Page:Conventional Lies of our Civilization.djvu/278

264 amount of life's goods and enjoyments, such a class would be inconceivable in a society reorganized according to this system. Real difficulties in carrying it out would not arise until the country became too densely populated and the soil exhausted. When these conditions arrive and it is found impossible to supply all the demands for productive land and factories, then a part of the young people must decide upon emigration. However, an extremely intensive cultivation of the soil, such as I mentioned above, will postpone this necessity to a far distant future.

There is no doubt but what this system is a kind of Communism. But let him who shudders and turns pale at this word, remember that we are living now in the midst of a complete Communism, only it is a passive instead of an active Communism. We have no community in possessions, but we have a community in debts. No one is shocked at the fact that every citizen merely on account of his being a citizen of the State, is a debtor to an amount varying in different countries; in France for example, it is nearly $120 per capita. Why should any one be shocked at the idea of the citizen owning, instead of owing, in consequence of a complete revolution, a corresponding amount of property, if the State should possess common property as well as common debts? In such a case the State would not be always taking taxes from its citizens, but distributing benefits among them, as it now does to a small number of them, comprising the privileged class. Besides, the State already possesses property of all kinds in buildings, lands, forests, ships etc. The existence of this property, which is certainly not individual possessions but belongs collectively and indivisibly to all the citizens together, is certainly communism but it is not recognized as such by the people, because the forms of government and the public institutions inherited from the Middle Ages,