1 70 ARISTOCRA C Y AND E VOL UTION 



Book n not only does it inflict no injury on themselves, but 

 to it that progress in the processes of production is 

 due on which their own hopes depend, as much 

 as do those of their employers. Accordingly, the 

 socialists, profound thinkers as they are, propose to 

 abolish the competition by which the workers benefit, 

 because they confuse it with the competition by 

 which the workers suffer. The point, however, 

 which concerns us here is not that they have made a 

 blunder as to the kind of competition which they 

 reintroduce it should attack, but that the kind of competition 

 syste m eir ' which they declare themselves pledged to abolish, 

 as a thing accursed, and the root of all social evils, 

 they really reintroduce into their own programme, 

 altered only by being associated with the system of 

 slavery, and by being robbed of its practical efficiency, 

 and robbed of nothing else. 



the only For our contemporary socialists, who have at last 



come to perceive that the productivity of labour de- 

 Wlth P en ds on the ability with which it is directed, perceive 

 system, which a j so th e f ac t that, out of many possible directors, some 

 cumbrous and would direct it far more efficiently than others. They 

 also perceive the fact that the directors of labour, 

 who, according to their proposals, would be officials 

 of the bureaucratic State, could prove their efficiency 

 only by practical experiment. Now if all capital 

 were, as socialists propose it should be, owned by 

 the State, and if all the means of subsistence were 

 apportioned amongst the citizens equally, without 

 reference to the work performed by them ; and if all 

 the directors of labour, whether inventors or business 



