2. Private Property and Common Property

Indeed, there can no longer be any question as to how private property in the instruments of production is to be preserved; the only question is what shall, or rather must, take its place. It is not a question of making an invention but of dealing with a fact. We have as little choice in the matter of the system of property that shall be instituted as we have in the matter of preserving the present one or throwing it overboard.

The same economic development that forces on us the question, What shall we put in the place of the system of private ownership in the means of production? brings with it the conditions that answer the question. The new system of property lies latent in the old. To become acquainted with it we must turn, not to our personal leanings and desires, but to the facts that surround us.

Whoever understands the conditions that are requisite for the present system of production knows what system of property those conditions will demand when the existing system of property ceases to be possible. Private property in the instruments of production has its root in small production. Individual production makes individual ownership necessary. Large production, on the contrary, means co-operation, social production. In large production the individual does not work alone, but a large number of workers, the whole commonwealth, work together to produce a whole. Accordingly, the modern instruments of production are extensive and powerful. It has become wholly impossible that every single worker should own his own instruments of production. Once the present stage is reached by large production, it admits of but two systems of ownership.

First, private ownership by the individual in the means of production used by co-operative labor; that means the existing system of capitalist production with its train of misery and exploitation as the portion of the workers and suffocating abundance as the portion of the capitalist.

Second, ownership by the workers in common of the instruments of production; that means a co-operative system of production and the extinction of the exploitation of the workers, who become masters of their own products and who themselves appropriate the surplus of which, under our system, they are deprived by the capitalist.

To substitute common, for private, ownership in the means of production, this it is that economic development is urging upon us with ever-increasing force.