As the fifth kind of aid whereby Christianity can help the working class, finally, we draw attention to the promotion of Productive Associations through special resources that are only at the disposal of Christianity.
The essence of Productive Associations is something we have recognized ourselves when workers take part in operating a business. In these [Associations], the worker is simultaneously both business entrepreneur and worker, and therefore has a dual share in the income: his worker’s wage and his share of actual business profits.
It is not necessary here to further explain the Productive Associations' great value for improving the situation of the working class. We do not know if anyone will ever succeed in offering the advantages of these cooperatives to all workers, or even just the major share of them. But they [the cooperatives] harbor a magnificent idea that deserves our utmost sympathy and support. It [this idea] provides, to the extent that it is practicable, the most immediate and most obvious solution to the problem at hand, since – apart from what the worker gets now, a working wage depressed to the lowest level by the market price – it offers the worker yet another source of income. LASSALLE wants to implement this plan with advance capital payments from the public treasury. We have expressed the view that this assistance – as a general principle, at least, i.e., as a compulsory obligation for the prosperous classes, in the manner of a tax raised from their assets, in order to give the working class the necessary capital – must be regarded as an intrusion into property rights and an overstepping of the lawful limits of the state's taxation rights, and that additionally we also doubt that this would result in a peaceful, orderly, governmental development. [ . . . ]
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