amily could not live alone, but was
dependent in a thousand ways on the village or the commune.

But nowadays, in the present state of industry, when everything is
interdependent, when each branch of production is knit up with all the
rest, the attempt to claim an Individualist origin for the products of
industry is absolutely untenable. The astonishing perfection attained by
the textile or mining industries in civilized countries is due to the
simultaneous development of a thousand other industries, great and
small, to the extension of the railroad system, to inter-oceanic
navigation, to the manual skill of thousands of workers, to a certain
standard of culture reached by the working class as a whole--to the
labours, in short, of men in every corner of the globe.

The Italians who died of cholera while making the Suez Canal, or of
anchylosis in the St. Gothard Tunnel, and the Americans mowed down by
shot and shell while fighting for the abolition of slavery, have helped
to develop the cotton industry of France and England, as well as the
work-girls who languish in the factories of Manchester and Rouen, and
the inventor who (following the suggestion of some worker) succeeds in
improving the looms.

How then, shall we estimate the share of each in the riches which ALL
contribute to amass?

Looking at production from this general, synthetic point of view, we
cannot hold with the Collectivists that payment proportionate to the
hours of labour rendered by each would be an ideal arrangement, or even
a step in the right direction.

Without discussing whether exchange value of goods is really measured in
existing societies by the amount of work necessary to produce
it--according to the teaching of Adam Smith and Ricardo, in whose
footsteps Marx has followed--suffice it to say here, leaving ourselves
free to return to the subject later, that the Collectivist ideal appears
to us untenable in a society which considers the instruments of labour
as a common inheritance. Starting from this principle, such a society
would find itself forced from the very outset to abandon all forms of
wages.

The migrated individualism of the Collectivist system certainly could
not maintain itself alongside a partial communism--the socialization of
land and the instruments of production. A new form of property requires
a new form of remuneration. A new method of production cannot exist side
by side with the old forms of consumption, any more t