If this account of the matter be true, Property is indeed unassailable. [p250]
The universal instinct of mankind, more infallible than the lucubrations of any individual, had adopted this view of the subject without refining upon it, when theory began to scrutinize the foundations of Property.
Theory unhappily began in confusion, mistaking Utility for Value, and attributing an inherent value, independent of all human service, to the materials or forces of nature. From that moment property became unintelligible, and incapable of justification.
For utility is the relation between commodities and our organization. It necessarily implies neither efforts, nor transactions, nor comparisons. We can conceive of it per se, and in relation to man in a state of isolation. Value, on the contrary, is a relation of man to man. To exist at all, it must exist in duplicate. Nothing isolated can be compared. Value implies that the person in possession of it does not transfer it except for an equivalent value. The theory, then, which confounds these two ideas, takes for granted that a person, in effecting an exchange, gives pretended value of natural creation for true value of human creation, utility which exacts no labour for utility which does exact it; in other words, that he can profit by the labour of another without working himself. Property, thus understood, is called first of all a necessary monopoly, then simply a monopoly,—then it is branded as illegitimate, and last of all as robbery.
Landed Property receives the first blow, and so it should. Not that natural agents do not bear their part in all manufactures, but these agents manifest themselves more strikingly to the eyes of the vulgar in the phenomena of vegetable and animal life, in the production of food, and of what are improperly called matières premières [raw materials], which are the special products of agriculture.
Besides, if there be any one monopoly more revolting than another, it is undoubtedly a monopoly which applies to the first necessaries of life.
The confusion which I am exposing, and which is specious in a scientific view, since no theorist I am acquainted with has got rid of it, becomes still more specious when we look at what is passing around us.
We see the landed Proprietor frequently living without labour, and we draw the conclusion, which is plausible enough, that “he must surely be remunerated for something else than his work.” And what can this something else be, if not the fecundity, the productiveness, the co-operation of the soil as an instrument? It is, then, the rent of land which we must brand, in the language [p251] of the times, with the names of necessary monopoly, privilege, illegitimacy, theft.
We must admit that the authors of this theory have encountered a fact which must have powerfully tended to mislead them. Few land estates in Europe have escaped from conquest and all its attendant abuses; and science has confounded the violent methods by which landed property has been acquired with the methods by which it is naturally formed.
But we must not imagine that the false definition of the word value tends only to unsettle landed property. Logic is a terrible and indefatigable power, whether it sets out with a good or a bad principle! As the earth, it is said, makes light, heat, electricity, vegetable life, etc., co-operate in the production of value, does not capital in the same way make gravitation, elasticity, the wind, etc., concur in producing value? There are other men, then, besides agriculturists who are paid for the intervention of natural agents. This remuneration comes to capitalists in the shape of Interest, just as it comes to proprietors in the shape of Rent. War, then, must be declared against Interest as it has been against Rent!