Proudhon, the socialist of the small farmer and petty tradesman, hated association most heartily. According to him, it does more harm than good; it is naturally unfruitful, even detrimental, because it curtails the worker's freedom; it is pure dogma, unproductive and troublesome, destructive of the freedom of the worker as well as the saving of labor; its disadvantages multiply faster than its advantages; while competition, division of labor, private property, are economic springs of greater power. Only in exceptional cases—these are Proudhon's own words—of great industries and great business corporations, the railroads, for instance, is the association of the workers good and proper.[1]
And yet, even in Paris, the center of the artistic trades, production on a large scale had so far ceased to be an exception in 1871 that the most important decree of the Commune had for its object the organization of great industries and even of manufacture;[2] and this organization
- ↑ See Idée générale de la Révolution, 3me étude.
- ↑ This term, "manufacture," is a compound of two Latin words: manu, by hand, and factum, made. From the birth of the factory system the true meaning of this expression has been lost by the "vulgar bourgeois," who ignorantly applied it to all the products of industries carried on upon a large scale, without making in his terminology, as he surely did in his mercantile operations, the important discrimination between those that were still entirely or chiefly wrought out with hand tools by hand labor, and those that now were to any appreciable extent turned out by "labor-saving" machinery, moved by steam, water, or some other non-human power, and simply "tended" by mere "operatives," less paid than the "artizans," and fewer in number as compared with the amount of production. Nay, sometimes the sense adulteration went even farther. For instance, a century ago every shoe was hand-made, was a "manufacture." To-day some shoes are still hand-made, and therefore are still truly "manufactures," while the great bulk of the shoe production is machinery-made and comes from "factories." Yet shoes of the latter sort are called "manufactures,"
the proper consideration of economic questions, the Commune should have done so well as to deserve the praise of Marx and Engels for such measures as it was able to take during its short life, is in itself an object lesson of the highest import. It shows in a vivid light the natural tendency of the proletarian mind when its class-consciousness is set in motion by a terrific class struggle.—Note to the American Edition.
