System of Economical Contradictions; Or, The Philosophy of MiseryProudhon, P.-J. (Pierre-Joseph)
Philosophy
System of Economical Contradictions; Or, The Philosophy of Misery
Proudhon, P.-J. (Pierre-Joseph)
Economics
Lyons will be chosen as the storming-party when the time comes
for assaulting the bastilles.
In short, it is impossible, contradictory, in the present system
of society, for the proletariat to secure well-being through
education or education through well-being. For, without
considering the fact that the proletaire, a human machine, is as
unfit for comfort as for education, it is demonstrated, on the
one hand, that his wages continually tend to go down rather than
up, and, on the other, that the cultivation of his mind, if it
were possible, would be useless to him; so that he always
inclines towards barbarism and misery. Everything that has been
attempted of late years in France and England with a view to the
amelioration of the condition of the poor in the matters of the
labor of women and children and of primary instruction, unless it
was the fruit of some hidden thought of radicalism, has been done
contrary to economic ideas and to the prejudice of the
established order. Progress, to the mass of laborers, is always
the book sealed with the seven seals; and it is not by
legislative misconstructions that the relentless enigma will be
solved.
For the rest, if the economists, by exclusive attention to their
old routine, have finally lost all knowledge of the present state
of things, it cannot be said that the socialists have better
solved the antinomy which division of labor raised. Quite the
contrary, they have stopped with negation; for is it not
perpetual negation to oppose, for instance, the uniformity of
parcellaire labor with a so-called variety in which each one can
change his occupation ten, fifteen, twenty times a day at will?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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