COMMUNISM AND POSITIVISM.

Thames Guardian and Mining Record, Volume I, Issue 27, 7 November 1871, Page 3

COMMUNISM AND POSITIVISM.

In the new number or the Fortnight!;/ Rcvier .Mr Frederic Harrison writes of the Commune with more than his usual force and ioss than his usual violence. AVe quote the concluding passages of this article as on various accounts well worth attention:—

This great crisis has stated though it has not solved the social problem. \\ hat, in a few words, is this problem? It is this. In this complex industrial system wealth has discovered the machinery by which the principal, in some cases tho whole, results of common labor become its special perquisites. Ten thousand miners delve and toil, giving their labor, risking their lives ; ten masters give their direction or their capital, oftenest only the latter. Amlin a generation the ten capitalists arc rioting in vast fortunes, and the ten thousand workmen are rotting in their graves, or in a workhouse. And yet the ten thousand were at least as necessary to the work as the ton. A. et more. The ten capitalists are practically the law makers, the magistrates, the government. The educators of youth, the priests of all creeds, are their creatures. Practically they make and interpret the law—the law of the land, the law of opinion, and the law of God ; they are masters of the whole social forces. A convenient faith has been invented for them by moralists and economists, the only faith which in these days they at all believe in—the faith that the good of mankind is somewhat promoted by a persevering course of selfish* ncss. Competition is, in fact, the whol duty of man. And thus it comes that in ten'thousaml ways the whole social force is directed for the benefit of those who have. Habitually, unconsciously, often with what they think is a religions sense of duty, they' work the machinery of society for their own objects. In this favored laud, whilst the owner of the soil knows no other toil or care but that of providing fresh modes of enjoyment, the peasant, out of his sweat whose luxury is wrung, lives like a beast of burden, and dies "like a dog in a ditch ; whilst the merchant prince is courting society for a peerage, a thousand lives of seamen are lost, decoyed in rotten ships to sea pwhilst mine owners can still paralyse the Legislature, a thousand lives arc lost each year in pits, “ chiefly, it is said, from preventible causes;” and whilst fortunes are reared by ironmasters, a hundred thousand workmen are ground to the dust by truck. Let us reflect what is implied in this mere finding of the late commission. One hundred thousand families in England are. cheated, insulted, and oppressed by beingforced to barter portion of their wages fulsome fraudulent equivalent in goods. Now all this makes up in gross that which in France they call Vexploitation des ouvriers. They say that where in a commonwork labor is no less necessary than capital, and laborers are as worthy of the profits as managers, the system by which the gross result is appropriated by capital, and under which the self indulgence of wealth soars to yet unimagined heights, whilst the area of misery, ignorance, and exhaustion sinks ever deeper, is a system which is doomed to end. And this their claim is good. Let us turn to the remedy they propose. The whole social force which so long, they say, has been directed by capital in its own interest, shall be directed by workmen in the interests of workmen. The laws shall no longer be made and administered so as to handicap the laborer in the race of industry. The powers of the State shall step in to neutralise competition, and to restrain the selfish abuse of capital. The land, at anyrate, they say, must bo resumed by the State for the benefit of the whole community, and farmed on social, and not proprietary, bases. Ultimately, in short, the whole existence of capital, and the ordering the lives of tho community, must be subject to the will of social authority.

Such is the faith which, in spite of its extravagance, has seized the foremost minds of the workmen of Europe, ..which in some form or other receives the devotion of a religious creed. Can any one doubt its strength compared with the conscious corruption of the opposite creed ? Does the selfish cunning of competition in its heart think it can stand a social energy like this, with all its errors and all its dangers? Does a society which lives in it equipages, and toils only in amusement, match itself seriously with men who are ready thus to dio for a cause however mistaken ? The claim of capital to amass wealth by what means it chooses, and to spend how and when it pleases, is so vile, the claim of the workman to have his part in the social result is so unanswerable, that in the end the issue is not doubtful. And since this social problem must some day bo faced by all, it seems time for serious men to reflect what other solution remains. Communism stares them in the fa< ■o ; it grows and deepens. Whatever it may suit a journalist to say, no sensible man believes that the 200,000 men who voted for the Commune aro bandits and fiends in human shape. They who think such a story as that of the Commune of l’aris is explicable on the “ miscreant” theory are unfit to discuss political questions. Il has a great purpose, and it has great, leaders. For every man who died on the barricades ten will spring up hereafter. The pry of Millicre as bodied, Vice Vhunumite ! will not be unanswered. The hones of Dcleseluze may he burned in quicklime, but his spirit lives. He and his followers have a purpose. They have sworn that the “ exploitation of the workman” shall nd ; and 3iid it must.