第94章

God! I know no God; mysticism again.Begin by striking this word from your remarks, if you wish me to listen to you; for three thousand years of experience have taught me that whoever talks to me of God has designs on my liberty or on my purse.How much do you owe me? How much do I owe you? That is my religion and my God.

Monopoly owes its existence both to nature and to man: it has its source at once in the profoundest depths of our conscience and in the external fact of our individualization.Just as in our body and our mind everything has its specialty and property, so our labor presents itself with a proper and specific character, which constitutes its quality and value.And as labor cannot manifest itself without material or an object for its exercise, the person necessarily attracting the thing, monopoly is established from subject to object as infallibly as duration is constituted from past to future.Bees, ants, and other animals living in society seem endowed individually only with automatism; with them soul and instinct are almost exclusively collective.That is why, among such animals, there can be no room for privilege and monopoly; why, even in their most volitional operations, they neither consult nor deliberate.But, humanity being individualized in its plurality, man becomes inevitably a monopolist, since, if not a monopolist, he is nothing; and the social problem is to find out, not how to abolish, but how to reconcile, all monopolies.

The most remarkable and the most immediate effects of monopoly are:

1.In the political order, the classification of humanity into families, tribes, cities, nations, States: this is the elementary division of humanity into groups and sub-groups of laborers, distinguished by race, language, customs, and climate.It was by monopoly that the human race took possession of the globe, as it will be by association that it will become complete sovereign thereof.

Political and civil law, as conceived by all legislators with-out exception and as formulated by jurists, born of this patriotic and national organization of societies, forms, in the series of social contradictions, a first and vast branch, the study of which by itself alone would demand four times more time than we can give it in discussing the question of industrial economy propounded by the Academy.

2.In the economic order, monopoly contributes to the increase of comfort, in the first place by adding to the general wealth through the perfecting of methods, and then by CAPITALIZING, -- that is, by consolidating the conquests of labor obtained by division, machinery, and competition.From this effect of monopoly has resulted the economic fiction by which the capitalist is considered a producer and capital an agent of production;

then, as a consequence of this fiction, the theory of net product and gross product.

On this point we have a few considerations to present.First let us quote J.B.Say:

The value produced is the gross product: after the costs of production have been deducted, this value is the net product.

Considering a nation as a whole, it has no net product; for, as products have no value beyond the costs of production, when these costs are cut off, the entire value of the product is cut off.National production, annual production, should always therefore be understood as gross production.

The annual revenue is the gross revenue.

The term net production is applicable only when considering the interests of one producer in opposition to those of other producers.The manager of an enterprise gets his profit from the value produced after deducting the value consumed.But what to him is value consumed, such as the purchase of a productive service, is so much income to the performer of the service.

-- Treatise on Political Economy: Analytical Table.

These definitions are irreproachable.Unhappily J.B.Say did not see their full bearing, and could not have foreseen that one day his immediate successor at the College of France would attack them.M.Rossi has pretended to refute the proposition of J.B.Say that to a nation net product is the same thing as gross product by this consideration, -- that nations, no more than individuals of enterprise, can produce without advances, and that, if J.B.Say's formula were true, it would follow that the axiom, Ex nihilo nihil fit, is not true Now, that is precisely what happens.Humanity, in imitation of God, produces everything from nothing, de nihilo hilum just as it is itself a product of nothing, just as its thought comes out of the void; and M.

Rossi would not have made such a mistake, if, like the physiocrats, he had not confounded the products of the industrial kingdom with those of the animal, vegetable, and mineral kingdoms.Political economy begins with labor; it is developed by labor; and all that does not come from labor, falling into the domain of pure utility, -- that is, into the category of things submitted to man's action, but not yet rendered exchangeable by labor, -- remains radically foreign to political economy.Monopoly itself, wholly established as it is by a pure act of collective will, does not change these relations at all, since, according to history, and according to the written law, and according to economic theory, monopoly exists, or is reputed to exist, only after labor's appearance.

Say's doctrine, therefore, is unassailable.Relatively to the man of enterprise, whose specialty always supposes other manufacturers cooperating with him, profit is what remains of the value produced after deducting the values consumed, among which must be included the salary of the man of enterprise, -- in other words, his wages.Relatively to society, which contains all possible specialties, net product is identical with gross product.