COMPETITION AND MONOPOLY
"Competition is as essential to Good side of | labor as division.... It is competition| necessary for the advent of | equality."
[I 186, 188]
"The principle is the negation of Bad side of| itself. Its most certain result competition| is to ruin those whom it drags | in its train."
[I 185]
"The drawback which follow General reflection| in its wake, just as the good it | provides... both flow logically | from the principle."
[I 185-86]
"To seek the principle of | accommodation, which must be | derived from a law superior to | liberty itself."
[I 185]
Variant
Problem to be solved | "There can, therefore, be no | question here of destroying | competition, a thing as impos-| sible to destroy as liberty; we | have only to find its equilibrium | I would be ready to say its | police."
[I 223] M . Proudhon begins by defending the eternal necessity of competition against those who wish to replace it by emulation [Engels: The Fourierists].
There is no "purposeless emulation", and as "the object of every passion is necessarily analogous to the passion itself -- a woman for the lover, power for the ambitious, gold for the miser, a garland for the poet --the object of indus- trial emulation is necessarily profit. Emulation is nothing but competition itself."[I 187]
Competition is emulation with a view to profit. Is industrial emulation necessarily emulation with a view to profit, that is, competition?? M.
Proudhon proves it by affirming it. We have seen that, for him, to affirm is to prove, just as to suppose is to deny.
If the immediate object of the lover is the woman, the immediate object of industrial emulation is the product and not the profit.
Competition is not industrial emulation, it is commercial emulation.
In our time industrial emulation exists only in view of commerce. There are even phases in the economic life of modern nations when everybody is seized with a sort of craze for making profit without producing. This speculation craze, which recurs periodically, lays bare the true character of competition, which seeks to escape the need for industrial emulation.
If you had told an artisan of the 14th century that the privileges and the whole feudal organization of industry were going to be abrogated in favor of industrial emulation, called competition, he would have replied that the privileges of the various corporations, guilds and fraternities were organized competition. M. Proudhon does not impose upon this when he affirms that "emulation is nothing but competition itself".
"Decree that from the first of January 1847, labor and wages shall be guaranteed to everybody: immediately an immense relaxation will succeed the high tension of industry."[I 189]
Instead of a supposition, an affirmation and a negation, we have now a decree that M. Proudhon issues purposely to prove the necessity of competition, its eternity as a category, etc.
If we imagine that decrees are all that is needed to get away from competition, we shall never get away from it. And if we go so far as to propose to abolish competition while retaining wages, we shall be proposing nonsense by royal decree. But nations do not proceed by royal decree. Before framing such ordinances, they must at least have changed from top to bottom the conditions of their industrial and political existence, and consequently their whole manner of being.
M. Proudhon will reply, with his imperturbable assurance, that it is the hypothesis of "a transformation of our nature without historical antecedents", and that he would be right in "excluding is from the discussion", we know not in virtue of which ordinance.
M. Proudhon does not know that all history is nothing but a continuous transformation of human nature.
"Let us stick to the facts. The French Revolution was made for industrial liberty as much as for political liberty; and although France, in 1789, had not perceived -- let us say it openly -- all the consequences of the principle whose real- ization it demanded, it was mistaken neither in its wishes nor in its expectations. Whoever attempts to deny this loses, in my view, the right to criticisM. I will never dispute with an adversary who puts as principle the spont- aneous error of 25 million men....
"Why then, if competition had not been a principle of social economy, a decree of fate, a necessity of the human soul, why, instead of abolishing corporations, guilds and brother- hoods, did nobody think rather of repairing the whole??"[I 191, 192]
So, since the French of the 18th century abolished corporations, guilds, and fraternities instead of modifying them, the French of the 19th century must modify competition instead of abolishing it. Since competition was established in France in the 18th century as a result of historical needs, this competition must not be destroyed in the 19th century because of other historical needs. M. Proudhon, not understanding that the establishment of competition was bound up with the actual development of the men of the 18th century, makes of competition a necessity of the human soul , in partibus infidelium [ed: literally, "territory of the infidels"; here, meaning, "beyond the realm of reality".] What would he have made of the great Colbert for the 17th century??
After the revolution comes the present state of affairs. M. Proudhon equally draws facts from it to show the eternity of competition, by proving that all industries in which this category is not yet sufficiently developed, as in agriculture, are in a state of inferiority and decrepitude.
To say that there are industries which have not yet reached the stage of competition, that others gains are below the level of bourgeois production, is drivel which gives not the slightest proof of the eternity of competition.
