Is it not immediately and intuitively evident that COMPETITION
DESTROYS COMPETITION? Is there a theorem in geometry more
certain, more peremptory, than that? How then, upon what
conditions, in what sense, can a principle which is its own
denial enter into science? How can it become an organic law of
society? If competition is necessary; if, as the school says, it
is a postulate of production,--how does it become so devastating
in its effects? And if its most certain effect is to ruin those
whom it incites, how does it become useful? For the
INCONVENIENCES which follow in its train, like the good which it
procures, are not accidents arising from the work of man: both
follow logically from the principle, and subsist by the same
title and face to face.
And, in the first place, competition is as essential to labor as
division, since it is division itself returning in another form,
or rather, raised to its second power; division, I say, no
longer, as in the first period of economic evolution, adequate to
collective force, and consequently absorbing the personality of
the laborer in the workshop, but giving birth to liberty by
making each subdivision of labor a sort of sovereignty in which
man stands in all his power and independence.
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