[1] A word is needed to make the force of this sarcasm clear to American readers. There was formed around the late Benoît Malon, the founder of La Revue Socialiste, a small but very intelligent and influential school of socialists, who loved (and still love) to prate about the inadequacy of Marxism, its neglect of various "factors," etc., etc. They regard Marxian economics as being true so far as they go, but as constituting a very inadequate and incomplete socialism, which it was reserved for them, by a beneficent Providence, to complete. Their own socialism they call "integral socialism." We have their like in America—men who use Marxian ammunition and belittle Marx.—Tr.
II.
In order for man, who can live only on condition that he works, to be able to perform any sort of work, he must have at his disposition the instruments and the subject of labor. Now, these tools and this material, in one word, the means of labor, are, more and more, becoming the property of the capitalists. Those who are despoiled of the means of utilizing in work their own labor-power (or physical capacity for work) are, henceforth, compelled, being unable to live otherwise, to sell the use of that power to the capitalists who hold in their possession the things indispensable for labor. Through their possession of the things indispensable for the functioning of labor-power, the capitalists are, in fact, masters of all who cannot utilize their own power themselves, nor live without utilizing it. From this economic dependence flows the existence of distinct classes, distinct in spite of the civil and political equality of their members; and, as the capitalist regime expropriates the Middle Class more and more, it tends to accentuate the division of society into two principal classes: on the one hand, those who control the means of labor; on the other, those for whom the actual use of those means is the sole possibility of life.
I will ask you to note that I speak of classes and not of orders or estates, because these last expressions imply a legal demarcation between the categories of persons which they indicate; while the word class simply denotes, according to Littré,[2] the "grades established among men by the diversity and inequality of their circumstances." This is the reason that some among us refuse to make use of the expression "Fourth Estate." There are no longer any Estates, it is true, but it is not the less true that there still are classes. As no one among us any longer dares to approve of their existence, to deny it is the only way to avoid combatting it. And so it is this denial that is resorted to by those adversaries of socialism whose only weapons are falsehood and hypocrisy. Socialists are not the cause of the existence of classes because they recognize their existence. They limit themselves to establishing that which has been, that which is and that which is destined to be: the origin of classes, their present persistence and their approaching disappearance.
As soon as, thanks to the development of the faculties of man and to his industrial discoveries, the productivity of labor became great enough for an individual to be able to produce more than was indispensable for his maintenance, the division of society into two great classes, the exploiters and the exploited, was effected. And this division had its justification, so long as production was not sufficient to render comfort for all a possibility. But, thanks to machinery and to scientific appliances which facilitate labor, while vastly multiplying the supply of articles of consumption, the exhausting labor of the masses and the monopolization of comfort by a minority can henceforth give place, must henceforth give place, and will give place in a future which no longer seems distant, to the universalization of labor and its inevitable consequence, the universalization of comfort and of leisure, that is to say, to social conditions under which there will be no classes, because their existence will (as now) serve no useful end as it has done in the past. We will soon see that our present ruling class, far from being useful, is already becoming baneful.
To-day, if the existence of distinct classes has, apparently, lost all legal sanction, it is just as real a fact as ever. To deny it, one must have—pardon me the expression, but I can find no other defining as accurately this state of mind—the desire to play the fool, or the interest to do so. It is impossible to deny seriously that a part of the population is, in fact, through the form of the economic relations, through their material self-interest, through their need of food, placed in a position of dependence upon another portion of the population, and that there is an antagonism between those who must struggle to exist by working and those who can bargain out to them the means of labor.[3]
By proclaiming the existence of classes and their antagonism, by divulging that antagonism, which is not their work, on the political rostrum, socialists are not creating factitious distinctions, they are not resuscitating and do not dream of resuscitating any of the social forms so fortunately and so energetically annihilated by the French Revolution, they are only adapting themselves to the situation as it presents itself to them now.