the performance of a fractional operation. The same thing holds good
for machinery. So, too, competition stimulates effort, but brings much
misery in its train by leading to adulteration, sharp practices, and
strife between man and man. Further, taxation should be proportional
to riches, in reality it is proportional to poverty. Or again, private
ownership of land ought to increase productivity; in practice it
deprives the farmer of the land. In this way he runs to earth the
contradictions in political economy, and so we find everywhere the
words thesis and anti-thesis or antinomies (contradictions between two
well-established propositions). And out of this contradiction springs
poverty. The solution or the synthesis is the creation of an economic
order which shall preserve the good elements in this category and
eliminate the bad ones, and so satisfy the demands of justice. And
that is what Socialism cannot do. "For the economic order is based
upon calculations of an inexorable justice and not upon those angelic
sentiments of brotherhood, sacrifice, and love which so many
well-meaning Socialists of the present time are endeavouring to awake
in the people. It is useless for them to preach, after the example of
Jesus Christ, the necessity for sacrifice, and to set an example of it
in their own lives: selfishness is stronger than they and can only be
restrained by rigid justice and immutable economic law. Humanitarian
enthusiasm may cause upheavals which are conducive to the progress of
civilisation, but such emotional crises, like the fluctuations in
value, simply result in the establishing of law and order on a more
rigid and more restricted basis. Nature or the Deity planted mistrust
in our hearts, having no faith in the love of man for his fellow men;
and though I say it to the shame of the human conscience (for our
hypocrisy must be confronted with it sooner or later), every
disclosure which science has made to us concerning the designs of
providence with respect to the progress of society points to a deeply
rooted hatred of mankind on God's part."--("System of Economic
Contradictions or the Philosophy of Poverty," Vol. I., p. 107.) Just
as severely does he denounce the institution of Trade Unionism and
its methods of warfare, together with State politics, as indeed the
working of class organisation and of the State generally. The only way
to realise social justice is to create a society of producers who
exchange their goods among one another according to their equivalents
in labour and carry on work in adequate relationship to the production
of wealth, or, to put it clearly, to establish an order where supply
and demand balance one another.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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