Page:Karl Marx - The Poverty of Philosophy - (tr. Harry Quelch) - 1913.djvu/166

 THE METAPHYSICS OF POLITICAL ECONOMY 159

of competition against those who would replace it by emulation. '

There is no “emulation without an object,” and as “the object of every passion is necessarily analogous to the passion, a mistress for the lover, power for the ambitious, gold for the avaricious, a crown for the poet; the object of industrial emulation is necessarily profit. Emulation is nothing but competition itself.”

Competition is emulation in view of profit. Is industrial emulation necessarily emulation in view of profit, that is to say, competition? M. Proudhon proves it in affirming it. We have already seen that to affirm is, for him, to prove, the same as to suppose is to deny.

If the immediate object of the lover is a mistress, the immediate object of industrial emulation is the product and not the profit.

Competition is not industrial emulation, it is com- mercial emulation. In our days industrial emulation only exists in view of commerce. There are some phases in the economic life of modern peoples in which everybody is seized with a kind of vertigo for making profit without producing. This vertigo of speculation, which reappears periodically, discloses the real character of competition which seeks to escape the necessity of industrial emulation.

If you had told an artisan of the fourteenth century that the privileges and the whole feudal organisation of ‘industry were about to be abrogated, in order to put in- dustrial emulation, called competition, in their place, he. would have answered that the privileges of the various corporations, masters and wardens, were organised competition. M. Proudhon says no better in affirming that “emulation is nothing but competition itself.”

“Enact that from January 1, 1847, work and wages