help along business, encourage commerce, industry, agriculture, stop the depreciation of property, assure work to the workers—it could have been done by guaranteeing, e.g., to the first 10,000 contractors, factory owners, manufacturers, merchants, etc., in the whole Republic, an interest of 5 per cent. on the capital, say, on the average, 100,000 francs, that each of them had embarked in his competitive business. For it is evident that the State" …. It is evident that the State has forced itself upon Proudhon, at least "as servant." And it has done this with such irresistible force that our author ends by surrendering, and solemnly proclaiming:
"Yes, I say it aloud: the workers' associations of Paris and the departments hold in their hands the salvation of the people, the future of the revolution. They can do everything, if they set about it cleverly. Renewed energy on their part must carry the light into the dullest minds, and at the election of 1852 [he wrote this in the summer of 1851] must place on the order of the day, and at the head of it, the constitution of value."[1]
Thus "No more parties! No politics!" when it is a question of the class struggle—and "Hurrah for politics! Hurrah for electoral agitation! Hurrah for State interference!" when it is a question of realising the vapid and meagre Utopia of Proudhon!
"Destruam et ædificabo," says Proudhon, with the pompous vanity peculiar to him. But on the other hand—to use the phrase of Figaro—it is the truest truth of all he has ever uttered in his life. He destroys and he builds. Only the mystery of his "destruction" reveals itself completely in his formula, "The Contract solves all problems." The mystery of his "ædificatio" is in the strength of the social and political bourgeois reality with which he reconciled himself, the more readily in that he never managed to pluck from it any of its "secrets."
Proudhon will not hear of the State at any price. And yet—apart from the political propositions such as the
- ↑ "Idée Générale," p. 268.
