During the capitalist period, it suffices for socialism to establish the possibility of the emancipation of the working-class and to work for that emancipation. There is no occasion to waste time in working out and settling the details of the organization of the future society. Each epoch has its task. Let us not have the presumption to lay down rules for those who are to come after us, and let us be content with present duties. The point upon which socialism trains its guns at present, though recognizing the utility that it has had in the past, is the capital-form; but let us not forget that the substance beneath this form will be every whit preserved. When an office is taken away from an office-holder, the individual is left without a hair the less. In the same way, in taking from the means of production their function as capital, everything that functions to-day under that form will remain intact. Socialism then attacks the capital-form, the form only, and it attacks it only in so far as the economic phenomena authorize such an attack. Everything which constitutes the substance of capital will be preserved, the capital-form alone will disappear and along with it that power that it involves of exploiting the labor of others. What will be the fate of the capitalists? Capital appears to be a collective power or force, by its origin, since it springs from the accumulated surplus-labor of a collective body of laborers, by its functional activity since it also requires a collective body of laborers to enable it to enter upon its functions, and by its mode of ownership since, if it is private property, it tends more and more to be the private property, not of an individual, but of a collective body, a company or trust. To make public property of the means of production, which are capital when they are able to exploit the labor of others and which are capital only on that condition, is simply to generalize the collective or social character which they already have. Is the holder of a share in a mining or railway company or any sort of stock-company justified in speaking of "his" property? Where is his property? In what does it consist? What can he show if someone asks to see it? A machine? A piece of real estate? No, simply one or several bits of paper which represent only an infinitesimal fraction of an undivided whole. Would this shareholder be any the less a property-owner, if this undivided whole should become an integrant portion of the national property? Would there be such a great difference between "his" property, as it now is, and his quota or share in the national property? Just as the capitalists understand well enough to-day how to avail themselves of the national forests, for instance, for fresh air, pleasure excursions afoot and awheel, recreation, etc., so, after the socialization of the material objects that make up what is at present capital, they would use this newly nationalized property as means of labor or production.