Critique of Marxism

Up to now all those who have experienced the need to buttress their revolutionary feelings with precise concepts have found or thought they found these concepts in Marx. It is accepted once and for all that Marx, thanks to his general theory of history and to his analysis of bourgeois society, demonstrated the ineluctable necessity of an early upheaval, in which the oppression we suffer under capitalism would be abolished; and indeed, by dint of being persuaded of the fact, we generally dispense with examining. the demonstration more closely. “Scientific socialism” has attained the status of a dogma, exactly in the same way as have all the results obtained by modern science, results in which each one thinks it is his duty to believe, without ever dreaming of enquiring into the method employed. As far as Marx is concerned, if one tries really to grasp his demonstration intellectually, one at once perceives that it contains very many more difficulties than the advocates of “scientific socialism” lead one to suppose.

Actually, Marx gives a first-rate account of the mechanism of capitalist oppression; but so good is it that one finds it hard to visualize how this mechanism could cease to function. As a rule, it is only the economic aspect of this oppression that holds our attention, that is to say the extortion of surplus value; and, if we confine ourselves to this point of view, it is certainly easy to explain to the masses that this extortion is bound up with competition, which latter is in turn bound up with private property, and that the day when property becomes collective all will be well. Nevertheless, even within the limits of this apparently simple reasoning, a thousand difficulties present themselves on careful examination. For Marx showed clearly that the true reason for the exploitation of the workers is not any desire on the part of the capitalists to enjoy and consume, but the need to expand the undertaking as rapidly as possible so as to make it more powerful than its rivals. Now not only a business undertaking, but any sort of working collectivity, no matter what it may be, has to exercise the maximum restraint on the consumption of its members so as to devote as much time as possible to forging weapons for use against rival collectivities; so that as long as there is, on the surface of the globe, a struggle for power, and as long as the decisive factor in victory is industrial production, the workers will be exploited. As a matter of fact, what Marx assumed, without, however, proving it, was that every kind of struggle for power will disappear on the day socialism is established in all industrial countries; the only trouble is that, as Marx himself recognized, revolution cannot take place everywhere at once; and when it does take place in one country, it does not for that country do away with the need for exploiting and oppressing the mass of workers, but on the contrary accentuates the need, lest it be found weaker than the other nations. The history of the Russian Revolution furnishes a painful illustration of this.

If we consider other aspects of capitalist oppression, other still more formidable difficulties appear, or rather the same difficulty under a more glaring light. The power which the bourgeoisie has to exploit and oppress the workers lies at the very foundations of our social life, and cannot be destroyed by any political and juridical transformation. This power consists in the first place and essentially in the modern system of production itself, that is to say big industry. Pungent dicta abound in Marx’s writings on this subject of living labour being enslaved to dead labour, “the reversal of the relationship between subject and object”, “the subordination of the worker to the material conditions of work”. “In the factory”, he writes in Capital, “there exists a mechanism independent of the workers, which incorporates them as living cogs…. The separation of the spiritual forces that play a part in production from manual labour, and the transformation of the former into power exercised by capital over labour, attain their fulfilment in big industry founded on mechanization. The detail of the individual destiny of the machine-worker fades into insignificance before the science, the tremendous natural forces and the collective labour which are incorporated in the machines as a whole and constitute with them the employer’s power.” Thus the worker’s complete subordination to the undertaking and to those who run it is founded on the factory organization and not on the system of property. Similarly, “the separation of the spiritual forces that play a part in production from manual labour”, or, according to another formula, “the degrading division of labour into manual and intellectual labour”, is the very foundation of our culture, which is a culture of specialists. Science is a monopoly, not because public education is badly organized, but by its very nature; non-scientists have access only to the results, not to the methods, that is to say they can only believe, not assimilate. “Scientific socialism” has itself remained the monopoly of a select few, and the “intellectuals” possess, unfortunately, the same privileges in the working-class movement as they do in bourgeois society. And the same applies, furthermore, on the political plane.

