It is necessary—and there is no other solution—that the machines become collective or social property. Then, obviously, their only effect will be to diminish the aggregate amount of labor and muscular effort necessary to produce a given quantity of products. And thus the daily work of each worker will be decreased, and his standard of existence will constantly rise and become more closely correspondent with the dignity of a human being.
This effect is already manifest, to a limited extent, in those cases where, for instance, several small farm proprietors found co-operative societies for the purchase of, for example, threshing-machines. If there should be joined to the small proprietors, in a grand fraternal co-operation, the laborers or peasants (and this will be possible only when the land shall have become social property), and if the machines were municipal property, for example, as are the fire-engines, and if the commune were to grant their use for the labors of the fields, the machines would no longer produce any evil effects and all men would see in them their liberators.
It is thus that socialism, because it represents a higher phase of human evolution, would eliminate from the present phase only the bad products of our unbridled economic individualism which creates, at one pole, the billionaires or "Napoleons of Finance" who enrich themselves in a few years by seizing upon—in ways more or less clearly described in the penal code—the public funds, and which, at the other pole, accumulates vast multitudes of poverty-stricken wretches in the slums of the cities or in the houses of straw and mud which reproduce in the South of Italy, the quarters of the Helots of antiquity, or in the valley of the Po, the huts of the Australian bushmen.[56]
No intelligent socialist has ever dreamt of not recognizing all that the bourgeoisie has done for human civilization, or of tearing out the pages of gold that it has written in the history of the civilized world by its brilliant development of the various nations, by its marvelous applications of science to industry, and by the commercial and intellectual relations which it has developed between different peoples.
These are permanent conquests of human progress, and socialism does not deny them any more than it wishes to destroy them, and it accords a just tribute of recognition to the generous pioneers who have achieved them. The attitude of socialism toward the bourgeoisie might be compared to that of atheists who do not wish either to destroy or to refuse their admiration to a painting of Raphael or to a statue of Michel-Angelo, because these works represent and give the seal of eternity to religious legends.
But socialism sees in the present bourgeois civilization, arrived at its decline, the sad symptoms of an irremediable dissolution, and it contends that it is necessary to rid the social organism of its infectious poison, and this not by ridding it of such or such a bankrupt, of such or such a corrupt official, of such or such a dishonest contractor ... but by going to the root of the evil, to the indisputable source of the virulent infection. By radically transforming the regime—through the substitution of social ownership for individual ownership—it is necessary to renew the healthy and vital forces of human society, to enable it to rise to a higher phase of civilization. Then, it is true, the privileged classes will no longer be able to pass their lives in idleness, luxury and dissipation, and they will have to make up their minds to lead an industrious and less ostentatious life, but the immense majority of men will rise to the heights of serene dignity, security and joyous brotherhood, instead of living in the sorrows, anxieties and bitter strife of the present.
An analogous response may be made to that banal objection that socialism will suppress all liberty—that objection repeated to satiety by all those who more or less consciously conceal, under the colors of political liberalism, the tendencies of economic conservatism.
That repugnance which many people, even in good faith, show toward socialism, is it not the manifestation of another law of human evolution which Herbert Spencer has formulated thus: "Every progress effected is an obstacle to further progress"?
This is, in fact, a natural psychological tendency, a tendency analogous to fetishism, to refuse to consider the ideal attained, the progress effected as a simple instrument, a starting-point for further progress and for the attainment of new ideals, instead of contentedly halting to adore as a fetish the progress already effected, which men are prone to look upon as being so complete that it leaves no room for new ideals and higher aspirations.
Just as the savage adores the fruit-tree, whose benefits he enjoys, for itself and not for the fruits it can yield, and, in the end, makes a fetish of it, an idol too holy to be touched and, therefore, barren; just as the miser who has learned in our individualist world the value of money, ends by adoring the money in itself and for itself, as a fetish and an idol, and keeps it buried in a safe where it remains sterile, instead of employing it as a means for procuring himself new pleasures; in the same way, the sincere liberal, the son of the French Revolution, has made Liberty an idol which is its own goal, a sterile fetish, instead of making use of it as an instrument for new conquests, for the realization of new ideals.