Karl Marx: The political economy of the proletariat had won a still greater victory through the co-operative movement and by the establishment of factories based on the principle of co-operation and made possible by the tireless work of a few men without outside assistance. The value of these great social experiments could not be estimated too highly. “In practice instead of by reasoning they have proved that production on a large scale and in accordance with the laws of modern science is possible without the existence of a class of employers giving employment to a class of workers; that in order to bear fruit the tools of labour need not be monopolized as the instruments of an exploiting dominance over the workers; that wage-labour, like slave-labour and serfdom, is only a subordinate and temporary form doomed to disappear before co-operative labour, which performs its difficult task with a willing hand, a joyful spirit and a light heart.” However, co-operative labour limited to occasional attempts would not be able to break the monopoly of capital. “Perhaps just for this reason aristocrats apparently high-minded in their ideas, philanthropic theoreticians of the bourgeoisie and even hard-headed economists have suddenly begun to pay loathsome compliments to the co-operative labour system, which they tried vainly to suppress in its infancy, mocked at as the utopianism of dreamers or condemned as the madness of socialists.” Only the development of co-operative labour to national dimensions could save the working masses, but the owners of land and capital would always mobilize their political privileges to perpetuate their economic monopoly indefinitely and it was therefore the great duty of the working class to conquer political power. https://wordsmith.social/protestation/quotes#quote3987