Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx)
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Title: Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx)
Author: Enrico Ferri
Translator: Robert Rives La Monte
Release date: May 16, 2006 [eBook #18397]
Language: English
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK SOCIALISM AND MODERN SCIENCE (DARWIN, SPENCER, MARX) ***
Produced by Geetu Melwani, Suzanne Lybarger, Martin Pettit
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SOCIALISM AND
MODERN SCIENCE
(DARWIN, SPENCER, MARX)
BY
ENRICO FERRI
TRANSLATED BY
ROBERT RIVES LA MONTE
THIRD EDITION
CHICAGO
CHARLES H. KERR & COMPANY
1917
Copyright, 1900
by The International Library Publishing Co.
Table of Contents.
PAGE.
Preface 5
Introduction 9
I.
THE THREE ALLEGED CONTRADICTIONS BETWEEN
DARWINISM AND SOCIALISM
Virchow And Haeckel at the Congress of Munich 13
_a_) The equality of individuals 19
_b_) The struggle for life and its victims 35
_c_) The survival of the fittest 49
SOCIALISM AS A CONSEQUENCE OF DARWINISM.
Socialism and religious beliefs 59
The individual and the species 67
The struggle for life and the class-struggle 74
II.
EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM.
The orthodox thesis and the socialist thesis confronted by
the theory of evolution 92
The law of apparent retrogression and collective ownership 100
The social evolution and individual liberty 110
Evolution.--Revolution.--Rebellion.--Violence 129
III.
SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIALISM.
Sterility of sociology 156
Marx completes Darwin And Spencer. Conservatives and
socialists 159
Appendix I.--Reply to Spencer 173
Appendix II.--Socialist superstition and individualist myopia 177
Author's Preface.
(_For the French Edition._)
This volume--which it has been desired to make known to the great public
in the French language--in entering upon a question so complex and so
vast as socialism, has but a single and definite aim.
My intention has been to point out, and in nearly all cases by rapid and
concise observations, the general relations existing between
contemporary socialism and the whole trend of modern scientific thought.
The opponents of contemporary socialism see in it, or wish to see in it,
merely a reproduction of the sentimental socialism of the first half of
the Nineteenth Century. They contend that socialism is in conflict with
the fundamental facts and inductions of the physical, biological and
social sciences, whose marvelous development and fruitful applications
are the glory of our dying century.
To oppose socialism, recourse has been had to the individual
interpretations and exaggerations of such or such a partisan of
Darwinism, or to the opinions of such or such a sociologist--opinions
and interpretations in obvious conflict with the premises of their
theories on universal and inevitable evolution.
It has also been said--under the pressure of acute or chronic
hunger--that "if science was against socialism, so much the worse for
science." And those who thus spoke were right if they meant by
"science"--even with a capital S--the whole mass of observations and
conclusions _ad usum delphini_ that orthodox science, academic and
official--often in good faith, but sometimes also through interested
motives--has always placed at the disposal of the ruling minorities.
I have believed it possible to show that modern experiential science is
in complete harmony with contemporary socialism, which, since the work
of Marx and Engels and their successors, differs essentially from
sentimental socialism, both in its scientific system and in its
political tactics, though it continues to put forth generous efforts for
the attainment of the same goal: social justice for all men.
I have loyally and candidly maintained my thesis on scientific grounds;
I have always recognized the partial truths of the theories of our
opponents, and I have not ignored the glorious achievements of the
bourgeoisie and bourgeois science since the outbreak of the French
Revolution. The disappearance of the bourgeois class and science,
which, at their advent marked the disappearance of the hieratic and
aristocratic classes and science, will result in the triumph of social
justice for all mankind, without distinction of classes, and in the
triumph of truth carried to its ultimate consequences.
The appendix contains my replies to a letter of Herbert Spencer and to
an anti-socialist book of M. Garofalo. It shows the present state of
social science, and of the struggle between ultra-conservative
orthodoxy, which is blinded to the sad truths of contemporary life by
its traditional syllogisms and innovating heterodoxy which is ever
becoming more marked among the learned, as well as strengthening its
hold upon the collective intelligence.
ENRICO FERRI.
Brussels, Nov., 1895.
Introduction.
