The Socialism of to-day

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 835096955

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-28834

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Laveleye, Émile de

Title:: The Socialism of to-day

Place of publication:: London

Publisher:: Field & Tuer

Year of publication:: 1884

Scope:: 1 Online-Ressource (XLIV, 331 S.)

Collection:: Economics Books

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tue rise and fall of tile international. 171 pensable. How are they to be preserved among equals? To-day the employer expels the workman who does not work : this is the stimulus. In the new social organization expulsion can hardly be included ; must recourse, then, be had to the prison ? At present the proprietor is interested in preserving his capital and in improving his apparatus. The co-operative members will be much less interested, since they will be only usufructuaries, and the responsibility for deteriorations will fall on society in general. At bottom the economic problem is nothing but the organization of responsibility and of justice. The Collectivists are ready to swear by Darwin : they ought, then, to admit that, in the struggle for existence, the best con stituted organisms will at last prevail. Let instruction be given to the working man, and every possible facility for forming pro ductive societies: when they shall thus have “fair play " if Collectivism is worth more than Individualism, their associations will supplant private enterprises, and the new régime will be established by a gradual and slow evolution, just as all economic transformations are made. If, on the contrary, their principle IS inferior in respect of the stimulus to activity of labour, to the formation of capital, and to industrial progress, even should they succeed in establishing it by a forcible revolution, it would not last : it would disappear, as every inferior organism suc cumbs when placed in contact with a superior organism The Communists demand the abolition of hereditary suc- ; it already been tried. In the Middle Ages there was no succession in the case of the serfs in mortmain. In order to defeat the claims of the superior lord, they formed themselves into corporations. These c^^,emtives^^:ri^, p^^^al d^l tinned in possession without interruption, and thus there was the collective property of groups in which deaths never cause a succession. Is not this the ideal that certain Collectivists " *'>« it has vanished at the touch ttviliaation, and that it is even now disappearing in

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