Jean Jaurès

“ In bringing out clearly the magnitude of the effort that must be made I hope that I am not discouraging but spurring on the energy and conscience of those to whom I speak. At all events, if the work to be accomplished is vast and entails the co-operation of innumerable wills, I shall also show that the resources and forces at our command are likewise vast, and that it only depends on us to march forward to an end both certain and victorious. But I maintain that the vehement effort of a Socialist minority will not suffice, and that we must rally round us almost the whole body of citizens. ”

“ Now it was the air-ship that went, not yet afar off, but swift and true like thought. Marvellous intuition of the Greek poet, making the harmony of thought the ideal measure of all motion.
That is the aim of man, that is the object of life eternally carried on by the species: to subdue all nature to the harmonious law of mind. And human society will come under the same sway, for it too is still but a part of nature, it is blind and unconscious as she is and composed of brutal and obscure forces at war with each other and controlled by no one. ”

“ The modern labourer, instead of bettering himself with the progress of industry, sinks deeper and deeper below the conditions of existence of his own class. The workman becomes a pauper, and pauperism increases even more rapidly than either population or wealth. It is therefore perfectly clear that the bourgeoisie is unfit to be any longer the ruling class in society and to impose its class conditions on society as a ruling law. ”

“ Socialism has triumphed, when conditions of peace have succeeded to conditions of combat, when all men have their share of property in the immense human capital, and their share of initiative and of the exercise of free-will in the immense human activity, then all men will know the fulness of pride and joy; and they will feel that they are co-operators in the universal civilisation, even if their immediate contribution is only the humblest manual labour ”

“ I simply maintain that to-day private property is embodied in the capitalist form which permits a minority of privileged individuals to dispose of the work, the strength, and the health of the working classes, and to levy on them a perpetual tribute. And I maintain that when the Radicals declare in a summary fashion that they wish to uphold private property, either the declaration has no meaning at all, or it means that they want to uphold capitalistic property. ”

“ No, if the great free peoples, living under the parliamentary régime, England, Italy, and France, join hands and become friends, it is not with the idea of using the advantages of freedom to secure selfish ends. They do it to help on the great European and human alliance, by enlarging and extending national friendships. They do it to serve the cause of civilisation, of justice, and of peace, in Europe, in the Near East, and at last in the entire world! ”

“ On the contrary, the just organisation of the forces at the disposition of humanity will add to their productive power. The splendour of wealth will be a manifestation of the triumph of right, and happiness will be the halo of justice. Babeufism was not the negation of the Revolution but, on the contrary, its hardiest pulsation. So Fourierism and Saint-Simonism are not the negation or the restriction of modern life, but its passionate fulfilment. Everywhere, then, Socialism is a vital force moving in the direction of life itself and in its fiercest current. ”

“ It knows that the power of organised labour will be substituted for the power of capital, that all tribute to capital from labour will be abolished, and that the disorder of capitalist and mercantile production will give place to an order of production regulated by science itself according to the needs of every one. The proletariat knows that it is necessary, in order that the organisation of freed and sovereign labour may become possible, for the collective body—the community—to substitute its right for the existing right of private property. ”

“ It is possible—and history has here a difficult problem to solve—that there have been periods and lands where the human multitude has been so passive and so unstable in character that it has been moulded by the will of certain strong individuals or small groups. But since the constitution of modern nations, since the Reformation and the Renaissance, there is hardly a single individual who is not a distinct force. There is hardly a single individual who has not got his own personal interests, his ties that bind him to the present, his ideas about the future, his passions and his thoughts. ”

“ Those who talk alternately of the vote and the rifle, those who, when universal suffrage favours them, give it their allegiance, and when it goes against them, reject it, trouble the forward march of the party by the incoherence of their thought.
And when I say this I accuse myself as much as any one else. We all, or almost all, have confused ideas on the subject of tactics and our action is thereby hampered and weakened. By our constant use of republican lawful methods and of universal suffrage, we weaken the instinct of revolt and the classical revolutionary tradition of an appeal to force. ”

“ To have responsibility without authority, to be punished without having been even consulted, such is the paradoxical fate of the proletariat under the capitalist disorder. And if capital were organised, if by means of vast trusts it were able to regulate production, it would only regulate it for its own profit. It would abuse the power gained by union to impose usurious prices on the community of buyers, and the working class would escape from economic disorder only to fall under the yoke of monopoly. ”

“ Thus, the two hypotheses, one historic and the other economic, from which, according to the ideas of the Communist Manifesto, the sudden proletarian revolution would inevitably result, are proved to be equally untenable. In the political world there will be no bourgeois revolution on which the revolutionary proletariat can mount and ride to victory, and in the economic world no cataclysm which will set up in a single day the class domination of the Communist proletariat, and a new system of production on the ruins of overthrown capitalism. ”

“ Labour dreaming of refusing its service, the heart meditating stopping; that is the profound internal crisis to which we have been brought by the selfishness and blindness of the privileged classes, the absence of any definite plan of action on our part. Toward this abyss of a revolutionary general strike the proletariat is feeling itself more and more drawn, at the risk not only of ruining itself should it fall over, but of dragging down with it for years to come either the wealth or the security of the national life. ”

“ Every human being has the right to his full physical and moral growth. He has then the right to exact from humanity everything needed to supplement his own effort. He has the right to work, to produce, and to create, and no category of mankind should be able to exact usury from the fruit of his work, and bring it under their yoke. And as the community can only ensure the rights of the individual by putting the means of production at his disposal, the community itself must have the sovereign right of ownership over all the means of production. ”