Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Modern Science and Anarchism (1912).pdf/57

 the French followers of Fourier, they attached a great importance to the freely constituted and federated communities or groups, which would own in common their land, their factories, and their stores; while remuneration for work, both within each industrial village, and in the exchange between the different groups, would be made by means of labour-cheques, representing the hours of labour that were spent by each person in the communal fields, workshops, or factories.

The same idea of remuneration by labour-cheques was advocated, as we have already seen, by Proudhon and his Mutualist followers. They also repudiated the coercive intervention of the State, both during the transitory period and the subsequent Socialist life. They considered that what now constitutes the functions of the State in economic matters could be accomplished by the branches of the Bank of the People and the Clearing Houses; while education, sanitary arrangements, and so on ought to be in the hands of entirely independent Communes.

Again, the same idea of labour-cheques taking the place of money in all exchanges, but with a State ownership of all the land, the mines, the railways, and the factories, was advocated by two remarkable writers, Pecqueur and Vidal, who described their system as Collectivism. Pecqueur, who was a member of the Constituent Assembly in 1848, wrote a whole treatise on this matter, in which he developed his system in full—even in the shape of laws which the Assembly had only to vote to accomplish the Social Revolution. The names of Vidal and Pecqueur were quite forgotten by that time, but their ideas were widely spread, and they were soon revived among the Germans under the names of "Marxism," "scientific Socialism," or "Collectivism."

By the side of these different schools, the ideas of the Saint-Simonist school had a considerable hold upon many minds in the International Working Men's Association, as they also had had among the revolutionists of 1848.

A great number of brilliant writers, politicians, and industrialists, among whom suffice it to name the philosopher Auguste Comte, the historian Augustin Thierry, and the economist Sismondi, had developed under the inspiration of the teachings of Saint-Simon. And their work had deeply influenced most social reformers.

Human progress—they said—had hitherto consisted in transforming Slavery into Serfdom, and Serfdom into the Wage System. But the time had now come to abolish the Wage