Marx had clearly perceived that State oppression is founded on the existence of organs of government that are permanent and distinct from the population, namely, the bureaucratic, military and police machines; but these permanent organs are the inevitable result of the radical distinction existing, in fact, between the managerial and executive functions. In this respect again, the working-class movement reproduces in full the vices of bourgeois society. At all levels we are brought up against the same obstacle. The whole of our civilization is founded on specialization, which implies the enslavement of those who execute to those who co-ordinate; and on such a basis one can only organize and perfect oppression, not lighten it. Far from capitalist society having developed within itself the material conditions for a régime of liberty and equality, the establishment of such a régime presupposes a preliminary transformation in the realm of production and that of culture.

We can only understand how Marx and his disciples could still believe in the possibility of a real democracy based on our present civilization if we take into account their theory of the development of productive forces. It is well known that, in Marx’s eyes, this development constitutes, in the last analysis, the true motive power of history, and that it is practically unlimited. Every social system, every dominant class has the “task”, the “historic mission”, of carrying the productive forces to an ever higher level, until the day when all further progress is arrested by the social cadres; at that moment the productive forces rebel, break up these cadres, and a new class takes over power. The recognition of the fact that the capitalist system grinds down millions of men only enables one to condemn it morally; what constitutes the historic condemnation of the system is the fact that, after having made productive progress possible, it is now an obstacle in its way. The essential task of revolutions consists in the emancipation not of men but of productive forces. As a matter of fact, it is clear that, as soon as these have reached a level of development high enough for production to be carried out at the cost of little effort, the two tasks coincide; and Marx assumed that such was the case in our time. It was this assumption that enabled him to establish a harmony, indispensable to his moral tranquillity, between his idealistic aspirations and his materialistic conception of history. In his view, modern technique, once freed from capitalist forms of economy, can give men, here and now, sufficient leisure to enable them to develop their faculties harmoniously, and consequently bring about the disappearance, to a certain extent, of the degrading specialization created by capitalism; and above all the further development of technique must lighten more and more, day by day, the burden of material necessity, and as an immediate consequence that of social constraint, until humanity reaches at last a truly paradisal state in which the most abundant production would be at the cost of a trifling expenditure of effort and the ancient curse of work would be lifted; in short, in which the happiness of Adam and Eve before the fall would be regained.

One can understand very well, starting from this conception, the attitude of the Bolsheviks, and why all of them, including Trotsky, treat democratic ideas with supreme disdain. They have found themselves powerless to bring about the workers’ democracy foreshadowed by Marx; but such a minor detail does not worry them, convinced as they are, on the one hand, that all attempts at social action which do not consist of developing productive forces are doomed to failure, on the other hand, that all progress in productive forces causes humanity to advance along the road leading to emancipation, even if it is at the cost of a temporary oppression. It is not surprising that, backed up by such moral certainty as this, they have astonished the world by their strength.

It is seldom, however, that comforting beliefs are at the same time rational. Before even examining the Marxist conception of productive forces, one is struck by the mythological character it presents in all socialist literature, where it is assumed as a postulate. Marx never explains why productive forces should tend to increase; by accepting without proof this mysterious tendency, he allies himself not with Darwin, as he liked to think, but with Lamarck, who in similar fashion founded his biological system on an inexplicable tendency of living creatures to adapt themselves. In the same way, why is it that, when social institutions are in opposition to the development of productive forces, victory should necessarily belong beforehand to the latter rather than the former? Marx evidently does not assume that men consciously transform their social conditions in order to improve their economic conditions; he knows perfectly well that up to the present social transformations have never been accompanied by any clear realization of their real long-term consequences; he therefore implicitly assumes that productive forces possess a secret virtue enabling them to overcome obstacles. Finally, why does he assert without demonstration, and as a self-evident truth, that the productive forces are capable of unlimited development?

