COMPETITION? Is there a theorem in geometry more certain, more peremptory, than that? How then, upon what conditions, in what sense, can a principle which is its own denial enter into science? How can it become an organic law of society? If competition is necessary; if, as the school says, it is a postulate of production, -- how does it become so devastating in its effects? And if its most certain effect is to ruin those whom it incites, how does it become useful? For the inconveniences which follow in its train, like the good which it procures, are not accidents arising from the work of man: both follow logically from the principle, and subsist by the same title and face to face.
And, in the first place, competition is as essential to labor as division, since it is division itself returning in another form, or rather, raised to its second power; division, I say, no longer, as in the first period of economic evolution, adequate to collective force, and consequently absorbing the personality of the laborer in the workshop, but giving birth to liberty by making each subdivision of labor a sort of sovereignty in which man stands in all his power and independence.Competition, in a word, is liberty in division and in all the divided parts: beginning with the most comprehensive functions, it tends toward its realization even in the inferior operations of parcellaire labor.
Here the communists raise an objection.It is necessary, they say, in all things, to distinguish between use and abuse.There is a useful, praiseworthy, moral competition, a competition which enlarges the heart and the mind, a noble and generous competition, -- it is emulation; and why should not this emulation have for its object the advantage of all? There is another competition, pernicious, immoral, unsocial, a jealous competition which hates and which kills, -- it is egoism.
So says communism; so expressed itself, nearly a year ago, in its social profession of faith, the journal, "La Reforme."
Whatever reluctance I may feel to oppose men whose ideas are at bottom my own, I cannot accept such dialectics."La Reforme," in believing that it could reconcile everything by a distinction more grammatical than real, has made use, without suspecting it, of the golden mean, -- that is, of the worst sort of diplomacy.Its argument is exactly the same as that of M.Rossi in regard to the division of labor: it consists in setting competition and morality against each other, in order to limit them by each other, as M.Rossi pretended to arrest and restrict economic inductions by morality, cutting here, lopping there, to suit the need and the occasion.I have refuted M.Rossi by asking him this simple question: How can science be in disagreement with itself, the science of wealth with the science of duty? Likewise I ask the communists: How can a principle whose development is clearly useful be at the same time pernicious?
They say: emulation is not competition.I note, in the first place, that this pretended distinction bears only on the divergent effects of the principle, which leads one to suppose that there were two principles which had been confounded.Emulation is nothing but competition itself;
and, since they have thrown themselves into abstractions, I willingly plunge in also.There is no emulation without an object, just as there is no passional initiative without an object; and as the object of every passion is necessarily analogous to the passion itself, -- woman to the lover, power to the ambitious, gold to the miser, a crown to the poet, -- so the object of industrial emulation is necessarily profit.
No, rejoins the communist, the laborer's object of emulation should be general utility, fraternity, love.
But society itself, since, instead of stopping at the individual man, who is in question at this moment, they wish to attend only to the collective man, -- society, I say, labors only with a view to wealth; comfort, happiness, is its only object.Why, then, should that which is true of society not be true of the individual also, since, after all, society is man and entire humanity lives in each man? Why substitute for the immediate object of emulation, which in industry is personal welfare, that far-away and almost metaphysical motive called general welfare, especially when the latter is nothing without the former and can result only from the former?
Communists, in general, build up a strange illusion: fanatics on the subject of power, they expect to secure through a central force, and in the special case in question, through collective wealth, by a sort of reversion, the welfare of the laborer who has created this wealth: as if the individual came into existence after society, instead of society after the individual.
For that matter, this is not the only case in which we shall see the socialists unconsciously dominated by the traditions of the regime against which they protest.
But what need of insisting? From the moment that the communist changes the name of things, vera rerum vocabala, he tacitly admits his powerlessness, and puts himself out of the question.That is why my sole reply to him shall be: In denying competition, you abandon the thesis; henceforth you have no place in the discussion.Some other time we will inquire how far man should sacrifice himself in the interest of all: for the moment the question is the solution of the problem of competition, -- that is, the reconciliation of the highest satisfaction of egoism with social necessities;
spare us your moralities.
Competition is necessary to the constitution of value, -- that is, to the very principle of distribution, and consequently to the advent of equality.
