Socialism, Revolution and Internationalism

by Gabriel Pierre Deville

And, though it displeases our opponents, this way of proceeding is very logical, although it does not conform to their pretended conception of logic. The logic of the Socialists does not consist in forcing a solution demanded by a certain set of facts upon other facts which do not yet require that solution, it does not consist in making fish live out of the water because that mode of life agrees with men. It consists in adapting itself in all cases to the environment, to the facts, in always acting with reference to the facts, instead of requiring the same kind of action in the face of different combinations of facts. To those who assert that this position is in conflict with the "pure dogma of the socialist church," you have only to reply that there is neither a socialist church nor a socialist dogma, but that there are far too many bourgeois imbeciles who attempt to palm off ideas made by themselves out of the whole cloth as the dogmas of socialism.

During the sixteen years that our socialist theory has been developing in France, it has never varied upon the subject of the petty producers. Those who assert the contrary follow their own imaginations and not the facts. I defy them to prove that we have not always spoken in the same way in regard, for example, to the small farms of the peasants. They now accuse our opinion on this subject of opportunism, using the word in its political meaning; they could, more correctly, accuse us of having always professed opportunism, but this time using the word in the sense implied by its derivation. You know how necessary it is to avoid the confusion—opportune for some, it is true—of the political meaning of a word with its true meaning. The political radicals are far from being radical in the ordinary sense, and their brothers (nominally opponents) the opportunists, instead of wishing that which is opportune, find nothing opportune except the satisfaction of their own appetites and the postponement of all else. In the true meaning—the time has come to say it—of the word, there cannot be a party more thoroughly opportunist than the socialist party which—I will not cease repeating—must simply adapt itself to the facts and which has no guide, save the facts, to point the way in the transformation of property.

When we talk of the transformation of property which is nothing, as they are obliged to confess, but "a social institution,"[8] our opponents, with their strange fashion of doing us justice, change our words into "suppression of property." "Socialists of all schools have decreed the suppression of property"[9] is the notable affirmation of "a certain number of young men, strangers hitherto to politics"[10]—this part of the phrase is not mine, it is, possibly, the least open to criticism of any part of the work of the young men in question, who have felt impelled to speak on a question that they confess is foreign to them. Their confession is superfluous; we would have readily perceived, unaided, that they spoke of socialism after the fashion of those who know nothing of it.

These young men, in founding the "comité d'action de la gauche libérale,"[11] wrote: "We are partisans of individual liberty and of individual property." I assume, until proof to the contrary is forthcoming, that they are not partisans of these things for themselves and their friends alone. If they advocate them for every one, I beg them to tell us what they think of the liberty of the man who has, as his source of livelihood, only his labor-power without the means of utilizing it.

Either they recognize that every man ought to have the means of labor at his disposal, and, in that case, I will ask them how, with the system of mechanical industry, they hope to put at the disposal of all these means so necessary to the liberty of all.

Or, they do not recognize that every man, to be free, must dispose of the tools and materials of labor, and then I will ask them what becomes of the liberty of the man to whom the employer can say: if you do such or such a thing, if you do not accept such or such a thing, you shall have no work, that is to say, it shall be impossible for you to eat. And that they may not accuse me of describing hypothetical cases blacker than nature, I will submit for their meditation the following fact related by the Temps (Times)[12] at the time of the strike of Rive-de-Gier.

"An engine-stoker fell ill. He was replaced, all the time of his illness, by a common laborer at 50 cents a day. The regular stoker having gotten well, resumed his duties. He was completely surprised, at the end of the fortnight, to receive only 50 cents a day, when he had been paid, before his illness, 80 cents. He protested. 'There it is. Take it or leave it,' he was told; 'we have found out that a common laborer at 50 cents does this work just as well as you; we cut you down to 50 cents. Get out or accept it.' The man had a family, and choice was forbidden him. He accepted it."

In the face of such facts, M. Célestin Jonnart has the assurance—which I will describe, returning one of the epithets he applies to us, as "villainous"—to assert that the socialists "are working for conditions which will produce generations of men who will know nothing but abject submission and will be ready for every degradation." These generations, sir, are not to be made; they are to be raised from their degradation, and that is the task at which socialism is working.

If I have cited only one fact, this is not because facts of this kind are rare, it is because the one I have cited has the advantage of coming from the Temps which may be suspected of anything you like except socialism. Then, besides proving how free the laborer is in his choice, this fact shows how the free contract between capitalist and laborer is concluded. When the stoker resumes his place, he naturally imagines that he is resuming it upon the former conditions, and no one undeceives him. On pay-day, which does not come till a fortnight later, he perceives that he must conclude a new free contract different from the one he had a right to believe in force, and accept 50 cents instead of the 80 cents expected and agreed upon.

Are these men free, the stoker and his like? I would gladly have on this point the opinion of M. Léon Say who not long since posed as the champion, against the socialists, of "human liberty and dignity." The truth is that the laborer is free, only when, to the right of being free, he joins the effective power of being free, only when he has at his disposition the things necessary to the realization of his labor, only, in other words, when he does not have to throw himself upon the mercy of the possessors of those things. Whatever the law may say, the man who depends upon another for his subsistence is not free. What is requisite is to furnish means of labor to the laborers who have them not; now, on the basis of the present form or character of these means, society can assure possession of them to all, only when these means shall have been socialized, shall have become social property. As regards the laborers who still possess their means of labor, they will retain them, as I explained just above. In fact, only through socialism can individual liberty be made a reality for all.