is, unhappily, to destroy the machines and to see in them only the
instruments of their undeserved sufferings.

But the destruction of the machines would be, in fact, only a pure and
simple return to barbarism, and this is not the wish or purpose of
socialism which represents a higher phase of human civilization.

And this is why socialism alone can furnish a solution of this tragic
difficulty which can not be solved by economic individualism which
involves the constant employment and introduction of improved machinery
because its use gives an evident and irresistible advantage to the
capitalist.

It is necessary--and there is no other solution--that the machines
become collective or social property. Then, obviously, their only effect
will be to diminish the aggregate amount of labor and muscular effort
necessary to produce a given quantity of products. And thus the daily
work of each worker will be decreased, and his standard of existence
will constantly rise and become more closely correspondent with the
dignity of a human being.

This effect is already manifest, to a limited extent, in those cases
where, for instance, several small farm proprietors found co-operative
societies for the purchase of, for example, threshing-machines. If there
should be joined to the small proprietors, in a grand fraternal
co-operation, the laborers or peasants (and this will be possible only
when the land shall have become social property), and if the machines
were municipal property, for example, as are the fire-engines, and if
the commune were to grant their use for the labors of the fields, the
machines would no longer produce any evil effects and all men would see
in them their liberators.

It is thus that socialism, because it represents a higher phase of human
evolution, would eliminate from the present phase only the bad products
of our unbridled economic individualism which creates, at one pole, the
billionaires or "Napoleons of Finance" who enrich themselves in a few
years by seizing upon--in ways more or less clearly described in the
penal code--the public funds, and which, at the other pole, accumulates
vast multitudes of poverty-stricken wretches in the slums of the cities
or in the houses of straw and mud which reproduce in the South of Italy,
the quarters of the Helots of antiquity, or in the valley of the Po, the
huts of the Australian bushmen.[56]

No intelligent socialist has ever dreamt of not recognizing all tha