economic
sub-stratum--is none the less the only scientific explanation of these
laws, institutions and beliefs. And in this fact consists the greatness
and strength of the perspicacious conception of the genius of Marx.[82]

As in the modern world there are now but two classes, with subordinate
varieties,--on the one side the workers to whatever category they
belong, and on the other the property owners who do not work,--the
socialist theory of Marx leads us to this evident conclusion: since
political parties are merely the echoes and the mouth-pieces of class
interests--no matter what the subvarieties of these classes may
be--there can be substantially only two political parties: the socialist
labor party and the individualist party of the class in possession of
the land and the other means of production.

The difference in the character of the economic monopoly may cause, it
is true, a certain diversity of political _color_, and I have always
contended that the great landed proprietors represent the conservative
tendencies of political stagnation, while the holders of financial or
industrial capital represent in many instances the progressive party,
driven by its own nature to petty innovations of form, while finally
those who possess only an intellectual capital, the liberal professions,
etc., may go to the extreme length of political radicalism.

On the vital question--that is to say on the economic question of
property--conservatives, progressives and radicals are all
individualists. On this point they are all, in their essential nature of
the same social class and, in spite of certain sentimental sympathies,
the adversaries of the working class and of those who, although born on
_the other shore_, have embraced the political programme of that class,
a programme necessarily corresponding to the primordial economic
necessity--that is to say, the socialization of the land and the means
of production with all the innumerable and radical moral, juridical and
political transformations, which this socialization will inevitably
bring to pass in the social world.

This is why contemporary political life cannot but degenerate into the
most sterile _bysantinisme_ and the most corrupt strife for bribes and
spoils, when it is confined to the superficial skirmishes between
individualist parties, which differ only by a shade and in their formal
names, but whose ideas are so similar that one often sees radicals and
progressiv