Now, let us suppose that the well-situated workman, instead of continuing to invest his savings in values of any kind, sets himself up in business on his own account after he has gathered together a certain amount. This is becoming more and more impossible, thanks to machinery, which requires the concentration of enormous capital and leaves no room for the isolated workman; but we will assume its possibility and suppose that this workman-employer works alone. If the postulate of political economy be true, that every faculty of man is employed capital, and that it produces a fortune for him who puts it into use, here is an individual who invests money-capital, force-capital, and intelligence-capital; having to divide with nobody it will not be long till he sees his money-capital increase tenfold in his hands, and becomes in his turn a millionaire.
In practice the workman who works alone on his own account is rarely to be found. The small employer, with two or three workmen, lives perhaps a little better than those he employs, but he must work as hard, if not harder, constantly pressed as he is to meet his obligations; he can expect no improvement, happy if he manage to maintain himself in his comparative comfort and escape failure. Big profits, big fortunes, life “driven four-in-hand,” are reserved to the big proprietors, big shareholders, big manufacturers, big speculators, who do not work themselves but employ workmen by hundreds; which proves that capital is indeed accumulated labor, but the labor of others accumulated in the hands of one person—a robber! For the rest the best proof that there is something fundamentally vicious in the social organization, is that machinery, a development begotten by all our acquired knowledge transmitted from generation to generation, and which consequently ought to benefit every human being, rendering all lives broader and easier by the fact that it increases their power of production and furnishes them the means of producing much more while working fewer hours—machinery has brought nothing but an increase of misery and privation to the workers. The capitalists are the only ones to benefit by the advantages of mechanical inventions, which enable them to reduce the number of their employees, and with the help of the antagonism thus established, competition between the unemployed and the employed, they profit by lowering the wages of the latter, poverty forcing the former to accept the price offered, even though it be less than the amount necessary to their maintenance and restoration of energy; which proves that the pretended “natural laws” are violated by their own operation, and that consequently if they be laws they are far from being natural.
On the other hand it is certain that the capitalists, with all their capital, all their machinery, could produce nothing without the cooperation of the workers, whilst the latter, by coming to an understanding among themselves and uniting their forces, could produce very well without the assistance of capital. But setting that aside the conclusion we want to draw is this:—From the moment it is admitted that the capitalists cannot put their capital into use without the cooperation of the worker, the latter becomes the most important factor in production, and in all logic ought to receive the greater share of the product. Now, how comes it that it is the capitalists, on the contrary, who absorb the greater share of the product? The less they produce the more they get! And the more the workers produce the more they increase their chances of idleness, and have consequently less chances to consume! How comes it that the more the stores are crammed with products the more the producers die of hunger, and what ought to be a source of general wealth and enjoyment becomes a source of misery for those who labor?
From all this it follows clearly that private property is accessible only to those who exploit their fellows. The history of humanity shows that this form of property was not that of the first human associations; that it was only at a much later period of their evolution, when the family commenced to emerge from promiscuity, that private property begins to be seen in property common to the clan or tribe. This would prove nothing against its legitimacy if such appropriation had operated otherwise than arbitrarily; we speak of it merely to prove to the bourgeoisie; who have tried to make an argument in its favor by claiming that property has always been what it now is, that that argument no longer has any value in our eyes. For the rest, did those
