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
Is it meant--it is still M. Blanc who interrogates--that all
capitalists are not idlers? M. Blanc, generous to capitalists
who work, asks why so large a share should be given to those who
do not work? A flow of eloquence as to the IMPERSONAL services
of the capitalist and the PERSONAL services of the laborer,
terminated by an appeal to Providence.
For the third time, you are asked whether the participation of
capital in profits is legitimate, since you admit that it is
indispensable in production.
At last M. Blanc, who has understood all the time, decides to
reply that, if he allows interest to capital, he does so only as
a transitional measure and to ease the descent of the
capitalists. For the rest, his project leading inevitably to the
absorption of private capital in association, it would be folly
and an abandonment of principle to do more. M. Blanc, if he had
studied his subject, would have needed to say but a single
phrase: "I deny capital."
Thus M. Blanc,--and under his name I include the whole of
socialism,-- after having, by a first contradiction of the title
of his book, "ORGANIZATION OF LABOR," declared that capital was
INDISPENSABLE in production, and consequently that it should be
organized and participate in profits like labor, by a second
contradiction rejects capital from organization and refuses to
recognize it: by a third contradiction he who laughs at
decorations and titles of nobility distributes civic crowns,
rewards, and distinctions to such litterateurs inventors, and
artists as shall have deserved well of the country; he allows
them salaries according to their grades and dignities; all of
which is the restoration of capital as really, though not with
the same mathematical precision, as interest and net product: by
a fourth contradiction M. Blanc establishes this new aristocracy
on the principle of equality,-- that is, he pretends to vote
masterships to equal and free associates, privileges of idleness
to laborers, spoliation in short to the despoiled: by a fifth
contradiction he rests this equalitarian aristocracy on the basis
of a POWER ENDOWED WITH GREAT FORCE,--that is, on despotism,
another form of monopoly: by a sixth contradiction, after having,
by his encouragements to labor and the arts, tried to proportion
reward to service, like monopoly, and wages to capacity, like
monopoly, he sets himself to eulogize life in common, labor and
consumption in common, which does not prevent him from wishing to
withdraw from the effects of common indifference, by means of
national encouragements taken out of the common product, the
grave and serious writers whom common readers do not care for: by
a seventh contradiction. . . . but let us stop at seven, for we
should not have finished at seventy-seven.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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