[From Proudhon’s Carnets]
Necessity of renouncing every utopia, every system, and of following the revolution. If not, nothing.
There are Communists who still say every day: I am a communist first, a revolutionary after.
— I have not, after February, proposed the abolition of property, although I have posited and confirmed on several occasions that proposition: Property is theft.
Neither have I proposed to the equality of wages, of consumption, and of all goods: although I have constantly repeated that absolute equality is the law of society, because it is its tendency.
That is because we do not make revolution with dialectics. It is because the Philosophy of history and the transcendent speculations of economics science do not make revolutionary practice.
Philosophy and economic science see beyond every revolution; but precisely because of this the superior conclusions of philosophy and science are inapplicable to any individual revolution.
