On page 41, spooking of tho scientific work of Marx 

 with a disdain that cannot be taken seriously, because it 

 too much resembles that of the theologians for Darwin 

 or that of the jurists for Lombroso, he gives this curious 

 reasoning : "Starting from the supposition that all private 

 property is unjust, it is not logic which is wanting in the 

 doctrine of Marx. But if we recognise, on the contrary, 

 that every individual has the right to own something, 

 there results immediately the inevitable consequence of 

 the fruit of capital, and, therefore, of the augmentation 

 of it." 



Ah ! Monsieur de la Palisse, you who before dying 

 were alive, how your joyous image comes to my mind 

 through an invincible association of ideas. 



Certainly, if we admitted, a priori, the right of indi- 

 vidual ownership of the land and of the means of 

 production, it is useless to set ourselves to discuss it. 



But the misfortune is that the whole of the scientific 

 work of Marx and of the socialists has exactly for its 

 object to give positive proofs of the true genesis of 

 capitalist property surplus value not paid for to the 

 worker and to put an end to the old fables of " the 

 first occupier," of the " accumulated savings," which 

 are exceptions more and more rare. 



Besides, the negation of private property is not " the 

 supposition," but the logical and inexorable consequence 

 of premises of fact and historical statements made not only 

 by 'Marx but by a numerous company of sociologists who, 

 leaving on one side the mental reticences and reserves of 

 orthodox conventionalism, have become thereby socialists. 



As to the posthumous work of Marx, of which M. 

 Garofalo speaks in his preface to the French translation, 

 it is easy to answer the affirmation of M. Loria that the 

 third volume of the Capital of Marx is the suicide of the 

 theory of surplus value, and that, consequently, Marx 

 and socialism are quite dead and buried in their own 

 rubbish. First of all, the opinion of M. Loria is not 

 indisputable, even on the technical question of the few 

 economic facts of which the theory of surplus value would 

 not give an explanation, for there are other economists 

 who do not think with M. Loria with regard to the third 

 volume of Capital. And in the second place, passing 

 upon one side the fact that M. Loria himself, after all 

 the tumult led by the Italian bourgeois press about his 

 judgment upon the posthumous work of Marx, publicly 

 declared that in spite of all he thinks socialism repre- 

 sents the scientific truth in political economy, we can 

 remind our opponents that the work of Marx, the basis 

 of scientific socialism, is by no means exclusively in the 

 technical theory of surplus value, but that it is also in 

 the unshaken sociological theories of " the struggle of 

 the classes" and of "historic materialism." 



