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
There's sense for you: whatever M. Leon Faucher may say, he calls
for the organization of labor. For government to see to it that
EVERY DISPLACEMENT OF LABOR IS EFFECTED ONLY BY MEANS OF A
COMPENSATION OR A TRANSITION, AND THAT INDIVIDUALS AND CLASSES
ARE NEVER SACRIFICED TO STATE CONSIDERATIONS,--that is, to the
progress of industry and the liberty of enterprise, the supreme
law of the State,--is without any doubt to constitute itself, in
some way that the future shall determine, the PURVEYOR OF LABOR
IN SOCIETY and the guardian of wages. And, as we have many times
repeated, inasmuch as industrial progress and consequently the
work of disarranging and rearranging classes in society is
continual, it is not a special transition for each innovation
that needs to be discovered, but rather a general principle, an
organic law of transition, applicable to all possible cases and
producing its effect itself. Is M. Leon Faucher in a position to
formulate this law and reconcile the various antagonisms which we
have described? No, since he prefers to stop at the idea of an
indemnity. POWER, he says, IN WELL-ORGANIZED NATIONS, HAS ALWAYS
TIME AND MONEY TO GIVE FOR THE MITIGATION OF THESE PARTIAL
SUFFERINGS. I am sorry for M. Faucher's generous intentions, but
they seem to me radically impracticable.
Power has no time and money save what it takes from the
taxpayers. To indemnify by taxation laborers thrown out of work
would be to visit ostracism upon new inventions and establish
communism by means of the bayonet; that is no solution of the
difficulty. It is useless to insist further on indemnification
by the State. Indemnity, applied according to M. Faucher's
views, would either end in industrial despotism, in something
like the government of Mohammed-Ali, or else would degenerate
into a poor-tax,--that is, into a vain hypocrisy. For the good
of humanity it were better not to indemnify, and to let labor
seek its own eternal constitution.
There are some who say: Let government carry laborers thrown out
of work to points where private industry is not established,
where individual enterprise cannot reach. We have mountains to
plant again with trees, ten or twelve million acres of land to
clear, canals to dig, in short, a thousand things of immediate
and general utility to undertake.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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