Convinced Darwinian and Spencerian, as I am, it is my intention to
demonstrate that Marxian Socialism--the only socialism which has a truly
scientific method and value, and therefore the only socialism which from
this time forth has power to inspire and unite the Social Democrats
throughout the civilized world--is only the practical and fruitful
fulfilment, in the social life, of that modern scientific revolution
which--inaugurated some centuries since by the rebirth of the
experimental method in all branches of human knowledge--has triumphed in
our times, thanks to the works of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.
It is true that Darwin and especially Spencer halted when they had
travelled only half way toward the conclusions of a religious, political
or social order, which necessarily flow from their indisputable
premises. But that is, as it were, only an individual episode, and has
no power to stop the destined march of science and of its practical
consequences, which are in wonderful accord with the
necessities--necessities enforced upon our attention by want and
misery--of contemporary life. This is simply one more reason why it is
incumbent upon us to render justice to the scientific and political work
of Karl Marx which completes the renovation of modern scientific
thought.
Feeling and thought are the two inseparable impelling forces of the
individual life and of the collective life.
Socialism, which was still, but a few years since, at the mercy of the
strong and constantly recurring but undisciplined fluctuations of
humanitarian sentimentalism, has found, in the work of that great man,
Karl Marx, and of those who have developed and completed his thought,
its scientific and political guide.[1] This is the explanation of every
one of its conquests.
Civilization is the most fruitful and most beautiful development of
human energies, but it contains also an infectious _virus_ of tremendous
power. Beside the splendor of its artistic, scientific and industrial
achievements, it accumulates gangrenous products, idleness, poverty,
misery, insanity, crime and physical suicide and moral suicide, _i. e._
servility.
Pessimism--that sad symptom of a life without ideals and, in part, the
effect of the exhaustion or even of the degeneration of the nervous
system--glorifies the final annihilation of all life and sensation as
the only mode of escaping from or triumphing over pain and suffering.
We have faith, on the contrary, in the eternal _virtus medicatrix
naturae_ (healing power of Nature), and socialism is precisely that
breath of a new and better life which will free humanity--after some
access of fever perhaps--from the noxious products of the present phase
of civilization, and which, in a more advanced phase, will give a new
power and opportunity of expansion to all the healthy and fruitful
energies of all human beings.
ENRICO FERRI.
Rome, June, 1894.
FOOTNOTE:
[1] The word in the original means a mariner's compass.--_Tr._
SOCIALISM AND MODERN SCIENCE.
PART FIRST.
I.
VIRCHOW AND HAECKEL AT THE CONGRESS OF MUNICH.
On the 18th of September, 1877, Ernest Haeckel, the celebrated
embryologist of Jena, delivered at the Congress of Naturalists, which
was held at Munich, an eloquent address defending and propagating
Darwinism, which was at that time the object of the most bitter
polemical attacks.
A few days afterward, Virchow, the great pathologist,--an active member
of the "progressive" parliamentary party, hating new theories in
politics just as much as in science--violently assailed the Darwinian
theory of organic evolution, and, moved by a very just presentiment,
hurled against it this cry of alarm, this political anathema: "Darwinism
leads directly to socialism."
The German Darwinians, and at their head Messrs. Oscar Schmidt and
Haeckel, immediately protested; and, in order to avert the addition of
strong political opposition to the religious, philosophical, and
biological opposition already made to Darwinism, they maintained, on the
contrary, that the Darwinian theory is in direct, open and absolute
opposition to socialism.
"If the Socialists were prudent," wrote Oscar Schmidt in the "Ausland"
of November 27, 1877, "they would do their utmost to kill, by silent
neglect, the theory of descent, for that theory most emphatically
proclaims that the socialist ideas are impracticable."
"As a matter of fact," said Haeckel,[2] "there is no scientific doctrine
which proclaims more openly than the theory of descent that the equality
of individuals, toward which socialism tends, is an impossibility; that
this chimerical equality is in absolute contradiction with the necessary
and, in fact, universal inequality of individuals.
"Socialism demands for all citizens equal rights, equal duties, equal
possessions and equal enjoyments; the theory of descent establishes, on
the contrary, that the realization of these hopes is purely and simply
impossible; that, in human societies, as in animal societies, neither
the rights, nor the duties, nor the possessions, nor the enjoyments of
all the members of a society are or ever can be equal.
