"As socialist-democrats, we belong, in truth, to no sect, no school. Or, rather, if we are obliged to come up with a description of ourselves, we should say that we are of the critical school. For us, socialism is not a system: it is, quite simply, a protest....
"The objective of socialism is liberation of the proletariat and eradication of poverty, which is to say, effective equality of circumstances between men. In the absence of equality, there will always be poverty, always be a proletariat.
"Socialism, which is egalitarianism above all else, is thus the democratic formula par excellence....
"The underlying dogma of socialism thus consists of reducing the aristocratic formula of capital-labor-talent into the simpler formula of LABOR!... in order to make every citizen simultaneously, equally, and to the same extent capitalist, worker, and expert or artist.
"In reality as in economic science, producer and consumer are always one and the same person, merely considered from two different viewpoints. Why should the same not be true of capitalist and worker? of worker and artist? Separate these qualities in the organization of society and inexorably you create castes, inequality and misery; amalgamate them, on the other hand, and in every individual you have equality, you have the Republic. And that is how in the political order, all these distinctions between governors and governed, administrator and administered, public functionaries and tax-paters, etc., must some day be erased. Each citizen must, through the spread of the social idea, become all: for, if he be not all, he is not free: he suffers oppression and exploitation somewhere."—Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (Election Manifesto of Le Peuple)