ABSTRACT
Charles Gide's social economics included a concrete program of business economics for the cooperative movement. If capitalists pumped wealth directly to the consumers, considered the socialists, it would lower the level of wages. This was because needs were only physiological in character and were dependent upon how hard the consumer, in the role of the worker, labored in the factories. The socialists should give up their dreams of confiscating the capital of the bourgeoisie, declared Gide, in response to statements about the inability of workers to ever save sufficient to purchase all industrial equipment. Gide was perhaps interested in attempting to counteract the influence of Marxism and anarchism, which had made their mark on the working-class movement, not through workers, but youths who were often students or journalists. From Charles Gide's side, however, consumer cooperation was not a manner of pursuing a conflict concerning distribution between workers and owners in an existing economic order.
