Page:Peter Alexeivitch Kropotkin - The Commune of Paris (1896).djvu/13

Rh by the worker will be a source of well-being to the whole Commune.

An attempt has been made of late to establish a distinction between various sorts of social wealth, and the Socialist party are divided upon the question. The present Collectivist school, substituting a sort of dogmatic theory of Collectivism for the Collectivism of the old International, which was merely anti-authoritative Communism, have sought to establish a distinction between capital used for production and wealth supplying the necessities of life. Machinery, factories, raw material, means of communication, and the soil, on the one side, and dwellings, manufactured produce, clothing, commodities, on the other. The first are to be collective property, the second are designed, by the professors of this school of Socialism, to remain private property.

There has been an attempt to set up this distinction; but the popular good sense has got the better of it; it has found it illusory and impossible to establish. It is vicious in theory and fails in in practical life. The workers understand that the house which shelters us, the coal and gas we burn, the tuel consumed by the human machine to sustain life, the clothing needful to existence, the book we read for instruction, even the enjoyments we get, are all so many component parts of our existence, are all as necessary to successful production and the progressive development of humanity, as machines, manufactories, raw materials and other means of working. The workers are arriving at the conclusion that to maintain private property in this sort of wealth would be to maintain inequality, oppression, exploitation, to paralyse beforehand the results of the partial expropriation. Leaping over the fence set up in their path by theoretical Collectivism, they are marching straight for the simplest and most practical form of anti-authoritative Communism.

Now in their meetings the revolutionary workers are distinctly stating their right to all social wealth and the necessity of abolishing private property in articles of consumption as well as in those of re-production: "On the day of the Revolution, we shall seize upon all the wealth stored up in the towns and put it in common," say the speakers, and the audience confirm the statements with their unanimous approval. "Let each take from the pile what he needs and be sure that in the warehouses of our towns there will be enough food to feed every one until free production has made a fair start; in the shops