Page:The Conquest of Bread (1906).djvu/267

Rh We can state as a fact that owing to these methods the needs of three-quarters of society are not satisfied, and that the present waste of human strength is the more useless and the more criminal.

We discover, moreover, that the most advantageous use of all commodities would be, for each of them, to go, first, for satisfying those needs which are the most pressing: that, in other words, the so-called "value in use" of a commodity does not depend on a simple whim, as has often been affirmed, but on the satisfaction it brings to real needs.

Communism—that is to say, an organization which would correspond to a view of Consumption, Production, and Exchange, taken as a whole—therefore becomes the logical consequence of the comprehension of things, the only one, in our opinion, that is really scientific.

A society that will satisfy the needs of all, and which will know how to organize production, will also have to make a clean sweep of several prejudices concerning industry, and first of all of the theory often preached by economists—The Division of Labour theory—which we are going to discuss in the next chapter.