Jean Jaurès

“ Thus the human rights proclaimed by the Revolution instantly took on a vaster and deeper meaning than that intended by the revolutionary bourgeoisie. That class was the upholder of rights still too oligarchical and restricted to cover the whole sphere of human rights: the bed of the river was larger than the river, and a new stream, the great proletarian and human flood, had to join it before the ideal of justice could be fulfilled at last. ”

“ Socialism alone can give its true meaning to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and realise the whole idea of human justice. The justice of the revolutionary bourgeoisie has freed humanity from many personal fetters: but in forcing each new generation to pay a tax to the capital accumulated by the generations that have preceded it, and in leaving to the minority the privilege of collecting this tax, it has in a sense mortgaged the personality of every living human being for the benefit of the past and of a single class. ”

“ Now, under the Empire and the Restoration, the economic system of the bourgeoisie based on unlimited competition began to bear its fruit: undoubted increase of wealth, but with it immorality, trickery, perpetual warfare, disorder, and oppression. Fourier's stroke of genius was to conceive that it was possible to remedy the confusion, to purge the social system without hampering the production of wealth, but on the contrary increasing it. ”

“ We, on the contrary, maintain that human activity in all its forms should have free access to the means of production and of wealth accumulated by humanity, so that humanity as a whole may gain freedom as well as riches through the efforts of the past. According to us, every member of society has henceforth a legal right to the means of development that society has created. ”

“ But even after we have made all the reservations and restrictions which result from the study of the complicated and many-sided reality, the truth remains that the proletariat is increasing in numbers, that it represents an ever-growing fraction of human societies, and that it is gathered together in always vaster centres of production; the truth remains that wholesale production has made this proletariat ready to conceive of wholesale ownership of property, which, carried to its logical conclusion, is social ownership of property. ”

“ Thus, by the action of the proletariat, Communism ceased to be a vague philosophic speculation and became a party, a living force. Thus, Socialism arose from the French Revolution under the combined action of two forces, the force of the idea of right, and the force of the new-born activity of the proletariat. ”

“ After 1792 it proclaimed that the ownership of our own lives is our greatest possession and that the right over this sovereign form of property should have precedence of all the others. Now let this word "life" be boldly expanded; let its meaning comprise not bare subsistence only, but all life, all the development of human faculties, and it will appear that Communism itself was grafted by the proletariat on to the Declaration of the Rights of Man. ”

“ It has come to signify that in every man, in every individual, humanity ought to be fully respected and exalted to its complete stature. Now true humanity can only exist where there is independence, active exercise of the will, free and joyous adaptation of the individual to the whole. Where men are dependent on the favour of others, where individual wills do not co-operate freely in the work of society, where the individual submits to the law of the whole under compulsion or by force of habit, and not from reason alone, there human nature is degraded and mutilated. ”

“ There is then a practical technical preparation for Socialism just as there is an intellectual and social preparation. They are children who, carried away by the magnitude of the work already accomplished, think that all that is now necessary is a decree, a Fiat lux, of the proletariat to make the Socialist world rise up forthwith. But on the other hand they are senseless who do not see the irresistible power of evolution which condemns the unjust ascendency of the middle class and the whole class system to extinction. ”

“ No, Socialism is not an academic and Utopian conception, it is ripening and developing in closest touch with reality. It is a great vital force, mingled with all phases of life, and will soon be able to take command of the life of society. ”

“ The domination of one class is an attempt to degrade humanity. Socialism, which will abolish all primacy of class and indeed all class, elevates humanity to its highest level. It is therefore a duty for all men to be Socialists. ”

“ The same association that would abolish crises would multiply riches by regulating and combining all efforts. Thus the slight cloud of asceticism that may have overshadowed Socialism was dispelled. Thus, Socialism, having taken part with the proletarians of the Revolution and with Babeuf in all the revolutionary life, came finally into the great current of modern wealth and production. As represented by Fourier and Saint-Simon it appears at last as a power able not only to overcome capitalism, but to surpass it in its own field. ”

