Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/117

 production. This distribution would not assure a great degree of comfort to each of the participants.

But M. Proudhon is not so pessimistic as one might believe him to be. As proportion is everything for him, it is indeed necessary that he should see in his fully endowed Prometheus, that is to say in actual society, a commencement of the realisation of his favorite idea.

"But everywhere also the progress of riches, that is to say the proportion of values, is the dominant law; and when the economists oppose to the complaints of the social party the progressive growth of the public wealth and the amelioration effected in the condition of even the most unfortunate classes, they proclaim, without suspecting it, a truth which is the condemnation of their theories."

What, in effect, are collective riches, public wealth? They are the wealth of the bourgeoisie, and not that of each individual bourgeois. Well! the economist have simply demonstrated how, in the relations of production as they exist, the wealth of the bourgeoisie has developed and must still grow. As to the working classes, it is still a much debated question whether their condition has been ameliorated at all as a result of the growth of the so-called public wealth. If the economists cite to us, in support of their optimism, the example of the workers engaged in the English cotton industry, they only notice their position in the rare moments of commercial prosperity. These moments of prosperity are to the epochs of crisis and stagnation in the "exact proportion" of three to ten. But perhaps also, in speaking of amelioration, the economists may have wished to refer to the millions of workers condemned to perish, in the East Indies, in order to procure for the million and a half of