Gabriel Pierre Deville

“ When, under the lashes of the thong of stern reality they feel themselves exploited and menaced with expropriation, they applaud the demands of the socialists and help support—as has often been seen—the strikes of the laborers. According to circumstances the middle class declares itself in this way, now on one side, now on the other.
The industrial workingmen who own nothing but their labor-power and to whom the possession, even in a dream, of the smallest estate is an impossibility, cannot possibly conceive the false idea that they have anything to lose by the victory of socialism. ”

“ Is the spirit of initiative and personal energy likely to be more broadly disseminated among the masses, when the latter know that they are compelled to make their own wretchedness the instrument of the prosperity of a minority, or when they shall know that their own prosperity will be whatever they, by their own labor, shall make it, under a system of absolute equality of privilege? ”

“ That is all that socialism means. I have taken pains to set it forth in its entirety, free from both the attenuations and the exaggerations by which it is often mutilated or disfigured, but which seem to me to have no foundation in reality. Its goal is the socialization of the means of labor which have already manifested collective tendencies—either in their mode of ownership or in the mode of their employment as exploiting agencies—and the abolition of classes. ”

“ The relative ease of work of this kind makes it possible to substitute unskilled labor for skilled labor, women and children for men. By thus throwing men out of work, the instrument of labor lowers wages and expropriates the laborer from his means of existence. This machinery, thanks to which the genius of Aristotle foresaw the possibility of the emancipation of the slave, has as yet been merely a cause of enslavement, and just as man is moulded by the economic environment which is his own work, he is here enslaved by his own product. ”

“ The only thing which the laborer can sell is his labor-power, a power distinct from its function, labor, just as the power of marching is distinct from a parade, just as any machine is distinct from its operations. ”

“ What I am advocating is not the policy of keeping our colors hidden in our pockets, it is not the policy of mutilating, however slightly, the theory of socialism, it is the policy of sticking strictly to that theory without marring or disfiguring it by violences which form no part of it, by vain predictions which threaten with no certainty of fulfilment. The truth is that it is impossible to promise in advance to stick solely to either method—force or legality ”

“ How could we deny the influence of the Idea, when socialism itself is as yet, as I have just pointed out, only a theoretical expression, i.e., an idea, which we nevertheless believe has a certain influence?
We merely assert that a truth, irrevocably established by science as a valid generalization, does not cease to be a truth when it is applied to human history and socialism. This truth is the action of the environment: all living beings are the product of the environment in which they live. ”

“ Simply, inequality in the enjoyment of privilege will have been abolished, another privileged class will have vanished from the stage. Yes, the capitalists will lose, along with their special privileges or rights over the means of production, that characteristic or quality that makes them capitalists; but, I repeat, they will have exactly the same rights as all others to the use and enjoyment of those means of production, from that time forth the inalienable property of society. ”

“ It is the capitalist regime which, by increasing immeasurably the property of the few, contracts the limits within which the personal acquirement of property by the many is possible. It is the socialist regime which will increase this possibility of the personal acquirement of property, by assuring to each the share earned by his labor. It is only under the regime of socialism that individual property will be a reality for all, as this regime alone will suppress—though suppressing nothing else—the possibility of using this property to exploit the labor of others. ”

“ Because we say that socialism makes its appeal more particularly to the industrial laborers, we beg our critics not to represent us as saying that socialism ought to neglect the members of all other classes. Socialism struggling for the emancipation—no longer impossible—of all, combats in every rank or stratum of society all exploitations and all oppressions, and it is the natural defender of all the exploited and all the oppressed. ”

“ Socialism, revolution, internationalism—these are the three subjects regarding which I beg your permission to say what—with no pretence of being infallible—I believe to be the truth. At the risk of telling you nothing new, I will simply try to speak truth. Those who reproach the socialists for constantly repeating the same thing, have, no doubt, the habit of accommodating the truth to suit their taste for variety. ”

“ Under the wage-system, the wage-form, which appears in the guise of direct payment of labor, wipes out every visible line of demarcation between paid labor and unpaid labor; when he receives his wages, the laborer seems to get all the value due to his labor, so that all his [20] labor takes on the form or appearance of paid labor. While, under slavery, the property-relation conceals the labor of the slave for himself, under the wage-system the money-relation conceals the gratuitous labor of the wage-worker for the capitalist. ”

“ It is impossible to deny seriously that a part of the population is, in fact, through the form of the economic relations, through their material self-interest, through their need of food, placed in a position of dependence upon another portion of the population, and that there is an antagonism between those who must struggle to exist by working and those who can bargain out to them the means of labor. ”

“ Socialism repels no one and is open to all those, without regard to their social position, who comprehend its necessity. But, if it is far from repelling them—striving indeed to attract them—it cannot count in advance, generally speaking, on those who too readily become the dupes of illusions begotten by a more or less privileged social situation and who are unable to rise above their class prejudices sufficiently to form a just conception of their own true interests. ”

