its Humanity over the laboring classes of the nations which it rules. Its Civilization and its Humanity may there be counted up by the mass of men, women and children dispossessed of all property, condemned to compulsory labor day and night, to periodical vacations at their own expense, to alcoholism, consumption, rickets; by the increasing number of misdemeanors and crimes, by the multiplication of insane asylums and by the development and improvement of the penitentiary system.

Never has ruling class so loudly clamored for the Ideal, because never had a ruling class had such need for obscuring its actions with idealistic chatter. This ideological charlatanism is its surest and most efficacious method for political and economic trickery. The startling contradiction between its words and its acts has not prevented the historians and philosophers from taking the eternal Ideas and Principles for the sole motive forces of the history of the capitalized nations. Their monumental error, which passes all bounds even for the intellectuals, is an incontestable proof of the power wielded by Ideas and of the adroitness with which the bourgeoisie has succeeded in cultivating and exploiting this force so as to derive an income from it. The financiers pad their prospectuses with patriotic principles, with ideas of civilization, humanitarian sentiments and six-per-cent investments for fathers of families. These are infallible baits when fishing for suckers. De Lesseps could never have inflated his magnificent bubble at Panama, raking in the savings of eight hundred thousand little people, had not that "great Frenchman" promised to add another glory to the halo of his Fatherland, to broaden civilized humanity and to enrich the subscribers.

Eternal Ideas and Principles are such irresistible attractions that there is no financial, industrial or commercial prospectus, nor even an advertisement of alcoholic drink or patent medicine, but is spiced with it; political treasons and economic frauds hoist the standard of Ideas and Principles*.

*) Vandervelde and other comrades are scandalized at my irreverent and outlandish fashion of stripping off the covering from the eternal Ideas and Principles. To make metaphysical dummies out of Justice, Liberty and Fatherland, which hold the center of the stage in academic and parliamentary discourses, electoral programs and mercantile advertisements, what a profanation: If these comrades had lived in the time of the Encyclopedists they would have thundered their wrath against Diderot and Voltaire, who laid violent hands on the collar of aristocratic ideology and dragged it before the bar of their Reason, who ridiculed the sacred Truths of Christianity, the Maid of Orleans, blue Blood and the Honor of the Nobility, Authority, Divine Right and other immortal things. They would have sentenced "Don Quixote" to burning because that incomparable masterpiece of romantic literature ridiculed pitilessly the chivalrous virtues exalted by the poems and romances which were read by the aristocracy.

Belfort Bax reproaches me for the contempt in which I hold Justice, Liberty and the other entities of the metaphysics of the propertied class, which he says are concepts so universal and so necessary that in order to criticize their bourgeois caricatures I avail myself of a certain ideal of Justice and Liberty. But indeed I am not, any more than the most spiritualistic philosophers, able to escape from my social environ

The historic philosophy of the idealists could not be other than a war of words, equally insipid and indigestible, since they have not perceived that the capitalist parades the eternal principles for no other purpose than to mask the egoistic motives of his actions, and since they have not arrived at the point of recognizing the humbug of the bourgeois ideology. But the lamentable abortions of the idealist philosophy do not prove that it is impossible to arrive at the determining causes of the organization and evolution of human societies as the chemists have succeeded in doing with those which regulate the agglomeration of molecules into complex bodies.

"The social world", says Vico, the father of the philosophy of history, "is undeniably the work of man, whence it results that we may and must find its principles nowhere else than in the modifications of human intelligence. Is it not surprising to every thinking man that the philosophers have seriously undertaken to know the world of nature, which God made and the knowledge of which He has reserved for Himself, and that they have neglected to meditate over that social world, the knowledge of which men may have, since men have made it ?"*

The numerous failures of the deistic and idealistic methods compel the trial of a new method of interpreting history.

ment. We are obliged to submit to its current ideas, and each one cuts them to his measure and takes his individual concepts for criteria of the ideas and the actions of others. But if these ideas are necessary in the social environment where they are produced it does not follow that, like the axioms of mathemotics, they are necessary in all social environments, as Socrates supposed, who, in the Protagoras, I believe, demonstrated the eternal necessity of Justice by saying that even brigands regulated according to it their conduct among themselves, Precisely so, because the societies based on private property, whether family or individual, are societies of brigands, whose ruling classes pilllage the other nations and steal the fruits of the labor of the subject classes, slaves, serfs or wage workers, - this is why Justice and Liberty are for them eternal principles. The philosophers declare them to be universal and necessary concepts because they know only societies founded on private property and they cannot conceive of a society resting on other foundations.

But the socialist who knows that capitalist production is carrying us on inevitably to a society based on common property, does not doubt that these universal and necessary concepts will vanish from the human head with the mine and thine, and the exploitation of man characteristic of the societies based on private property which have given birth to them. This belief is not suggested by sentimental reveries, but by observed facts beyond the reach of discussion. It is proved that the communist savages and barbarians of the prehistoric period have no notion of these eternal principles. Mayne, who, by the way, is a scientific legist, has not found them in the village communities of contemporary India. whose inhabitants take tradition and custom for their rules of conduct. Since the universal and necessary concepts utilized by the men of societies based on private property to organize their civil and political life will no longer be necessary to regulate the relations of men of the future society hased on common property. history will gather them up and classify them for the museum of dead ideas.

* Giambista Vico: Principi di Scienza nuova.

(Translated by Charles H. Kerr.)

(To be Continued.)

PAUL LAFARGUE.

EDITORIAL

Some Problems of the Trust.

One of the favorite illustrations to show the scientific character of Socialist philosophy is its power to predict social phenomena, and the star illustration of this power is that the trust was predicted by socialist writers nearly a half century before it came.

