In a little pamphlet, The Products of the Earth, one of our friends has shown from official figures that even in its present infantile state of agriculture, its entire product is very considerably in excess of consumption. M. Ville shows that by the judicious use of chemical products, without additional labor, the earth may be made to return four or five times as much as at present. Is not this a triumphant confirmation of what we say? But he is mistaken in seeing in his system the solution of the social question, and in believing that products rendered thus abundant will be so cheap that the workers will be able to live by spending little and saving much. If M. Ville had read the bourgeois economists, among others M. de Molinari, he would have learned that “the superabundance of products in the market has the effect of so lowering the price of these products that their production being no longer remunerative to the capitalist drives capital out of these branches of production until the equilibrium is reestablished and things brought back to where they started from.” If M. Ville had been less absorbed in his learned calculations, and had taken some slight account of the functioning of society, he would have seen that, although there is now an enormous excess of production over consumption, there are people dying of hunger; he would have seen that the very best theoretical calculations are defeated of their aims in our present social practice. Nature aided by intelligence and human labor may indeed succeed in producing, at small cost, the wherewithal to nourish the human race; but commerce and stock-gambling, the proprietor and the capitalist, will also succeed in getting their discount thereon, in making goods scarce in order to sell them at a dearer price, and, in an emergency, in preventing their production altogether in order to raise the fictitious prices still further, and maintain them at a fixed rate through rapacity, greed for lucre, and parasitism. For example let us take coal; coal is a ready-made product. It has only to be extracted from the soil; the beds are so abundant that they are spread all over the surface of the globe and are practically inexhaustible. And yet its price is kept at a relatively high rate; not everyone can be warm according to the requirements of temperature; its abundance has not made it accessible to the workers. This is because the mines have been monopolized by powerful companies which limit the output of coal, and which, in order to escape competition, have ruined or bought up small operators, preferring to leave such acquisitions unworked rather than encumber the market and reduce the price, which would reduce their incomes.
What has happened with coal is likewise taking place with the land. Is not the small proprietor, eaten up, squeezed to the wall by usury, daily expropriated for the benefit of the capitalist? Does not property on a big scale constantly tend to reconstitute itself? Does not the use of agricultural machines result in giving impetus to the formation of agricultural syndicates and establishing those powerful anonymous companies already dominant in the manufacturing world, as they are the invariable rule in the mining world?—If we should succeed in making the earth yield four or five times as much, they would reduce by so much the area of cultivated lands, and the rest would be transformed into hunting grounds or pleasure parks for our exploiters. This is already beginning to take place in France, and is an accomplished fact on the estates of the English lords in Scotland and Ireland, the populations whereof are trampled upon and decimated for the benefit of the deer and foxes whose spirited death agonies will serve as pastime to a “select” public similar to that which applauded the lectures in which M. George Ville uttered the philanthropic harangues mentioned above!
Ah, it is because society is so constituted that he who possesses is master of the world! The exchange of products taking place only by the help of capital, money becomes their sole dispenser. All the improvements, all the progress created by labor, industry, and science, go on ever accumulating in the hands of those who already possess, becoming a means of still severer exploitation, weighing down those who possess nothing with still more frightful poverty. The perfecting of the processes of production renders the laborers less and less necessary to the capitalist, increases competition among them, forces them to offer their services at a lower price. Behold, then, how in dreaming you do the workers a service! The social organization reverses your intent so that you work for their exploitation, riveting more firmly the chain whose formidable weight is crushing them.
Certainly, M. G. Ville, you pictured there a beautiful dream: to work and multiply products so that everybody might have enough to eat; to enable the worker to save up a few cents to ward off the incertitudes of the morrow, though scarcely the perfection of human ideals, is as much as could be expected from one whose situation does not expose him to suffer the physical and moral evils that overwhelm the disinherited. Yes, even that is much; but it is only a dream, alas! so long as you have not destroyed the system of exploitation which renders all its promise deceptive and illusory. Capitalism has more than one string to its bow; and admitting that the multiplicity of products would reduce them to a relatively low price, that the worker could
