As a matter of fact, those pretended work-houses, where the work consists in ridiculous and fruitless occupations, are, whatever may be said, simply torture-houses.For to a reasonable being there is no torture like that of turning a mill without grain and without flour, with the sole purpose of avoiding rest, without thereby escaping idleness.
"This organization [the organization of competition]," continues M.
Blanqui, "tends to make all the profits of labor pass into the hands of capital....It is at Reims, at Mulhouse, at Saint-Quentin, as at Manchester, at Leeds, at Spitalfields, that the existence of the workers is most precarious"....
Then follows a frightful picture of the misery of the work-ers.Men, women, children, young girls, pass before you, starved, blanched, ragged, wan, and wild.The description ends with this stroke:
The workers in the mechanical industries can no longer supply recruits for the army.
It would seem that these do not derive much benefit from M.Dunoyer's white bread and soup.
M.Villerme regards the licentiousness of young working girls as inevitable.
Concubinage is their customary status; they are entirely subsidized by employers, clerks, and students.Although as a general thing marriage is more attractive to the people than to the bourgeoisie, there are many proletaires, Malthusians without knowing it, who fear the family and go with the current.
Thus, as workingmen are flesh for cannon, workingwomen are flesh for prostitution:
that explains the elegant dressing on Sunday.After all, why should these young women be expected to be more virtuous than their mistresses?
M.Buret, crowned by the Academy:
I affirm that the working class is abandoned body and soul to the good pleasure of industry.
The same writer says elsewhere:
The feeblest efforts of speculation may cause the price of bread to vary a cent a pound and more: which represents $124,100 for thirty-four million men.
I may remark, in passing, that the much-lamented Buret regarded the idea of the existence of monopolists as a popular prejudice.Well, sophist!
monopolist or speculator, what matters the name, if you admit the thing?
Such quotations would fill volumes.But the object of this treatise is not to set forth the contradictions of the economists and to wage fruitless war upon persons.Our object is loftier and worthier: it is to unfold the System of Economical Contradictions, which is quite a different matter.
Therefore we will end this sad review here; and, before concluding, we will throw a glance at the various means proposed whereby to remedy the inconveniences of competition.
3.-- Remedies against competition.
Can competition in labor be abolished?
It would be as well worth while to ask if personality, liberty, individual responsibility can be suppressed.
Competition, in fact, is the expression of collective activity; just as wages, considered in its highest acceptation, is the expression of the merit and demerit, in a word, the responsibility, of the laborer.It is vain to declaim and revolt against these two essential forms of liberty and discipline in labor.Without a theory of wages there is no distribution, no justice; without an organization of competition there is no social guarantee, consequently no solidarity.
The socialists have confounded two essentially distinct things when, contrasting the union of the domestic hearth with industrial competition, they have asked themselves if society could not be constituted precisely like a great family all of whose members would be bound by ties of blood, and not as a sort of coalition in which each is held back by the law of his own interests.
The family is not, if I may venture to so speak, the type, the organic molecule, of society.In the family, as M.de Bonald has very well observed, there exists but one moral being, one mind, one soul, I had almost said, with the Bible, one flesh.The family is the type and the cradle of monarchy and the patriciate: in it resides and is preserved the idea of authority and sovereignty, which is being obliterated more and more in the State.
It was on the model of the family that all the ancient and feudal societies were organized, and it is precisely against this old patriarchal constitution that modern democracy protests and revolts.
The constitutive unit of society is the workshop.
Now, the workshop necessarily implies an interest as a body and private interests, a collective person and individuals.Hence a system of relations unknown in the family, among which the opposition of the collective will, represented by the employer, and individual wills, represented by the wage-
receivers, figures in the front rank.Then come the relations from shop to shop, from capital to capital, -- in other words, competition and association.
For competition and association are supported by each other; they do not exist independently; very far from excluding each other, they are not even divergent.Whoever says competition already supposes a common object; competition, then, is not egoism, and the most deplorable error of socialism consists in having regarded it as the subversion of society.
Therefore there can be no question here of destroying competition, as impossible as to destroy liberty; the problem is to find its equilibrium, I would willingly say its police.For every force, every form of spontaneity, whether individual or collective, must receive its determination: in this respect it is the same with competition as with intelligence and liberty.
How, then, will competition be harmoniously determined in society?
We have heard the reply of M.Dunoyer, speaking for political economy:
