Property has been demolished from top to
bottom: the economists could only keep silent; but, powerless to
arrest itself in this new descent, socialism has slipped clear to
the farthest boundaries of communistic utopia, and, for want of a
practical solution, society is reduced to a position where it can
neither justify its tradition, nor commit itself to experiments
in which the least mistake would drive it backward several
thousand years.
In such a situation what is the mandate of science?
Certainly not to halt in an arbitrary, inconceivable, and
impossible juste milieu; it is to generalize further, and
discover a third principle, a fact, a superior law, which shall
explain the fiction of capital and the myth of property, and
reconcile them with the theory which makes labor the origin of
all wealth. This is what socialism, if it wishes to proceed
logically, must undertake. In fact, the theory of the real
productivity of labor, and that of the fictitious productivity of
capital, are both essentially economical: socialism has
endeavored only to show the contradiction between them, without
regard to experience or logic; for it appears to be as destitute
of the one as of the other.
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