The whole of this doctrine, on which the Marxist conception of revolution entirely rests, is absolutely devoid of any scientific basis. In order to understand it, we must remember the Hegelian origins of Marxist thought. Hegel believed in a hidden mind at work in the universe, and that the history of the world is simply the history of this world mind, which, as in the case of everything spiritual, tends indefinitely towards perfection. Marx claimed to “put back on its feet” the Hegelian dialectic, which he accused of being “upside down”, by substituting matter for mind as the motive power of history; but by an extraordinary paradox, he conceived history, starting from this rectification, as though he attributed to matter what is the very essence of mind—an unceasing aspiration towards the best. In this he was profoundly in keeping, moreover, with the general current of capitalist thought; to transfer the principle of progress from mind to things is to give a philosophical expression to that “reversal of the relationship between subject and object” in which Marx discerned the very essence of capitalism. The rise of big industry made of productive forces the divinity of a kind of religion whose influence Marx came under, despite himself, when formulating his conception of history. The term religion may seem surprising in connection with Marx; but to believe that our will coincides with a mysterious will which is at work in the universe and helps us to conquer is to think religiously, to believe in Providence. Besides, Marx’s vocabulary itself testifies to this since it contains quasi-mystical expressions such as “the historic mission of the proletariat”.

This religion of productive forces, in whose name generations of industrial employers have ground down the labouring masses without the slightest qualm, also constitutes a factor making for oppression within the socialist movement. All religions make man into a mere instrument of Providence, and socialism, too, puts men at the service of historical progress, that is to say of productive progress. That is why, whatever may be the insult inflicted on Marx’s memory by the cult which the Russian oppressors of our time entertain for him, it is not altogether undeserved. Marx, it is true, never had any other motive except a generous yearning after liberty and equality; but this yearning, once separated from the materialistic religion with which it was merged in his mind, no longer belongs to anything except what Marx contemptuously called utopian socialism. If Marx’s writings contained nothing more valuable than this, they might without loss be forgotten, at any rate except for his economic analyses.

But such is not the case; we find in Marx a different conception from that Hegelian doctrine turned inside out, namely, a materialism which no longer has anything religious about it and forms not a doctrine but a method of understanding and of action. It is no uncommon thing to find thus in quite great minds two distinct and even incompatible conceptions mingling together under cover of the inevitable looseness of language; absorbed as they are in formulating new ideas, such minds have not the time to make a critical examination of what they have discovered. Marx’s truly great idea is that in human society as well as in nature nothing takes place otherwise than through material transformations. “Men make their own history, but within certain fixed conditions.” To desire is nothing; we have got to know the material conditions which determine our possibilities of action; and in the social sphere these conditions are defined by the way in which man obeys material necessities in supplying his own needs, in other words, by the method of production. A methodical improvement in social organization presupposes a detailed study of the method of production, in order to try to find out on the one hand what we may expect from it, in the immediate or distant future, from the point of view of output, and on the other hand what forms of social and cultural organization are compatible with it, and, finally, how it may itself be transformed. Only irresponsible human beings can neglect such a study and yet claim the right to domineer over society; and, unfortunately, such is the case everywhere, as much in revolutionary circles as among the ruling classes. The materialistic method—that instrument which Marx bequeathed us—is an untried instrument; no Marxist has ever really used it, beginning with Marx himself. The only really valuable idea to be found in Marx’s writings is also the only one that has been completely neglected. It is not surprising that the social movements springing from Marx have failed.

The first question to consider is that concerning output. Are there any reasons for supposing that modern technique, at its present level, is capable—always supposing a fair distribution—of guaranteeing to everyone sufficient welfare and leisure so that the development of the individual may cease to be hampered by modern working conditions? It seems that on this subject there are many illusions, purposely kept alive by demagogic interests. It is not profits which have to be calculated; those of them that are reinvested in production would for the most part be taken away from the workers under any system. We should have to be able to calculate the total amount of labour that could be dispensed with at the cost of a transformation of the property system. Even that would not solve the problem; we must bear in mind the labour involved in the complete reorganization of the productive machine, a reorganization necessary for production to be adapted to its new end, namely, the welfare of the masses; we must not forget that the manufacture of armaments would not be abandoned before the capitalist system had been everywhere destroyed; above all, we must provide for the fact that the abolition of individual profit, while causing certain forms of waste to disappear, would at the same time necessarily create others. It is impossible, of course, to make exact calculations; but they are not indispensable for discerning that the abolition of private property would be far from sufficient in itself to prevent work in the mines and in the factories from continuing to weigh as a servitude on those who are subjected to it.

