is rent, he obtains a fraction of property in the land entrusted
to his care, the denominator of which is equal to the proportion of rent
paid. Unless you admit this, you fall into absolutism and tyranny; you
recognize class privileges; you sanction slavery.

Whoever labors becomes a proprietor--this is an inevitable deduction
from the acknowledged principles of political economy and jurisprudence.
And when I say proprietor, I do not mean simply (as do our hypocritical
economists) proprietor of his allowance, his salary, his wages,--I mean
proprietor of the value which he creates, and by which the master alone
profits.

As all this relates to the theory of wages and of the distribution of
products,--and as this matter never has been even partially cleared
up,--I ask permission to insist on it: this discussion will not
be useless to the work in hand. Many persons talk of admitting
working-people to a share in the products and profits; but in
their minds this participation is pure benevolence: they have never
shown--perhaps never suspected--that it was a natural, necessary right,
inherent in labor, and inseparable from the function of producer, even
in the lowest forms of his work.

This is my proposition: THE LABORER RETAINS, EVEN AFTER HE HAS RECEIVED
HIS WAGES, A NATURAL RIGHT OF PROPERTY IN THE THING WHICH HE HAS
PRODUCED.

I again quote M. Ch. Comte:--

"Some laborers are employed in draining marshes, in cutting down trees
and brushwood,--in a word, in cleaning up the soil. They increase the
value, they make the amount of property larger; they are paid for
the value which they add in the form of food and daily wages: it then
becomes the property of the capitalist."

The price is not sufficient: the labor of the workers has created a
value; now this value is their property. But they have neither sold
nor exchanged it; and you, capitalist, you have not earned it. That you
should have a partial right to the whole, in return for the materials
that you have furnished and the provisions that you have supplied, is
perfectly just. You contributed to the production, you ought to share in
the enjoyment. But your right does not annihilate that of the laborers,
who, in spite of you, have been your colleagues in the work of
production. Why do you talk of wages? The money with which you pay
the wages of the laborers remunerates them for only a few years of the
perpetual possession which they have abandoned to you. Wages i