Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - Modern Science and Anarchism (1912).pdf/59

 State based upon a division of society into classes ("the Class-State"). They ended by recognising an all-powerful State. They based the structure of society upon inequality and authority, and they based order upon a hierarchy of administrators, proceeding from above to below.

From the Communists of 1848 the Saint-Simonists thus differed by allotting to the individual a purely individual share in the riches produced by the whole community. Notwithstanding the valuable work which some of them had accomplished in political economy, they did not yet reach the conception of all production being a social fact, and consequently of it being materially impossible to determine with justice the share which must be attributed to each separate individual out of the total mass of commodities produced.

Upon this point the Communists widely differed from the Saint-Simonists. But there was one point upon which both the authoritarian Communists and the followers of Saint-Simon agreed. They both ignored the individual and his claims. All that the Communists did, was to concede to the individual the right of electing his administrators and rulers, which the earlier Saint-Simonists, before 1848, refused to admit. But under Communism, as under Saint-Simonism and under Collectivism, the individual was a mere functionary of the State. With Cabet, Jacobinist Communism, the suppression of individuality, reached its fullest expression.

And finally we must mention the followers of Louis Blanc, very numerous at that time both in France and Germany (where they were represented by a strong body of Lassalleans). They considered that the transfer of industrial property from Capital to Labour could be effected if a Government, born of a revolution and inspired by Socialist ideas, would aid the workers in organising a wide system of productive Labour Associations, support them by loans, and join all of them in one large system of national production. Equal remuneration of all workers in these associations might be accepted as a transitory form—their final aim being to come later on to a division of produce according to the needs of each producer. It was thus, as Considérant remarked, Communistic Saint-Simonism under State management.

Supported by a large system of State credit, granted at a very low rate of interest, freely competing against capitalist production, and upheld by the commands of the Stare, such Labour Associations would soon oust the Capitalist from the