But if the present state of technique is insufficient to liberate the workers, is there at any rate a reasonable hope that an unlimited development lies before it, which would imply an unlimited increase in productivity? This is what everybody assumes, both among capitalists and socialists, without the smallest preliminary study of the question; it is enough that the productivity of human effort should have increased in an unheard of manner for the last three centuries for it to be expected that this increase will continue at the same rate. Our so-called scientific culture has given us this fatal habit of generalizing, of arbitrarily extrapolating, instead of studying the conditions of a given phenomenon and the limits implied by them; and Marx, whose dialectical method should have saved him from such an error, fell into it on this point just like other people.

The problem is fundamental, and of a kind to determine all our future prospects; it must be formulated with the utmost precision. To this end, the first thing is to know in what technical progress consists, what factors play a part in it, and to examine each factor separately; for we mix up under the name of technical progress entirely different procedures that offer different possibilities of development.

The first procedure that offers itself to man for producing more with less effort is the utilization of natural sources of energy; and it is true, in a sense, that it is impossible to assign a precise limit to the benefits of this procedure, because we do not know what new sources of energy we shall one day be able to use; but this does not mean to say that there can be prospects of unlimited progress in this direction, nor that progress in it is, generally speaking, assured. For nature does not give us this energy, whatever may be the form in which it offers itself—animal power, coal or petroleum; we have to wrest it from her and transform it through our labour so as to adapt it to our own ends. Now, this labour does not necessarily become less as time goes on; at present the very opposite is happening to us, since the extraction of coal and petroleum becomes continually and automatically less profitable and more costly. What is more, the deposits at present known are destined to become exhausted at the end of a relatively short time. Perhaps new deposits will be found; but prospecting, the development of new workings, some of which will doubtless fail to pay—all that will be costly; furthermore, we do not know how many unknown deposits there are in general, and in any case their number will not be unlimited. We may also—and no doubt some day we are bound to—discover new sources of energy; but there is nothing to guarantee that their utilization will call for less labour than the utilization of coal or heavy oils; the opposite is just as possible. It may even happen, at the worst, that the utilization of a natural source of energy involves more labour than the human expenditure of energy one is seeking to replace. In this field it is chance which decides; for the discovery of a new and easily accessible source of energy or of an economic transformation process for a known source of energy is not one of those things one is sure of reaching on a basis of thinking methodically and spending the necessary time thereon.

We deceive ourselves in this matter because we are in the habit of considering the development of science from outside and as a whole; we do not realize that if certain scientific results depend entirely on the good use the scientist makes of his reasoning faculties, others are the result of lucky finds. This is so in the case of the utilization of the forces of nature. There is not the least doubt that every source of energy is transformable; but the scientist is no more certain of coming across something economically advantageous in the course of his researches than is the explorer of arriving at a fertile territory. We can find an instructive example of this in the famous experiments connected with the thermic energy of the seas, about which there has been so much—and such useless—excitement. Now, as soon as chance enters in, the idea of continuous progress is no longer applicable. Consequently, to hope that the development of science will one day bring about, in some sort of automatic way, the discovery of a source of energy which would be almost immediately utilizable for all human needs, is simply day-dreaming. One cannot prove that it is impossible; and, strictly speaking, it is possible, too, that one fine day some sudden change in the astronomical order may give to vast expanses of the earth’s surface the bewitching climate that enables, so it is said, certain primitive tribes to live without working; but possibilities of this description must never be taken into account. On the whole, it would not be reasonable to try to determine here and now what the future holds in store for the human race in this field.

Apart from this, there exists only one other resource making it possible to diminish the total sum of human effort, namely, what we may call, to use a modern expression, the rationalization of labour. Two aspects of it may be distinguished; one which concerns the relationship between simultaneous efforts, the other that between successive efforts; in both cases progress resides in increasing the productivity of the efforts by the way in which these are combined. It is clear that in this field one can, strictly speaking, leave chance out of account, and that here the notion of progress has a meaning; the question is to know whether this progress is unlimited, and, if not, whether we are still a long way from the limit.