"The great law of variation teaches--both in the general theory of
evolution and in the smaller field of biology where it becomes the
theory of descent--that the variety of phenomena flows from an original
unity, the diversity of functions from a primitive identity, and the
complexity of organization from a primordial simplicity. The conditions
of existence for all individuals are, from their very birth, unequal.
There must also be taken into consideration the inherited qualities and
the innate tendencies which also vary more or less widely. In view of
all this, how can the work and the reward be equal for all?
"The more highly the social life is developed, the more important
becomes the great principle of the division of labor, the more requisite
it becomes for the stable existence of the State as a whole that its
members should distribute among themselves the multifarious tasks of
life, each performing a single function; and as the labor which must be
performed by the individuals, as well as the expenditure of strength,
talent, money, etc., which it necessitates, differs more and more, it is
natural that the remuneration of this labor should also vary widely.
These are facts so simple and so obvious that it seems to me every
intelligent and enlightened statesman ought to be an advocate of the
theory of descent and the general doctrine of evolution, as the best
antidote for the absurd equalitarian, utopian notions of the socialists.
"And it was Darwinism, the theory of selection, that Virchow, in his
denunciation, had in mind, rather than mere metamorphic development, the
theory of descent, with which it is always confused! Darwinism is
anything rather than socialistic.
"If one wishes to attribute a political tendency to this English
theory,--which is quite permissible,--this tendency can be nothing but
aristocratic; by no means can it be democratic, still less socialistic.
"The theory of selection teaches that in the life of mankind, as in that
of plants and animals, it is always and everywhere a small privileged
minority alone which succeeds in living and developing itself; the
immense majority, on the contrary, suffer and succumb more or less
prematurely. Countless are the seeds and eggs of every species of plants
and animals, and the young individuals who issue from them. But the
number of those who have the good fortune to reach fully developed
maturity and to attain the goal of their existence is relatively
insignificant.
"The cruel and pitiless 'struggle for existence' which rages everywhere
throughout animated nature, and which in the nature of things must rage,
this eternal and inexorable competition between all living beings, is an
undeniable fact. Only a small picked number of the strongest or fittest
is able to come forth victoriously from this battle of competition. The
great majority of their unfortunate competitors are inevitably destined
to perish. It is well enough to deplore this tragic fatality, but one
cannot deny it or change it. 'Many are called, but few are chosen!'
"The selection, the 'election' of these 'elect' is by absolute necessity
bound up with the rejection or destruction of the vast multitude of
beings whom they have survived. And so another learned Englishman has
called the fundamental principle of Darwinism 'the survival of the
fittest, the victory of the best.'
"At all events, the principle of selection is not in the slightest
degree democratic; it is, on the contrary, thoroughly aristocratic. If,
then, Darwinism, carried out to its ultimate logical consequences, has,
according to Virchow, for the statesman 'an extraordinarily dangerous
side,' the danger is doubtless that it favors aristocratic aspirations."
I have reproduced complete and in their exact form all the arguments of
Haeckel, because they are those which are repeated--in varying tones,
and with expressions which differ from his only to lose precision and
eloquence--by those opponents of socialism who love to appear
scientific, and who, for polemical convenience, make use of those
ready-made or stereotyped phrases which have currency, even in science,
more than is commonly imagined.
It is easy, nevertheless, to demonstrate that, in this debate, Virchow's
way of looking at the subject was the more correct and more
perspicacious, and that the history of these last twenty years has amply
justified his position.
It has happened, indeed, that Darwinism and socialism have both
progressed with a marvelous power of expansion. From that time the one
was to conquer--for its fundamental theory--the unanimous endorsement of
naturalists; the other was to continue to develop--in its general
aspirations as in its political discipline--flooding all the conduits of
the social consciousness, like a torrential inundation from internal
wounds caused by the daily growth of physical and moral disease, or like
a gradual, capillary, inevitable infiltration into minds freed from all
prejudices, and which are not satisfied by the merely personal
advantages that they derive from the orthodox distribution of spoils.
But, as political or scientific theories are natural phenomena and not
the capricious and ephemeral products of the free wills of those who
construct and propagate them, it is evident that if these two currents
of modern thought have each been able to triumph over the opposition
they first aroused--the strongest kind of opposition, scientific and
political conservatism--and if every day increases the army of their
avowed disciples, this of itself is enough to show us--I was about to
say by a law of intellectual _symbiosis_--that they are neither
irreconcilable with, nor contradictory to, each other.