“ It is true that the revolution of the 4th of September was purely a political revolution. But, while the revolution, whose possibility we are considering, is to usher in a social transformation, as a revolution it is simply a change of a political character. If the capitalists are as prudent as were the Bonapartists on the 4th of September, the future rupture of legality may be just as peaceful as was that in which Senator Jules Simon took part. It is seen, then, that socialism may burst the mould of legality while preserving the peace. ”

“ Whether or not a revolutionary situation is destined to arise, the duty, the whole duty of socialists consists in educating the masses, in rendering them conscious of their condition, their task and their responsibility, of organizing them in readiness for the day when the political power shall fall into their hands. To win for socialism the greatest possible number of partisans, that is the task to which socialist parties must consecrate their efforts, using, for this purpose, all pacific and legal means, but using such means only. ”

“ The money advanced in production can, in fact, realize an appreciable profit by the sale of the objects produced, only when its possessor is able to realize a certain quantity of surplus-labor; now, to accomplish this he must have a certain number of laborers. For it is the surplus-labor realized, we know, that forms the excess of the value produced over that of the money laid out in production, or, in other words, the surplus-value which incessantly swells the capital and continually increases its power to dominate labor. ”

“ I say socialism of the socialists because we have seen flourish in our day a peculiar socialism, the socialism of those good people who earnestly wish to remove the inconveniences and injustices of our present social state, but who also wish a little more earnestly to preserve the cause of these inconveniences, who wish at once to suppress or abolish the proletariat and to preserve the capitalist form of society. It is quite possible for socialism also to have its converts and even its backsliders ”

“ At least it so appears to the capitalists who deem that which does not yield them a profit to be non-existent. To the socialists, on the other hand, the existence of individuality appears dependent upon its freedom. Now, as it is, as we have just seen, only in the socialist period that all individuals will be able to have the means necessary to true freedom, it follows that the triumph of socialism will be the triumph of the individual, the blossoming of personality. ”

“ Before man was able to produce in excess of his needs, one portion of society could not live upon the fruits of the toil of another portion. How could a man work gratuitously for others when his entire time was barely [18] sufficient to procure him his own necessary means of existence? When, in consequence of human progress, labor had acquired such a degree of productiveness that an individual was enabled to produce more than what was strictly necessary for his needs, it became possible for some to subsist upon the toil of others and slavery could be established. ”

“ To those who assert that this position is in conflict with the "pure dogma of the socialist church," you have only to reply that there is neither a socialist church nor a socialist dogma, but that there are far too many bourgeois imbeciles who attempt to palm off ideas made by themselves out of the whole cloth as the dogmas of socialism.
During the sixteen years that our socialist theory has been developing in France, it has never varied upon the subject of the petty producers. Those who assert the contrary follow their own imaginations and not the facts. ”

“ Inevitably, therefore, the political struggle is becoming more and more a class struggle which cannot end until the political power, in the hands of the workingmen, shall at last place the State at the service of the interests of all the exploited, and thus enable the latter to proceed to the economic reforms which will lead to the disappearance of classes as a direct consequence.
Therefore, the Class Struggle is not an invention of the socialists, but the very substance of the facts and acts of history in the making that are daily taking place under their eyes. ”

“ The important point is that, from the dawn of social production, there will be no more surplus-labor, no more classes, and, therefore, no more exploitation, as there inevitably is under capitalist production. Every adult able to work will receive, under one form or another, partly in articles for personal consumption, partly in social guarantees, in public services of every kind, the same quantity of labor that he shall give to society. ”

“ Notwithstanding the most sincere sentiment of international solidarity on both sides, the workingmen of two countries may still have to fight against each other. This is one of the numerous contradictions—and one of the most horrible—inherent in the capitalist regime, which is condemned to aspire to peace and to unchain the horrid dogs of war. While, for example, commerce on the world market requires peace, the bitterness of competition on that market begets conflicts. ”

“ When, under the empire of a naive pride and vain hopes, the man proud of his possessions, the would-be capitalist, dominates in them, they give heed to the dirty blackguards who are forever telling them that the common laborer and the socialist wish to take their little property away from them, and they show a hostility which, in spite of their conservative intentions, is aimed against those whom they ought to help if they wish to be sure of retaining the little property they have. ”

“ And the fact that the thinkers of antiquity and the greatest among them, Aristotle, excused slavery, is a proof that the mode of thought is determined by the exigencies of the economic organization of society. To reproach Aristotle, in particular, because he did not regard slavery and property as it is natural for us to regard them, is equivalent to reproaching him for not having applied the processes of our modern production to ancient industries. ”

“ The socialization will not result in such a change in the distribution of wealth as is often caused by watering the stock of a company. It will simply extend to all, those who hold stocks at present included, those advantages which a minority alone enjoys to-day, and it will benefit all, but stockholders especially, by doing away with those risks which capitalist exploitation forces everyone to run.
Finally, socialism will rob no one. ”

“ To say that socialism springs from the facts, is then simply to place the socialist idea on the same plane with all other ideas. In socialism, as in all subjects, the idea is the reflex in the brain of the relations of man with his surroundings, and the greater or less aptitude of the brain for acquiring, retaining and combining ideas, constitutes intelligence. ”