As far as what may be termed the rationalization of labour in space is concerned, the economic factors are the concentration, division and co-ordination of labour. The concentration of labour implies the reduction of all kinds of expenses that may be included all together under the heading of overheads, amongst them those relating to premises, transport, sometimes plant. As for the division of labour, that has far more astonishing results. Sometimes it makes it possible to reach a considerable speed in the execution of work which individual workers by themselves could accomplish as well, but much more slowly, and that because each would have to make on his own account the effort of co-ordination which the organization of labour enables one man to assume on behalf of several others. Adam Smith’s famous analysis with regard to the manufacture of pins is an example of this. At other times—and this is what matters most—division and co-ordination of effort make possible gigantic works which would be infinitely beyond the scope of a single man. We must also bear in mind the savings which regional specialization makes possible in the matter of transportation of energy and of raw materials, and doubtless many others besides, which it would take too long to investigate. At all events, as soon as we cast a look at the present system of production, it seems fairly obvious not only that these labour-saving factors contain within themselves a limit beyond which they become factors of expenditure, but furthermore that this limit has been reached and overstepped.

For many years now the expansion of industrial undertakings has been accompanied, not by any reduction in overhead costs, but by an increase in them; the functioning of an undertaking, having become too complex to allow for efficient supervision, leaves an ever wider and wider margin for waste and brings about an accelerated, and no doubt to a certain extent a parasitic, increase in the staff whose task it is to coordinate the various branches of the undertaking. The increase in exchange, which formerly played a tremendous role as a factor in economic progress, has begun in its turn to cause more overhead expenses than it avoids, because the goods remain a long time nonproductive, because the staff dealing with exchange is itself increasing at an accelerated tempo, and because transport consumes an ever-increasing amount of energy as a result of innovations for increasing speed-innovations that become necessarily more and more costly and less and less efficient as they succeed one another. Thus, in all these respects, progress is transformed nowadays, in a strictly speaking mathematical manner, into regression.

The progress achieved by the co-ordination of effort in time is doubtless the most important factor of technical progress; it is also the hardest to analyse. Ever since Marx, we have been in the habit of designating it by speaking of the substitution of inanimate labour for living labour, a dangerously vague formula in the sense that it conjures up the picture of a continuous evolution towards a stage of technique where, if one may so express it, all the jobs to be done would be done already. Such a picture is as chimerical as that of the existence of a natural source of energy as readily accessible to man as his own vital force. The substitution in question simply puts in the place of the movements that would enable certain results to be obtained directly other movements that produce these results indirectly, thanks to the purposeful arrangement of inert objects; it still remains a question of entrusting to matter what seemed to be the role of human effort, but instead of making use of the energy supplied by certain natural phenomena, use is made of the resistance, solidity, hardness possessed by certain materials. In either case, the properties of blind and indifferent matter can only be adapted to human ends by human labour; and in either case again, reason forbids one to assume in advance that this work of adaptation must necessarily be less than the effort that men would have to make so as to obtain directly the end they have in view. But whereas the utilization of natural sources of energy depends to a considerable extent on unforeseeable conjunctures, the utilization of inert and resistant materials has for the most part been effected according to a continuous progress which, once one has understood the principle involved, the mind is capable of embracing and extending.

The first stage—as old as humanity—consists in entrusting to objects disposed in suitable places all those efforts of resistance whose aim it is to prevent certain movements on the part of certain things. The second stage constitutes mechanization as such; mechanization became possible on the day when it was observed that one could not only make use of inert matter so as to ensure immobility where this was necessary, but also entrust it with maintaining the permanent relationships of movements with one other—relationships which up to then had on each occasion to be established by the mind. To this end, all that is necessary is that one should have been able to register these relationships, suitably transposed, in the forms impressed on solid matter. It is thus that one of the first developments which made for the introduction of mechanization consisted in relieving the weaver of the necessity of adapting the choice of threads to be drawn on his loom to the design of the cloth, and this by means of a piece of cardboard punched with holes corresponding to the design. If transpositions of this nature in the various branches of labour could only be obtained little by little, and thanks to inventions apparently due to inspiration or chance, it is because manual work combines the permanent elements that compose it in such a way as to conceal them more often than not under an appearance of variety; that is why sectionalized hand-fabrication had to precede big industry.

