As long as a product is supplied only by a single manufacturer, its real value remains a mystery, either through the producer's misrepresentation or through his neglect or inability to reduce the cost of production to its extreme limit.Thus the privilege of production is a real loss to society, and publicity of industry, like competition between laborers, a necessity.
All the utopias ever imagined or imaginable cannot escape this law.
Certainly I do not care to deny that labor and wages can and should be guaranteed; I even entertain the hope that the time of such guarantee is not far off: but I maintain that a guarantee of wages is impossible without an exact knowledge of value, and that this value can be discovered only by competition, not at all by communistic institutions or by popular decree.For in this there is something more powerful than the will of the legislator and of citizens, -- namely, the absolute impossibility that man should do his duty after finding himself relieved of all responsibility to himself: now, responsibility to self, in the matter of labor, necessarily implies competition with others.Ordain that, beginning January 1, 1847, labor and wages are guaranteed to all: immediately an immense relaxation will succeed the extreme tension to which industry is now subjected; real value will fall rapidly below nominal value; metallic money, in spite of its effigy and stamp, will experience the fate of the assignats; the merchant will ask more and give less; and we shall find ourselves in a still lower circle in the hell of misery in which competition is only the third turn.
Even were I to admit, with some socialists, that the attractiveness of labor may some day serve as food for emulation without any hidden thought of profit, of what utility could this utopia be in the phase which we are studying? We are yet only in the third period of economic evolution, in the third age of the constitution of labor, -- that is, in a period when it is impossible for labor to be attractive.For the attractiveness of labor can result only from a high degree of physical, moral, and intellectual development of the laborer.Now, this development itself, this education of humanity by industry, is precisely the object of which we are in pursuit through the contradictions of social economy.How, then, could the attractiveness of labor serve us as a principle and lever, when it is still our object and our end?
But, if it is unquestionable that labor, as the highest manifestation of life, intelligence, and liberty, carries with it its own attractiveness, I deny that this attractiveness can ever be wholly separated from the motive of utility, and consequently from a return of egoism; I deny, I say, labor for labor, just as I deny style for style, love for love, art for art.
Style for style has produced in these days hasty literature and thoughtless improvisation; love for love leads to unnatural vice, onanism, and prostitution;
art for art ends in Chinese knick-knacks, caricature, the worship of the ugly.When man no longer looks to labor for anything but the pleasure of exercise, he soon ceases to labor, he plays.History is full of facts which attest this degradation.The games of Greece, Isthmian, Olympic, Pythian, Nemean, exercises of a society which produced everything by its slaves;
the life of the Spartans and the ancient Cretans, their models; the gymnasiums, playgrounds, horse-races, and disorders of the market-place among the Athenians;
the occupations which Plato assigns to the warriors in his Republic, and which but represent the tastes of his century; finally, in our feudal society, the tilts and tourneys, -- all these inventions, as well as many others which I pass in silence, from the game of chess, invented, it is said, at the siege of Troy by Palamedes, to the cards illustrated for Charles VI.by Gringonneur, are examples of what labor becomes as soon as the serious motive of utility is separated from it.Labor, real labor, that which produces wealth and gives knowledge, has too much need of regularity and perseverance and sacrifice to be long the friend of passion, fugitive in its nature, inconstant, and disorderly; it is something too elevated, too ideal, too philosophical, to become exclusively pleasure and enjoyment, -- that is, mysticism and sentiment.The faculty of laboring, which distinguishes man from the brutes, has its source in the profoundest depths of the reason:
how could it become in us a simple manifestation of life, a voluptuous act of our feeling?
But if now they fall back upon the hypothesis of a transformation of our nature, unprecedented in history, and of which there has been nothing so far that could have expressed the idea, it is nothing more than a dream, unintelligible even to those who defend it, an inversion of progress, a contradiction given to the most certain laws of economic science; and my only reply is to exclude it from the discussion.
Let us stay in the realm of facts, since facts alone have a meaning and can aid us.The French Revolution was effected for industrial liberty as well as for political liberty: and although France in 1789 had not seen all the consequences of the principle for the realization of which she asked, -- let us say it boldly, -- she was mistaken neither in her wishes nor in her expectation.Whoever would try to deny it would lose in my eyes the right to criticism: I will never dispute with an adversary who would posit as a principle the spontaneous error of twenty-five millions of men.
At the end of the eighteenth century France, wearied with privileges, desired at any price to shake off the torpor of her corporations, and restore the dignity of the laborer by conferring liberty upon him.Everywhere it was necessary to emancipate labor, stimulate genius, and render the manufacturer responsible by arousing a thousand competitors and loading upon him alone the consequences of his indolence, ignorance, and insincerity.Before '89
