Consequently power
in your hands has never been anything but ruinous, and that is
why you have never been able to retain it; that is why, on the
Eighteenth of Brumaire,[31] four men were sufficient to take
it away from you, and why today the bourgeoisie, which is as fond
of power as you are and which wants a strong power, will not
restore it to you.
[31] Date of the Napoleonic coup d'Etat, according to the
revolutionary calendar.
Thus power, the instrument of collective might, created in
society to serve as a mediator between labor and privilege, finds
itself inevitably enchained to capital and directed against the
proletariat. No political reform can solve this contradiction,
since, by the confession of the politicians themselves, such a
reform would end only in increasing the energy and extending the
sphere of power, and since power would know no way of touching
the prerogatives of monopoly without overturning the hierarchy
and dissolving society. The problem before the laboring classes,
then, consists, not in capturing, but in subduing both power and
monopoly,--that is, in generating from the bowels of the people,
from the depths of labor, a greater authority, a more potent
fact, which shall envelop capital and the State and subjugate
them.
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