Finally, the third and last stage corresponds to automation, which is only beginning to make its appearance; the principle behind it lies in the possibility of entrusting the machine not only with an operation that is invariably the same, but also with a combination of varied operations. This combination can be as vast, as complex as you like; it is only necessary that the variety of operations should be defined and limited beforehand. Automation, which is still, so to say, at a primitive stage of development, can thus, theoretically, develop indefinitely; and the use of such a technique for satisfying human needs knows no limits save those imposed by the share of the unforeseen in the conditions of human existence. If it were possible to conceive of conditions of existence absolutely devoid of any unforeseen contingency, then the American myth of the robot would have a meaning, and the complete abolition of human labour through a systematic organization of the world would be feasible. It is not so, and these are only fictions; though it would still be useful to formulate these fictions, as an ideal limit, if men had at least the power to reduce progressively by some method or other the share of the unforeseen in their lives. But such is not the case, either, and no technique will ever relieve men of the necessity of continually adapting, by the sweat of their brow, the mechanical equipment they use.

Under these conditions it is easy to conceive that a certain degree of automation might be more costly in human effort than a less advanced degree. At least it is easy to conceive it in an abstract way; it is almost impossible to reach any concrete notion in this matter on account of the great number of factors which would have to be taken into account. The extraction of the metals from which machines are made can be done only with human labour; and as it is a question of mining, the work becomes more and more arduous as it proceeds, not to mention the fact that the known deposits run the risk of becoming exhausted relatively quickly; men reproduce themselves, iron does not. Nor must we forget, though financial balance-sheets, statistics, the publications of economists disdain to note it, that work in the mines is more painful, more exhausting, more dangerous than most other forms of work; iron, coal, potassium—all these products are stained with blood. Besides, automatic machines are only a paying proposition as long as they are used for mass production in enormous quantities; their functioning is therefore bound up with the chaos and waste involved in an excessive economic centralization; furthermore, they create the temptation to produce far more than is required to satisfy real needs, which leads to the squandering of precious stores of human energy and of raw materials. Nor must we leave out of account the expenditure involved in all technical progress, on account of the preliminary research required, the need for adapting other branches of production to this progress, the scrapping of old plant which is often discarded when it could still have served for a long time. Nothing of all this is capable of being even approximately measured. It is only clear, in a general way, that the higher the level of technical efficiency the more the advantages to be derived from new developments diminish as compared with the drawbacks. We have, however, no means of ascertaining exactly whether we are near or far from the limit beyond which technical progress must transform itself into a factor of economic regression. We can only try to guess at it empirically, according to the way in which our contemporary economy is evolving.

Now, what we see is that for some years past, in almost all industries, the various concerns have refused systematically to welcome technical innovations. The socialist and communist press takes advantage of this fact to pour out eloquent diatribes against capitalism, but it omits to explain by what miracle innovations that are at present costly would become economically paying under a socialist system or one so called. It is more reasonable to suppose that in this sphere we are not far from reaching the limit of useful progress; and, seeing that the present-day complexity of economic relations and the formidable extension of credit prevent industrial leaders from immediately perceiving that a once paying factor has ceased to be so, we may even conclude, with all suitable reservations regarding so intricate a problem, that it is very likely this limit has already been overstepped.

