No, rejoins the communist, the laborer's object of emulation
should be general utility, fraternity, love.
But society itself, since, instead of stopping at the individual
man, who is in question at this moment, they wish to attend only
to the collective man,--society, I say, labors only with a view
to wealth; comfort, happiness, is its only object. Why, then,
should that which is true of society not be true of the
individual also, since, after all, society is man and entire
humanity lives in each man? Why substitute for the immediate
object of emulation, which in industry is personal welfare, that
far-away and almost metaphysical motive called general welfare,
especially when the latter is nothing without the former and can
result only from the former?
Communists, in general, build up a strange illusion: fanatics on
the subject of power, they expect to secure through a central
force, and in the special case in question, through collective
wealth, by a sort of reversion, the welfare of the laborer who
has created this wealth: as if the individual came into existence
after society, instead of society after the individual.
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