THE DECENTRALISATION OF INDUSTRIES. 5 



soon discover that, while all the benefits of a tempo- 

 rary division of labour must be maintained, al_is_higk 

 time to claim those of the integration of labour. 

 Political 'economy has hitherto insisted chiefly upon 

 division. We proclaim integration; and we maintain 

 that the ideal of society that is, the state towards 

 which society is already marching is a society of in- 

 tegrated labour; a society where each individual is a 

 producer of both manual and intellectual work ; where 

 each able-bodied human being is a worker, and where 

 each worker works both in the field and the industrial 

 workshop ; where each aggregation of individuals, large 

 enough to dispose of a certain variety of natural re- 

 sources it may be a nation, or rather a region pro- 

 duces and itself consumes most of its own agricultural 

 and manufactured produce. 



Of course as long as society remains organised so 

 as to permit the owners of the land and capital to 

 appropriate for themselves, under the protection of the 

 State and historical rights, the yearly surplus of human 

 production, no such change can be thoroughly accom- 

 plished. But the present industrial system, based upon 

 a permanent specialisation of functions, already bears 

 in itself the germs of its proper ruin. The industrial 

 crises, which grow more acute and protracted, and are 

 rendered still worse and still more acute by the arma- 

 ments and wars implied by the present system, are 

 rendering its maintenance more and more difficult. 

 Moreover, the workers plainly manifest their intention 

 to support no longer patiently the misery occasioned by 

 each crisis. And each crisis accelerates the day when 

 the present institutions of individual property and pro- 

 duction will be shaken to their foundations with such 

 internal struggles as will depend upon the more or less 

 good sense of the now privileged classes. 



But we maintain also that any Socialist attempt at 

 remodelling the present relations between Capital and 