A serious study of the question ought, strictly speaking, to take many other elements into consideration. The various factors that go to increase productivity do not develop separately, although they have to be separated in analysis; they combine together, and these combinations produce results difficult to foresee. Besides, technical progress does not only serve to obtain at low cost what one used to obtain before with considerable effort; it also makes it possible to undertake what without it would have been almost unimaginable. It would be as well to examine the value of these new possibilities, while bearing in mind the fact that they are not only possibilities of construction, but also of destruction. But such a study would be forced to take into account the economic and social relations which necessarily go hand in hand with a given form of technical achievement. For the moment it is enough to have understood that the possibility of future progress so far as concerns productivity is not beyond question; that, to all appearances, we have at present as many reasons for expecting to see it diminish as increase; and, what is most important of all, that a continuous and unlimited increase in productivity is, strictly speaking, inconceivable. It is solely the frenzy produced by the speed of technical progress that has brought about the mad idea that work might one day become unnecessary. On the plane of pure science, this idea has found expression in the search for the “perpetual motion machine”, that is to say a machine which would go on producing work indefinitely without ever consuming any; and the scientists made short work of it by propounding the law of the conservation of energy. In the social sphere, divagations are better received. The “higher stage of communism”, regarded by Marx as the final term of social evolution, is, in effect, a utopia absolutely analogous to that of perpetual motion.

It is in the name of this utopia that revolutionaries have shed their blood. Or rather, they have shed their blood in the name either of this utopia or of the equally utopian belief that the present system of production could be placed by a mere decree at the service of a society of free and equal men. Is it surprising, then, if all this blood has been shed in vain? The history of the working-class movement is thus lit up with a cruel, but singularly vivid, light. The whole of it can be summarized by remarking that the working class has never manifested strength save in so far as it has served something other than the workers’ revolution. The working-class movement was able to give the illusion of power as long as it was still a question for it of helping to liquidate the vestiges of feudalism or to prepare the way for capitalist domination, whether under the form of private capitalism or that of State capitalism, as happened in Russia; now that its role in that field is over and the industrial crisis confronts it with the problem of the effective seizure of power by the working masses, it is crumbling away and dissolving with a rapidity that breaks the hearts of those who had placed their faith in it. On its ruins interminable arguments are held which can only be smoothed over by the most ambiguous formulas; for among all those who still persist in talking about revolution, there are perhaps not two who attach the same content to the term. And that is not in the least surprising. The word “revolution” is a word for which you kill, for which you die, for which you send the labouring masses to their death, but which does not possess any content.

Yet perhaps one can give a meaning to the revolutionary ideal, if not as a possible prospect in view, at any rate as a theoretical limit of feasible social transformations. What we should ask of the revolution is the abolition of social oppression; but for this notion to have at least a chance of possessing some meaning, we must be careful to distinguish between oppression and subordination of personal whims to a social order. So long as such a thing as a society exists, it will circumscribe the life of individuals within quite narrow limits and impose its rules on them; but this inevitable constraint does not merit the name of oppression except in so far as, owing to the fact that it brings about a division between those who exercise it and those who are subject to it, it places the latter at the disposal of the former and thus causes those who command to exert a crushing physical and moral pressure over those who execute. Even when this distinction has been made, nothing entitles us to assume a priori that the abolition of oppression is either possible or even simply conceivable by way of limit. Marx demonstrated forcibly, in the course of analyses of whose far-reaching scope he was himself unaware, that the present system of production, namely, big industry, reduces the worker to the position of a wheel in the factory and a mere instrument in the hands of his employers; and it is useless to hope that technical progress will, through a progressive and continuous reduction in productive effort, alleviate, to the point of almost causing it to disappear, the double burden imposed on man by nature and society.

The problem is, therefore, quite clear; it is a question of knowing whether it is possible to conceive of an organization of production which, though powerless to remove the necessities imposed by nature and the social constraint arising therefrom, would enable these at any rate to be exercised without grinding down souls and bodies under oppression. At a time like ours, to have grasped this problem clearly is perhaps a condition for being able to live at peace with oneself. If we can manage to conceive in concrete terms the conditions of this liberating organization, then it only remains for us to exercise, in order to move towards it, all the powers of action, small or great, at our disposal; and if, on the other hand, we realize clearly that the possibility of such a system of production is not even conceivable, we at least gain the advantage of being able legitimately to resign ourselves to oppression and of ceasing to regard ourselves as accomplices in it because we fail to do anything effective to prevent it.