The world, humanity, capital, industry, business machinery, exist; it is a matter now simply of finding their philosophy, -- in other words, of organizing them: and the socialists are in search of capital! Always outside of reality, is it astonishing that they miss it?
Thus M.Blanc asks for State aid and the establishment of national workshops;
thus Fourier asked for six million francs, and his followers are still engaged today in collecting that sum; thus the communists place their hope in a revolution which shall give them authority and the treasury, and exhaust themselves in waiting for useless subscriptions.Capital and power, secondary organs in society, are always the gods whom socialism adores: if capital and power did not exist, it would invent them.Through its anxieties about power and capital, socialism has completely overlooked the meaning of its own protests: much more, it has not seen that, in involving itself, as it has done, in the economic routine, it has deprived itself of the very right to protest.It accuses society of antagonism, and through the same antago-nism it goes in pursuit of reform.It asks capital for the poor laborers, as if the misery of laborers did not come from the competition of capitalists as well as from the factitious opposition of labor and capital;
as if the question were not today precisely what it was before the creation of capital, -- that is, still and always a question of equilibrium; as if, in short, -- let us repeat it incessantly, let us repeat it to satiety, -- the question were henceforth of something other than a synthesis of all the principles brought to light by civilization, and as if, provided this synthesis, the idea which leads the world, were known, there would be any need of the intervention of capital and the State to make them evident.
Socialism, in deserting criticism to devote itself to decla-mation and utopia and in mingling with political and religious intrigues, has betrayed its mission and misunderstood the character of the century.The revolution of 1830 demoralized us; socialism is making us effeminate.Like political economy, whose contradictions it simply sifts again, socialism is powerless to satisfy the movement of minds: it is henceforth, in those whom it subjugates, only a new prejudice to destroy, and, in those who propagate it, a charlatanism to unmask, the more dangerous because almost always sincere.
NOTES:
1.A comparison of this passage, as given here, with the English translation of "What is Property" will show a marked variation in the language.This is explained by the fact that the author, in reproducing the passage, modified it considerably.The same is true of another quotation from the same work which will be found a few pages farther on.-- Translator.
2.This extract from Scott, as well as that from a parliamentary report cited a few paragraphs later, is here translated from the French, and presumably differs in form somewhat, therefore, from the original English.-- Translator.
3.The spinning-wheel is silent in the valley: family feelings are at an end.Over a little smoke the aged grandsire spreads his pale hands;
and the empty hearth is as desolate as his heart.-- Translator.
4.Possibly these paragraphs will not be clear to all without the explanation that the form of association discussed in them, called in French the commandite, is a joint-stock company to which the shareholders simply lend their capital, without acquiring a share in the management or incurring responsibility for the results thereof.-- Translator.
