When e. g. a branch of industry is ruined and thousands of laborers become breadless, people think reasonably enough to acknowledge that it is not the individual who must bear the blame, but that "the evil lies in the situation."
Let us change the situation then, but let us change it thoroughly, and so that its fortuity becomes powerless, and a law! Let us no longer be slaves of chance! Let us create a new order that makes an end of fluctuations. Let this order then be sacred!
Formerly one had to suit the lords to come to anything; after the Revolution the word was "Grasp fortune!" Luck-hunting or hazard-playing, civil life was absorbed in this. Then, alongside this, the demand that he who has obtained something shall not frivolously stake it again.
Strange and yet supremely natural contradiction. Competition, in which alone civil or political life unrolls itself, is a game of luck through and through, from the speculations of the exchange down to the solicitation of offices, the hunt for customers, looking for work, aspiring to promotion and decorations, the second-hand dealer's petty haggling, etc. If one succeeds in supplanting and outbidding his rivals, then the "lucky throw" is made; for it must be taken as a piece of luck to begin with that the victor sees himself equipped with an ability (even though it has been developed by the most careful industry) against which the others do not know how to rise, consequently that—no abler ones are found. And now those who ply their daily lives in the midst of these changes of fortune without seeing any harm in it are seized with the most virtuous indignation when their own principle appears in naked form and "breeds misfortune" as—hazard-playing. Hazard-playing, you see, is too clear, too barefaced a competition, and, like every decided nakedness, offends honorable modesty.
The Socialists want to put a stop to this activity of chance, and to form a society in which men are no longer dependent on fortune, but free.
In the most natural way in the world this endeavor first utters itself as hatred of the "unfortunate" against the "fortunate," i. e., of those for whom fortune has done little or nothing, against those for whom it has done everything.
But properly the ill-feeling is not directed against the fortunate, but against fortune, this rotten spot of the commonalty.
As the Communists first declare free activity to be man's essence, they, like all work-day dispositions, need a Sunday; like all material endeavors, they need a God, an uplifting and edification alongside their witless "labor."
That the Communist sees in you the man, the brother, is only the Sunday side of Communism. According to the work-day side he does not by any means take you as man simply, but as human laborer or laboring man. The first view has in it the liberal principle; in the second, illiberality is concealed. If you were a "lazybones," he would not indeed fail to recognize the man in you, but would endeavor to cleanse him as a "lazy man" from laziness and to convert you to the faith that labor is man's "destiny and calling."
Therefore he shows a double face: with the one he takes heed that the spiritual man be satisfied, with the other he looks about him for means for the material or corporeal man. He gives man a twofold post,—an office of material acquisition and one of spiritual.