13 



The equality can only consist in an obliga- 

 tion on the part of each individual to work 

 for a livelihood if each is guaranteed condi- 

 tions of existence worthy of a human being 

 in return for service rendered to society. 



Equality, according to socialism as Benoit 

 Malon said* ought to be understood in a 

 double sense : I. All men as such ought to be 

 assured of the conditions of human existence; 

 2. All men ought to be equal at the starting 

 point in the struggle for life, so that each may 

 freely develop his own personality with 

 equality of social conditions, whilst to-day a 

 healthy and robust, but poor child, in com- 

 petition with a feeble, but rich child, goes to 

 the wall. 



This is the radical, incommensurable trans- 

 formation that socialism demands, but which 

 it also discovers and announces as an evolu- 

 tion already begun in the world of to-day 

 necessary and inevitable in the world of the 

 future.| 



This transformation is. summed up in the 

 conversion of private or individual ownership 

 of the means of production, that is to say of 

 the physical basis of human life (land, mines, 

 houses, manufactories, machines, implements 

 of work, means of transport), into collective 

 or social ownership according to methods and 

 processes with which I will deal further on. 



From this point we will hold it to have 



* B. Malon, Le Socialisme integral, 2 vol., Paris, 1892. 



t Letourneau Pass6, present et avenir du travail, in 

 Revue mensuelle de I'tcole d'anthropologie. Paris, icth 

 June, 1894. 



