Accordingly the economists have
demonstrated--and M. Rossi has formally admitted it--that
monopoly is the form of social possession, outside of which there
is no labor, no product, no exchange, no wealth. Every landed
possession is a monopoly; every industrial utopia tends to
establish itself as a monopoly; and the same must be said of
other functions not included in these two categories.
Monopoly in itself, then, does not carry the idea of injustice;
in fact, there is something in it which, pertaining to society as
well as to man, legitimates it: that is the POSITIVE side of the
principle which we are about to examine.
But monopoly, like competition, becomes anti-social and
disastrous: how does this happen? By ABUSE, reply the
economists. And it is to defining and repressing the abuses of
monopoly that the magistrates apply themselves; it is in
denouncing them that the new school of economists glories.
We shall show that the so-called abuses of monopoly are only the
effects of the development, in a NEGATIVE sense, of legal
monopoly; that they cannot be separated from their principle
without ruining this principle; consequently, that they are
inaccessible to the law, and that all repression in this
direction is arbitrary and unjust.
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