Moreover, the three principal arguments which form the substance of the
anti-socialist reasoning of Haeckel resist neither the most elementary
criticisms, nor the most superficial observation of every-day life.
These arguments are:
I.--Socialism tends toward a chimerical equality of persons and
property: Darwinism, on the contrary, not only establishes, but shows
the organic necessity of the natural inequality of the capabilities and
even the wants of individuals.
II.--In the life of mankind, as in that of plants and animals, the
immense majority of those who are born are destined to perish, because
only a small minority can triumph in the "struggle for existence";
socialism asserts, on the contrary, that all ought to triumph in this
struggle, and that no one is inexorably destined to be conquered.
III.--The struggle for existence assures "the survival of the best, the
victory of the fittest," and this results in an aristocratic hierarchic
gradation of selected individuals--a continuous progress--instead of the
democratic, collectivist leveling of socialism.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Les preuves du transformisme.--Paris, 1879, page 110 _et seq._
II.
THE EQUALITY OF INDIVIDUALS.
The first of the objections, which is brought against socialism in the
name of Darwinism, is absolutely without foundation.
If it were true that socialism aspires to "the equality of all
individuals," it would be correct to assert that Darwinism irrevocably
condemns it.[3]
But although even to-day it is still currently repeated--by some in good
faith, like parrots who recite their stereotyped phrases; by others in
bad faith, with polemical skillfulness--that socialism is synonymous
with equality and leveling; the truth is, on the contrary, that
scientific socialism--the socialism which draws its inspiration from the
theory of Marx, and which alone to-day is worthy of support or
opposition,--has never denied the inequality of individuals, as of all
living beings--inequality innate and acquired, physical and
intellectual.[4]
It is just as if one should say that socialism asserts that a royal
decree or a popular vote could settle it that "henceforth all men shall
be five feet seven inches tall."
But in truth, socialism is something more serious and more difficult to
refute.
Socialism says: _Men are unequal, but they are all_ (of them) _men_.
And, in fact, although each individual is born and develops in a
fashion more or less different from that of all other individuals,--just
as there are not in a forest two leaves identically alike, so in the
whole world there are not two men in all respects equals, the one of the
other,--nevertheless every man, simply because he is a _human being_,
has a right to the existence of a man, and not of a slave or a beast of
burden.
We know, we as well as our opponents, that all men cannot perform the
same kind and amount of labor--now, when social inequalities are added
to equalities of natural origin--and that they will still be unable to
do it under a socialist regime--when the social organization will tend
to reduce the effect of congenital inequalities.
There will always be some people whose brains or muscular systems will
be better adapted for scientific work or for artistic work, while others
will be more fit for manual labor, or for work requiring mechanical
precision, etc.
What ought not to be, and what will not be--is that there should be some
men who do not work at all, and others who work too much or receive too
little reward for their toil.
But we have reached the height of injustice and absurdity, and in these
days it is the man who does not work who reaps the largest returns, who
is thus guaranteed the individual monopoly of wealth which accumulates
by means of hereditary transmission. This wealth, moreover, is only very
rarely due to the economy and abstinence of the present possessor or of
some industrious ancestor of his; it is most frequently the time-honored
fruit of spoliation by military conquest, by unscrupulous "business"
methods, or by the favoritism of sovereigns; but it is in every instance
always independent of any exertion, of any socially useful labor of the
inheritor, who often squanders his property in idleness or in the
whirlpool of a life as inane as it is brilliant in appearance.
And, when we are not confronted with a fortune due to inheritance, we
meet with wealth due to fraud. Without talking for the moment of the
economic organization, the mechanism of which Karl Marx has revealed to
us, and which, even without fraud, normally enables the capitalist or
property owner to live upon his income without working, it is
indisputable that the fortunes which are formed or enlarged with the
greatest rapidity under our eyes cannot be the fruit of honest toil. The
really honest workingman, no matter how indefatigable and economical he
may be, if he succeeds in raising himself from the state of wage-slave
to that of an overseer or contractor, can, by a long life of privations,
accumulate at most a few hundreds of dollars. Those who, on the
contrary, without making by their own talent industrial discoveries or
inventions, accumulate in a few years millions, can be nothing but
unscrupulous manipulators of affairs, if we except a few rare strokes
of good luck. And it is these very parasites--bankers, etc.,--who live
in the most ostentatious luxury enjoying public honors, and holding
offices of trust, as a reward for their honorable business methods.
