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if the people are kept slaves to misery, to 

 slack seasons, to sharp or chronic hunger ? 



Liberty for liberty's sake that is, progress 

 attained opposing itself to progress to come 

 is a sort of political self pollution : it is 

 impotence in face of the fresh necessities of 

 life. 



Socialism answers that it does not wish to 

 suppress the liberty gloriously acquired by the 

 bourgeois world in 1879 any more than the 

 subsequent phase effaces the conquests of the 

 preceding phases of social evolution, but it 

 wishes that the workers after having acquired 

 a consciousness of the interests and needs of 

 their class should make use of this liberty to 

 realise a more equitable and more humane 

 social organisation. 



However, it is only too incontestable that, 

 given individual ownership, and therefore the 

 monopoly of economic power, the liberty of 

 him who is not a holder of this monopoly is 

 only an impotent and platonic toy. And 

 when the workers wish to use this liberty with 

 a clear consciousness of their class interests, 

 then the holders of political power are forced 

 to deny the great liberal principles, " the 

 principles of '89," by suppressing all public 

 liberty, and they imagine themselves able 

 thus to arrest the inevitable march of human 

 evolution. 



It is necessary to say as much of another 

 accusation directed against socialists. " They 

 deny their country," it is said, "in the name 

 of internationalism." 



That also is false. 





