between the mode of production and the mode of distribution. This
antithesis must, then, be suppressed in a society which produces
collectively. Owen becomes utopian. This perfect society must needs be
realized experimentally and to this he devotes himself with a heroic
constancy and unequalled self-sacrifice bringing a mathematical
precision even into his thoughts of its details.

The antithesis between production and distribution once discovered,
there arose in England from Thompson to Bray a series of writers of a
socialism which is not strictly utopian, but which should be qualified
as one-sided for its object is to correct the manifest vices of society
by as many appropriate remedies.[22]

In fact the first stage of all those who are on the road toward
socialism is the discovery of the contradiction between production and
distribution. Then, these ingenuous questions immediately arise: Why not
abolish poverty? Why not eliminate lockouts? Why not suppress the middle
man? Why not favor the direct exchange of products in consideration of
the labor that they contain? Why not give the worker the entire product
of his labor, etc.? These demands reduce the _things_, tenacious and
resistant, of real life, into as many reasonings, and they have for
their object to combat the capitalist system as if it were a machine
from which one can take away or to which one can add pieces, wheels and
gearings.

The partisans of critical communism have broken definitely with all
these tendencies. They have been the successors and the continuers of
classical economics.[23] What is the doctrine of the structure of
present society? No one can combat this structure in practice, in
politics or in revolution without first taking an exact account of its
elements and its relations and making a fundamental study of the
doctrine which explains it. These forms, these elements and these
relations arise in certain historic conditions but they constitute a
system and a necessity. How can it be hoped to destroy such a system by
an act of logical negation and how eliminate it by reasoning? Eliminate
pauperism? But it is a necessary condition of capitalism. Give the
worker the entire product of his labor? But what would become of the
profit of capital, and where and how could the money expended in the
purchase of commodities be increased if among all the commodities which
it meets and with which it makes exchanges there were not a particular
one whic