Page:Studies in socialism 1906.djvu/193

Rh proletarian distortion of the borgeoisbourgeois [sic] revolution, Marx does not foresee a complete victory of the proletariat and Communism; he looks for an extraordinary combination of Capitalist and Communist ownership, of violence to property and organisation of credit. Here is a singular fact: after having maintained that it is to the evolution of industry and the growth of the industrial proletariat that the revolutionary power owes its very existence, the Manifesto only plans as the first move of the victorious Communist Revolution, the expropriation of the income from land! In this Marx is less advanced than Babeuf, whose glory it is to have brought industrial, as well as agricultural, production within the scope of Communist action. His position is almost that of St. Just, who seems to have foreseen the possibility of the nation's absorbing the rent of farms. "We have seen above," says Marx, "that the first measure of the working class will be to raise the proletariat to the position of the ruling class, to capture the democratic régime.

"The proletariat will make use of its political supremacy to wrest by degrees all capital from the bourgeoisie, to centralise all the means of production in the hands of the State, viz., the proletariat organised into a ruling class, and to increase as quickly as possible the total of productive forces of which use can be made.

"It is evident that this policy implies at the outset despotic inroads on the rights of private