Those who toil, the immense majority, receive barely enough food to keep
them from dying of hunger; they live in back-rooms, in garrets, in the
filthy alleys of cities, or in the country in hovels not fit for stables
for horses or cattle.
Besides all this, we must not forget the horrors of being unable to find
work, the saddest and most frequent of the three symptoms of that
_equality in misery_ which is spreading like a pestilence over the
economic world of modern Italy, as indeed, with varying degrees of
intensity, it is everywhere else.
I refer to the ever-growing army of the _unemployed_ in agriculture and
industry--of those who have lost their foothold in the lower middle
class,--and of those who have been _expropriated_ (robbed) of their
little possessions by taxes, debts or usury.
It is not correct, then, to assert that socialism demands for all
citizens material and actual equality of labor and rewards.
The only possible equality is equality of obligation to work in order to
live, with a guarantee to every laborer of conditions of existence
worthy of a human being in exchange for the labor furnished to society.
Equality, according to socialism--as Benoit Malon said[5]--is a
relative thing, and must be understood in a two-fold sense: 1st, All
men, as men, must be guaranteed human conditions of existence; 2d, All
men ought to be equal _at the starting point_, ought not to be
handicapped, in the struggle for life, in order that each may freely
develop his own personality in an environment of equality of _social_
conditions, while to-day a child, sound and healthy, but poor, goes to
the wall in competition with a child puny but rich.[6]
This is what constitutes the radical, immeasurable transformation that
socialism demands, but that it also has discovered and announces as an
evolution--already begun in the world around us--that will be
necessarily, inevitably accomplished in the human society of the days to
come.[7]
This transformation is summed up in the conversion of private or
individual ownership of the means of production, _i. e._ of the physical
foundation of human life (land, mines, houses, factories, machinery,
instruments of labor or tools, and means of transportation) into
collective or social ownership, by means of methods and processes which
I will consider further on.
From this point we will consider it as proven that the first objection
of the anti-socialist reasoning does not hold, since its starting-point
is non-existent. It assumes, in short, that contemporary socialism aims
at a chimerical physical and mental equality of all men, when the fact
is that scientific and fact-founded socialism never, even in a dream,
thought of such a thing.
Socialism maintains, on the contrary, that this inequality--though
greatly diminished under a better social organization which will do away
with all the physical and mental imperfections that are the cumulative
results of generations of poverty and misery--can, nevertheless, never
disappear for the reasons that Darwinism has discovered in the
mysterious mechanism of life, in other words on account of the principle
of variation that manifests itself in the continuous development of
species culminating in man.
In every social organization that it is possible to conceive, there will
always be some men large and others small, some weak and some strong,
some phlegmatic and some nervous, some more intelligent, others less so,
some superior in mental power, others in muscular strength; and it is
well that it should be so; moreover, it is inevitable.
It is well that this is so, because the variety and inequality of
individual aptitudes naturally produce that division of labor that
Darwinism has rightly declared to be a law of individual physiology and
of social economy.
All men ought to work in order to live, but each ought to devote himself
to the kind of labor which best suits his peculiar aptitudes. An
injurious waste of strength and abilities would thus be avoided, and
labor would cease to be repugnant, and would become agreeable and
necessary as a condition of physical and moral health.
And when all have given to society the labor best suited to their innate
and acquired aptitudes, each has a right to the same rewards, since
each has equally contributed to that solidarity of labor which sustains
the life of the social aggregate and, in solidarity with it, the life of
each individual.
The peasant who digs the earth performs a kind of labor in appearance
more modest, but just as necessary, useful and meritorious as that of
the workman who builds a locomotive, of the mechanical engineer who
improves it or of the savant who strives to extend the bounds of human
knowledge in his study or laboratory.
The one essential thing is that all the members of society work, just as
in the individual organism all the cells perform their different
functions, more or less modest in appearance--for example, the
nerve-cells, the bone-cells or the muscular cells--but all biological
functions, or sorts of labor, equally useful and necessary to the life
of the organism as a whole.
