply a step towards that. This is how Labriola writes in his Essai sur la Conception matérialiste (2nd ed., p. 62): “The proletariat must learn to concentrate upon one thing, namely, the abolition of the wage-earner.”
It is well to remember that such is also the aim of the Associationists, the co-operators, and the Radical Socialists. They proceed, however, from the opposite point of view, and would multiply property rather than abolish it, thinking that the latter process would merely universalise the wage-earner.
[990] “Communism deprives no man of the power to appropriate the products of society. All that it does is to deprive him of the power to subjugate the labour of others by means of such appropriation.” (Manifesto, § 2.)
[991] To say that Karl Marx was the leader of a great socialist school is hardly the way to describe him, for it is necessary that we should remember that the vast majority of those who consider themselves socialists are more or less his disciples. The other socialist schools, the anarchists, the Fabians, the Collinsists, and the followers of Henry George, cut a very poor figure beside his.
The bulk of his adherents is drawn either from Germany or Russia, England being the country which has done least to swell the ranks of his followers. In France the pure doctrine has been vigorously preached since 1878 by MM. Jules Guesde and Lafargue—the latter of whom is Marx’s son-in-law. But a great many French socialists, though collectivists in name, refuse their adhesion to the Marxian doctrine in all its rigidity. They have accepted three of his main principles—the socialisation of the means of production, class war, and internationalism—but reject his theory of value and his materialistic conception of history. Moreover, they show no desire to break with the French socialist tradition, which was pre-eminently idealistic. Benoît Malon, the founder of the Revue socialiste (1885), was one of the earliest representatives of French collectivism, and among his successors may be reckoned M. George Renard and Fournière.
[992] Labriola, Essai sur la Conception matérialiste de l’Histoire, p. 24. The Saint-Simonians had already made a similar claim. It is hardly fair to class them among the Utopians, and some Marxians are quite ready to admit their claim to priority in this matter.
[993] Georges Sorel, one of Marx’s disciples, writing in no derogatory spirit, we may be certain, expresses himself as follows: “Our experience of the Marxian theory of value convinces us of the importance which obscurity of style may lend to a doctrine”—a remark that is applicable to other writers besides Marx.
[994] See Sorel’s article, Les Polémiques pour l’Interprétation du Marxisme, in the Revue internationale de Sociologie, 1900, p. 248. There is no such thing as a theory of value—in the accepted sense of the term in Marx. What we have is a theory of economic equilibrium which would only be true of a very rudimentary kind of society. It is assumed, for example, that all industries are equally easy or difficult, that all the workers are of one type, that ten men working for one hour will produce the same amount of wealth no matter what task they are engaged upon. It is this equality that enables comparison to be made between one commodity and another, and this constitutes their value. We are simply treated to an abstraction which shows that with the exercise of a little ingenuity it is at least possible to reconcile the theory of time-value and the theory of market price.
[995] Conception matérialiste, p. 91. Sorel says: “Marxism is really much more akin to the Manchester doctrine than to the Utopian. We must never forget this.” (La Décomposition du Marxisme, p. 44.)
[996] “The bourgeoisie, historically, has played a most revolutionary part.… The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionising the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society.… All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify, all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.” (Manifesto, § 1.)