Proletarians are acknowledged fit as citizens to manage the milliards of the national and communal budgets; as laborers, in the workshop, they are only a passive multitude, which has no share in the direction of enterprises, and they endure the domination of a class which makes them pay dearly for a tutelage whose utility ceases and whose prolongation is arbitrary. The irresistible tendency of the proletarians, therefore, is to transfer into the economic order the democracy partially realized in the political order. Just as all the citizens have and handle in common, democratically, the political power, so they must have and handle in common the economic power, the means of production. They must themselves appoint the heads of work in the workshops, as they appoint the heads of government in the city, and reserve for those who work, for the community, the whole product of work. This tendency of political democracy to enlarge itself into social democracy has been strengthened and defined by the whole economic evolution. In proportion as the capitalistic régime developed its effects, the proletariat became conscious of the irreducible opposition between its essential interests and the interests of the class dominant in society, and to the bourgeois form of democracy it opposed more and more the complete and thorough communistic democracy. All hope of universalizing ownership and independence by multiplying small autonomous producers has disappeared. The great industry is more and more the rule in modern production. By the enlargement of the world's markets, by the growing facility of transport, by the division of labor, by the increasing application of machinery, by the concentration of capitals, immense concentrated production is gradually ruining or subordinating the small or middling producers. Even where the number of small craftsmen, small traders, small peasant proprietors, does not diminish, their relative importance in the totality of production grows less unceasingly. They fall under the sway of the great capitalists. Even the peasant proprietors, who seem to have retained a little independence, are more and more exposed to the crushing forces of the universal market, which capitalism directs without their concurrence and against their interests. For the sale of their wheat, wine, beetroot, and milk, they are more and more at the mercy of great middlemen or great industries of milling, distilling, and sugar-refining, which dominate and despoil peasant labor. The industrial proletarians, having lost nearly all chance of individually rising to be employers, and being thus doomed to eternal dependence, are further subject to incessant crises of unemployment and misery, let loose by the unregulated competition of the great capitalist forces.