The chapter which is most frequently quoted in behalf of this position is the famous one on "The Historical Character of Capitalist Accumulation", from the first volume of "Capital". To be sure this was published only some thirty years ago, but its substance had appeared in previous writings by the same author at a sufficienly early. date to justify the claim to long prophetic insight which is made for him.

This chapter is itself affords an example of the most condensed reasoning combined with brilliant intense expression of that reasoning to be found in any language. It is not surprising that around it has waged the most bitter of Socialist controversies. Its statements formed the point against which Bernsteinists and Revisionists hurled their attacks. It is safe to say that fifty percent of the Socialist litera ture of today is based upon the positions set forth in this chapter, and if there be any reader who does not recall it now is the place for him to stop and read n. If he reads it as he would a popular novel it will not take more then ten minutes, for it would make less than four such pages as the one before you at the present moment. But if it is thoroughly assimilated the reader will take hours and days.

There are certain sentences in it that are so striking, and so applicable to the matter under discussion that they will bear repeating: As soon as the process of transformation has sufficiently decomposed the old society", says Marx, "as soon as the capitalist mode of production stands on its own feet, then ** the further expropriation of private proprietors takes a new form. That which is now to be expropriated is no longer the laborer working for himself, but the capitalist exploiting many laborers. This expropriating is so accomplished by the action of the immanent laws of capitalist production it

self, by the centralization of capital. One capitalist always kills many. ***Centralization of the means of production and socialization of labor at last reach a point were they vecome incompatible with their capitalist integument. This integument is burst asunder. The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriafed."

Here we have the prophecy not only of the trust, but of its disappearance. On the truth of this prophecy, and of the laws which lie back of that prophecy is based much of socialist reasoning. Some of this reasoning has been evolved from other and less careful examinations of industrial evolution that those upon which Marx based his statements. Indeed the more carefully Marx is studied the more the student is struck with the cautious accuracy of his statements even at times when he uses then most vehement expressions.

From this chapter of Marx' and similar expressions has been drawn the material from which to construct a theory that the coming of the trust meant the immediate downfall of capitalism, that it was the appearance of the trust that was in itself to "burst the integument of capitalism". To be sure there is nothing in Marx that justifies this position. Yet this has been interwoven with the Marxian theory of crises to form the foundation of a theory that the coming of the trust heralded the coming of a world-wide industrial crisis in the modst of which the transition would be made to socialism.

Let us examine some of the phenomena introduced by the trust and see in how far these things that have been so widely accepted as fundamental principles of Marxian Socialism are justifiable.

There is much reason to believe that Marx looked upon the trust stage as an exceedingly temporary one. Although, with that charactristic scientific caution to which reference was just made. he never made any definite statement to that effect, it would seem that he considered the trust stage the climax, the closing scene of capitalism, and that, in his mind, the stage would be occupied but a short time with the gigantic actors of the era of monopoly. Otherwise, socialism, to him would have been little else than a theoretical system, with little need of practical political parties.

Today we are in the midst of that trust era. We should be surrounded by the fragments of the "bursting integument of capitalism." To a certain extent this condition does prevail, but on the whole the integument is fairly firm.

It would seem that what Marx did not see, or at least did not attempt to analyze, is the economic workings of a society in which competition should not be the dominant factor. Today it is nonsense to talk about the price of coal, kerozene, railroad rates, telegraph tolls, and a host of other things being fixed by competition, or even being determined by the amount of labor power which they contain. If this be treason, make the most of it. It is a fact that should be faced at least. To be sure Marx saw much more of this fact than

most of his followers, as may be shown to those who should chance to fall afoul of the above statement.

It would have required more than human foresight for anyone to have analyzed the economic interactions of a society which did not yet exist. For Marx to have attempted it would have been as foolish as for us at the present time to attempt to foretell the details of a co-operative commonwealth, and would have placed him among the utopians whom he so frequently denounced.

It is now evident that the trust ruled society will be with us for some few years at least. We are now within that society. Our practical tactics and our theoretical writings must be adapted to that society, and not to he competitive one that has been left behind. Yet there is almost nothing in Socialist writings to show even a recognition of this fact.

It would be manifestly impossible in the scope of an editorial to do more than suggest a few of the problems and leave them without discussion to be considered by the readers.

The coming of the trust has once more transformed production for the market back to production for use. But the circle, like all those representing social progress, is a spiral, and the present position bears little resemblance to the one which was left behind at the beginning of the last century. It is well-known among business men that the great trusts of today, especially those in steel, the manufacture of electricical supplies, copper, railroad supplies, locomotives, etc. do not produce for an unknown market, but only "on order". To a large extent this removes one of the greatest elements of th industrial chaos so charactristic of the competitive age. There will not be any great "overproduction" in any of these lines. New mills are not built when the demand shows a sudden increase. On the contrary the customer is permitted to wait the gracious pleasure of the producer, until the accumulated orders become so great as to certainly justify the addition of new productive facilities.

Another fact, closely related to the above, but more frequently noted, is that the trust, occupying the field, can control production, curtail or increase it to meet fluctuations, without overstocking the market.

The relation of the trust to labor raises another interesting question. The ordinary trade union depends for success in strike largely upon the fear of the employer that some competitor will get his trade while his industry is tied up with a strike. Under a trust organization of industry there are no competitors, and the only thing which is endangered is immediate profits, and these can be postponed with joy for the certainty of the greater profits that will follow the crushing of rebellious laborers. On the other hand, if the revolt of labor seems to really threaten all profits, the trust can increase the share of labor, without fear of being underbidden in the market by more successful exploiters.