Socialism and Democracy in Europe

by Samuel Peter Orth

To extend, therefore, to every citizen the guarantees inscribed in the Declaration of Rights, our great Babeuf demanded ownership in common, as a guarantee of welfare in common. Communism was for the boldest proletarians the supreme expression of the Revolution.

Between the political régime, the outcome of the revolutionary movement, and the economic régime of society, there is an intolerable contradiction.

In the political order democracy is realized: all citizens share equally, at least by right, in the sovereignty; universal suffrage is communism in political power.

In the economic order, on the other hand, a minority is sovereign. It is the oligarchy of capital which possesses, directs, administers, and exploits.

Proletarians are acknowledged fit as citizens to manage the milliards of the national and communal budgets; as laborers, in the workshop, they are only a passive multitude, which has no share in the direction of enterprises, and they endure the domination of a class which makes them pay dearly for a tutelage whose utility ceases and whose prolongation is arbitrary.

The irresistible tendency of the proletarians, therefore, is to transfer into the economic order the democracy partially realized in the political order. Just as all the citizens have and handle in common, democratically, the political power, so they must have and handle in common the economic power, the means of production.

They must themselves appoint the heads of work in the workshops, as they appoint the heads of government in the city, and reserve for those who work, for the community, the whole product of work.

This tendency of political democracy to enlarge itself into social democracy has been strengthened and defined by the whole economic evolution.

In proportion as the capitalistic régime developed its effects, the proletariat became conscious of the irreducible opposition between its essential interests and the interests of the class dominant in society, and to the bourgeois form of democracy it opposed more and more the complete and thorough communistic democracy.

All hope of universalizing ownership and independence by multiplying small autonomous producers has disappeared. The great industry is more and more the rule in modern production.