Competition must be determined by itself.In other words, according to M.Dunoyer and all the economists, the remedy for the inconveniences of competition is more competition; and, since political economy is the theory of property, of the absolute right of use and abuse, it is clear that political economy has no other answer to make.Now, this is as if it should be pretended that the education of liberty is effected by liberty, the instruction of the mind by the mind, the determination of value by value, all of which propositions are evidently tautological and absurd.
And, in fact, to confine ourselves to the subject under discussion, it is obvious that competition, practised for itself and with no other object than to maintain a vague and discordant independence, can end in nothing, and that its oscillations are eternal.In competition the struggling elements are capital, machinery, processes, talent, and experience, --
that is, capital again; victory is assured to the heaviest battalions.
If, then, competition is practised only to the advantage of private interests, and if its social effects have been neither determined by science nor reserved by the State, there will be in competition, as in democracy, a continual tendency from civil war to oligarchy, from oligarchy to despotism, and then dissolution and return to civil war, without end and without rest.
That is why competition, abandoned to itself, can never arrive at its own constitution: like value, it needs a superior principle to socialize and define it.These facts are henceforth well enough established to warrant us in considering them above criticism, and to excuse us from returning to them.Political economy, so far as the police of competition is concerned, having no means but competition itself, and unable to have any other, is shown to be powerless.
It remains now to inquire what solution socialism contem-plates.A single example will give the measure of its means, and will permit us to come to general conclusions regarding it.
Of all modern socialists M.Louis Blanc, perhaps, by his remarkable talent, has been most successful in calling public attention to his writings.
In his "Organization of Labor," after having traced back the problem of association to a single point, competition, he unhesitatingly pronounces in favor of its abolition.From this we may judge to what an extent this writer, generally so cautious, is deceived as to the value of political economy and the range of socialism.On the one hand, M.Blanc, receiving his ideas ready made from I know not what source, giving everything to his century and nothing to history, rejects absolutely, in substance and in form, political economy, and deprives himself of the very materials of organization; on the other, he attributes to tendencies revived from all past epochs, which he takes for new, a reality which they do not possess, and misconceives the nature of socialism, which is exclusively critical.
M.Blanc, therefore, has given us the spectacle of a vivid imagination ready to confront an impossibility; he has believed in the divination of genius; but he must have perceived that science does not improvise itself, and that, be one's name Adolphe Boyer, Louis Blanc, or J.J.Rousseau, provided there is nothing in experience, there is nothing in the mind.
M.Blanc begins with this declaration:
We cannot understand those who have imagined I know not what mysterious coupling of two opposite principles.To graft association upon competition is a poor idea: it is to substitute hermaphrodites for eunuchs.
These three lines M.Blanc will always have reason to regret.They prove that, when he published the fourth edition of his book, he was as little advanced in logic as in political economy, and that he reasoned about both as a blind man would reason about colors.Hermaphrodism, in politics, consists precisely in exclusion, because exclusion always restores, in some form or other and in the same degree, the idea excluded; and M.Blanc would be greatly surprised were he to be shown, by his continual mixture in his book of the most contrary principles, -- authority and right, property and communism, aristocracy and equality, labor and capital, reward and sacrifice, liberty and dictatorship, free inquiry and religious faith, -- that the real hermaphrodite, the double-sexed publicist, is himself.
M.Blanc, placed on the borders of democracy and socialism, one degree lower than the Republic, two degrees beneath M.Barrot, three beneath M.
Thiers, is also, whatever he may say and whatever he may do, a descendant through four generations from M.Guizot, a doctrinaire.
"Certainly," cries M.Blanc, "we are not of those who anathematize the principle of authority.This principle we have a thousand times had occasion to defend against attacks as dangerous as absurd.We know that, when organized force exists nowhere in a society, despotism exists everywhere."
Thus, according to M.Blanc, the remedy for competition, or rather, the means of abolishing it, consists in the intervention of authority, in the substitution of the State for individual liberty: it is the inverse of the system of the economists.
I should dislike to have M.Blanc, whose social tendencies are well known, accuse me of making impolitic war upon him in refuting him.I do justice to M.Blanc's generous intentions; I love and I read his works, and I am especially thankful to him for the service he has rendered in revealing, in his "History of Ten Years," the hopeless poverty of his party.
