And, in fact, to confine ourselves to the subject under
discussion, it is obvious that competition, practised for itself
and with no other object than to maintain a vague and discordant
independence, can end in nothing, and that its oscillations are
eternal. In competition the struggling elements are capital,
machinery, processes, talent, and experience,--that is, capital
again; victory is assured to the heaviest battalions. If, then,
competition is practised only to the advantage of private
interests, and if its social effects have been neither determined
by science nor reserved by the State, there will be in
competition, as in democracy, a continual tendency from civil war
to oligarchy, from oligarchy to despotism, and then dissolution
and return to civil war, without end and without rest. That is
why competition, abandoned to itself, can never arrive at
its own constitution: like value, it needs a superior principle
to socialize and define it. These facts are henceforth well
enough established to warrant us in considering them above
criticism, and to excuse us from returning to them.
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