“ To the hard pride and selfishness of the middle class, narrowed by its legalised exploitation and monopoly, it has opposed a revolutionary bitterness, an irritating and vengeful irony; a deadly implacable analysis that dispels lies and sophistries. ”

“ To the incomplete application of justice and human rights made by the democratic bourgeois Revolution, it has opposed a full and decisive interpretation of the Rights of Man. To the incomplete, narrow, and chaotic organisation of wealth attempted by capital, it has opposed a magnificent conception of harmonised wealth, where the effort of each would be supplemented by the co-ordinated effort of all. ”

“ If we look at the national organisation we see that it is constantly becoming more unified, and more clearly sovereign, and that it has been forced to take on more and more economic functions, which we must hail as a sort of rude prelude to the social property of the future. ”

“ Let no one object, as do some Socialists and Positivists, that it is useless and childish to invoke justice, that justice is a metaphysical conception, susceptible of being twisted in any direction, and that all tyrannies have fashioned a cloak for themselves from this same worn-out purple. No, in modern society the word "justice" is taking on an ever larger and more definite meaning. ”

“ It is not then a human being in all his weakness and nakedness, that is born into the world, a prey to every form of oppression and exploitation. It is a person with certain vested rights, who can claim for his perfect development the free use of the means of labour that have been accumulated by human effort. ”

“ No, the nation, in which is vested the sovereign social right of property, will have numberless agents—local government units, co-operative societies, and trade-unions—which will give the freest and supplest movement to social property, in harmony with the mobility and variety of individual forces. ”

“ In bourgeois society living labour is only a means of adding to labour which has been accumulated in the form of capital. In Communist society the accumulated labour of the past will be only a means of enlarging, enriching, and stimulating the life of the labourers. ”

“ Now the growth of modern industry has brought forth a working proletariat increasingly numerous, coherent, and self-conscious. Those who with Marx hailed the advent of this decisive power, those who have understood that the world was to be transformed by its means, have perhaps shown a tendency to exaggerate the rapidity of economic evolution. ”

“ But I know also that the democrats immediately made use of the theory of the Rights of Man, of all men, to demand and to conquer the right of universal suffrage. I know that they immediately based even their economic demands on that same theory. I know that the working class, although in 1789 its existence as a self-conscious class was only rudimentary, did not hesitate to apply, and to enlarge, the Rights of Man in a proletarian direction. ”

“ In the great urban and industrial centres we see that the questions of hygiene, housing, lighting, education, and food are bringing the democracy into ever closer touch with the whole problem of property and into the administration of that part of property which is already collective. ”

“ Proudhou quickly discovered that the army of social democracy was composed of very various elements, that it was a mixture of factory-workers, still weak in numbers and power, of a lower middle-class composed of petty manufacturers and small tradespeople, and of an artisan class which the absorbing power of capital was eying greedily but had not yet done away with. ”

“ Having shown the strength of which it was capable it gained self-confidence, and ended by telling itself, with Babeuf, that the new power it had created, the national power that was the common possession of all, ought to be made the instrument by whose means happiness for all could be established. ”

“ But here again, in these hesitations, these scruples, even in the contradictory nature of these efforts, we can trace the influence of the intimate contact of sincere Socialist thought with the complex and still uncertain reality. It is the very life of modern times that again and again finds its echo here. ”

“ Most important again is the growing co-operative movement, including as it does co-operatives for both production and distribution. And finally, we have the labour and professional organisations, that are growing, changing, and becoming more complicated and elastic all the time: trade-unions, federations of unions, central trade committees, federations of trades, and federations of labour. ”

“ He seems to have wished to suspend the action of events and to put off the revolutionary crisis of 1848, in order to give economic evolution time to draw its line of action more clearly, and better to direct the minds of men. ”