This struggle between individuals has the effect of leading the possessors to make war upon each other, to divide them and prevent them from seeing their caste interest, which would be to work to ensure their powers of exploitation by avoiding and stalling everything which would open the eyes of the exploited—a war which causes them to commit a multitude of mistakes that contribute largely to their downfall. If the capitalistic classes were truly united among themselves, if their members no longer had private interests and were moved solely by the interests of caste, given the power which the possession of fortune, authority, and all the administrative machinery, coercive and executive, secures to them, given their intellectual development, necessarily superior to that of the workers the nourishment of whose brains they apportion to the nourishment of their bodies, the bourgeoisie might, for an indefinite period, rivet upon the exploited the yoke of poverty and dependence under which it now holds them. Happily the thirst to own, to shine, to parade, and to amass, makes them give themselves up to a warfare among themselves not less cruel than that in which they engage the workers. Eager to possess, they heap error upon error; the workers finally take an account of things, become acquainted with the causes whence flows their misery, and conscious of the subjection in which they are held.
But the same war which goes on among the capitalists goes on also among the workers; and while the first compromises the stability of the bourgeois edifice, the second helps to secure its continued existence. Forced to struggle among themselves in order to snatch the vacancies in these dungeons which the capitalists offer them, the workers regard each other as so many enemies while they are led to consider him who exploits them as a benefactor. Starved by the bourgeoisie, who in exchange for their toil give them just enough to keep them from dying of hunger, they are, at the very start, led to treat as an enemy the one who comes into the workshop to compete with them for the place they have had so much trouble to obtain. The scarcity of these vacancies again sharpens the competition, causing them to offer themselves at a lower price than their competitors. So that the anxiety of the daily struggle for daily bread makes them forget that their worst enemies are their masters. For the bourgeoisie, strengthened, it is true, by fortune, intellectual supremacy, and the possession of the governmental forces, are, after all, but a feeble minority in comparison with the multitude of workers; nor would the former be long in surrendering to the more numerous class, had they not found means for dividing the latter and making the same contribute to the defense of their privileges.
All this, therefore, certainly shows us that man is far from being an angel. He has even been a brute in the fullest acceptation of the word; this is true enough also. When men first became organized into societies they based these societies upon their instincts for struggle and mastery; and this explains why society is so badly constructed. Only, society has remained bad. Its authority resting in the hands of a minority, the latter have turned it to their own profit; and the more society has evolved the more this concentration of power in the hands of a few has tended to increase and develop the evil effects of these ill-omened institutions. Man, on the contrary, in proportion as his brain has developed, as facilities for procuring the means of subsistence have increased, has felt evolving within him that sentiment of solidarity which he had already obeyed in founding the first groups. This sentiment of solidarity has become such a necessity that religions have carried it to the extreme of sacrifice, preaching charity and self-renunciation, and therein finding a new element for exploitation. To what dreams of social reorganization, of plans for the happiness of humanity has the longing to live harmoniously with our fellows not given birth! But society was there, stifling with all its weight the good instincts of man, reviving in him his savage primitive egoism, forcing him to consider other people as so many enemies whom he must overthrow in order not to be overthrown himself, accustoming him to look with a dry eye upon those who disappear, ground up in the monstrous gearing of the social mechanism, he being powerless to help them under pain of being caught himself in the same insatiable jaws, which mainly devour the good and the innocent who yield to their humanitarian sentiments, allowing the survival only of the malicious who have learned how to push others into those jaws in order to delay their own fall.
You make a great outcry against the lazy, against thieves and
