Finally, socialism will rob no one. I would ask those who assert the contrary, what description then should be given to those transactions in the goods and property of the nobility, the clergy and above all of the communes, performed by our great radicals in the French Revolution, by those whose work has become a "compass" for our guidance. Just as soon as we cease simply substituting one privileged class for another, just as soon as we enable all without exception to enjoy the same advantages, no one will be robbed or deprived of anything. Simply, inequality in the enjoyment of privilege will have been abolished, another privileged class will have vanished from the stage. Yes, the capitalists will lose, along with their special privileges or rights over the means of production, that characteristic or quality that makes them capitalists; but, I repeat, they will have exactly the same rights as all others to the use and enjoyment of those means of production, from that time forth the inalienable property of society. With capital dethroned, the principles of the Republic will at last be applied with controlling power to the field of economics, just as they are to the field of politics, and political democracy will have ceased to be a farce, for it will have developed into its perfect flower, Industrial Democracy.
FOOTNOTES:
[6] This is not an English word, but I will take the liberty of borrowing it from the French.—Tr.
[7] "The world owes every man a living," is a common saying.
VII.
Far from being a material upheaval, the advent of socialism will be simply the culmination of the economic evolution now going on. Born, in its contemporaneous form, from the study of facts, socialism sees in the facts the controlling elements of the modifications to be effected. It makes no pretence of going in advance of the economic phenomena, it limits itself to following them, to adapting itself to conditions which it does not create and which it is not its part to create. Now, if, in all those cases where the means of production are already collectively owned by companies or trusts or are concentrated in the hands of single individuals, they can be placed at the disposition of ALL only by the substitution of society as a whole for their present capitalist possessors, in those cases in which the form of ownership of the means of labor is still truly individual, i.e., where they are still in the hands of those who themselves directly make use of them in actual work, it is not for society to force itself into the place of the present proprietors. The purpose of the interference of society, indeed, is to give, in the only form to-day possible, the means of production to the laborers who have them not, it is to restore the tools and materials of labor to those who have been robbed of them. It is not its business, then, to interfere in those cases where the laborers are still in possession of their tools and materials. And so the peasant will retain the patch of land he possesses and tills, the petty tools and implements will continue to belong to the artisan-manufacturer who himself works with them, until the facts shall lead them to renounce voluntarily this form of private ownership, no longer to their advantage, in order to enjoy the far more fruitful benefits of collective ownership and production.
Moreover, just as, in the capitalist period, the changes brought about by the development of machinery re-acted upon even those branches of production in which machinery had not as yet been introduced, by developing, for example, in all branches the exploitation of women and children, in the same way, the advantages of the socialization of the means of production previously centralized by the capitalists, will re-act upon the petty proprietors of the means of production not yet socialized. The petty producer, who remains master of his own instrument of labor, will, through the simultaneity and propinquity of the embryonic co-operative commonwealth, get the help he needs. Notably, he will be freed from the clutches of the financial middlemen whose victim he is at present; his labor, freed from their exploitation, will be in its turn emancipated, just as truly, although in a different way, as will be the labor of those who, exploited to-day because they lack the means of labor, will have these means, socialized, placed at their free disposition. The result for all will thus be the emancipation of labor, in the one case, by placing the socialized means of labor at the free disposition of all laborers, in the other, by leaving to the individual laborer his individual tool. In both cases, the tools will be owned by those who use them.