The opponents of communism have always described it as a process of sharing things out equally. They declared that the communists wanted to confiscate everything and to divide everything up; to parcel out the land, to divide up the other means of production, and to share out also all the articles of consumption. Nothing could be more absurd than this notion. Above all, such a general division is impossible. We could share out land, horses and cattle, money, but could not share out railways, machinery, steamboats, and various other things of the sort. So much for that. Furthermore, such a division, as far as practicable, would not merely do no good to anyone, but would be a backward step for mankind. It would create a vast number of petty proprietors. But we have already seen that out of petty proprietorship and the competition among petty proprietors there issues large-scale proprietorship. Thus even if it were possible to realise such an equal division, the same old cycle would be reproduced.
Proletarian communism (or proletarian socialism) is a huge co-operative commonwealth. It is a sequence of the whole development of capitalist society and of the condition of the proletariat in that society. It must be carefully distinguished from the four following things:
- Lumpenproletanan socialism (anarchism). The anarchists reproach the communists on the ground that communism (so they contend) will maintain the State authority in the future society. As we have seen, the assertion is false. The essential difference consists in this, that the anarchists are far more concerned with dividing up than with the organisation of production; and that they conceive the organisation of production as taking the form, not of a huge cooperative commonwealth, but of a great number of “free,” small, self-governing communes.