In the biological organism no living cell remains inactive, and the cell
obtains nourishment by material exchanges only in proportion to its
labor; in the social organism no individual ought to live without
working, whatever form his labor may take.
In this way the majority of the artificial difficulties that our
opponents raise against socialism may be swept aside.
"Who, then, will black the boots under the socialist regime?" demands M.
Richter in his book so poor in ideas, but which becomes positively
grotesque when it assumes that, in the name of social equality the
"grand chancellor" of the socialist society will be obliged, before
attending to the public business, to black his own boots and mind his
own clothes! In truth, if the adversaries of socialism had nothing but
arguments of this sort, discussion would indeed be needless.
But all will want to do the least fatiguing and most agreeable kinds of
work, says some one with a greater show of seriousness.
I will answer that this is equivalent to demanding to-day the
promulgation of a decree as follows: Henceforth all men shall be born
painters or surgeons!
The distribution to the proper persons of the different kinds of mental
and manual labor will be effected in fact by the anthropological
variations in temperament and character, and there will be no need to
resort to monkish regulations (another baseless objection to socialism).
Propose to a peasant of average intelligence to devote himself to the
study of anatomy or of the penal code or, inversely, tell him whose
brain is more highly developed than his muscles to dig the earth,
instead of observing with the microscope. They will each prefer the
labor for which they feel themselves best fitted.
The changes of occupation or profession will not be as considerable as
many imagine when society shall be organized under the collectivist
regime. When once the industries ministering to purely _personal_ luxury
shall be suppressed--luxury which in most cases insults and aggravates
the misery of the masses--the quantity and variety of work will adapt
themselves gradually, that is to say naturally, to the socialist phase
of civilization just as they now conform to the bourgeois phase.
Moreover, under the socialist regime, every one will have the fullest
liberty to declare and make manifest his personal aptitudes, and it will
not happen, as it does to-day, that many peasants, sons of the people
and of the lower middle class, gifted with natural talents, will be
compelled to allow their talents to atrophy while they toil as peasants,
workingmen or employees, when they would be able to furnish society a
different and more fruitful kind of labor, because it would be more in
Harmony with their peculiar genius.
The one essential point is this: In exchange for the labor that they
furnish to society, society must guarantee to the peasant and the
artisan, as well as to the one who devotes himself to the liberal
careers, conditions of existence worthy of a human being. Then we will
no longer be affronted by the spectacle of a ballet girl, for instance,
earning as much in one evening by whirling on her toes as a scientist, a
doctor, a lawyer, etc., in a year's work. In fact to-day the latter are
in luck if they do that well.
Certainly, the arts will not be neglected under the socialist regime,
because socialism wishes life to be agreeable for all, instead of for a
privileged few only, as it is to-day; it will, on the contrary, give to
all the arts a marvelous impulse, and if it abolishes private luxury
this will be all the more favorable to the splendor of the public
edifices.
More attention will be paid to assuring to each one remuneration in
proportion to the labor performed. This ratio will be ascertained by
taking the difficulty and danger of the labor into account and allowing
them to reduce the time required for a given compensation. If a peasant
in the open air can work seven or eight hours a day, a miner ought not
to work more than three or four hours. And, indeed, when everybody shall
work, when much unproductive labor shall be suppressed, the aggregate of
daily labor to be distributed among men will be much less heavy and more
easily endured (by reason of the more abundant food, more comfortable
lodging and recreation guaranteed to every worker) than it is to-day by
those who toil and who are so poorly paid, and, besides this, the
progress of science applied to industry will render human labor less and
less toilsome.
Individuals will apply themselves to work, although the wages or
remuneration cannot be accumulated as private wealth, because if the
normal, healthy, well-fed man avoids excessive or poorly rewarded labor,
he does not remain in idleness, since it is a physiological and
psychological necessity for him to devote himself to a daily occupation
in harmony with his capacities.
The different kinds of sport are for the leisure classes a substitute
for productive labor which a physiological necessity imposes upon them,
in order that they may escape the detrimental consequences of absolute
repose and ennui.
The gravest problem will be to _proportion_ the remuneration to the
labor of each. You know that collectivism adopts the formula--to each
according to his labor, while communism adopts this other--to each
according to his needs.
No one can give, in _its practical details_, the solution of this
problem; but this impossibility of predicting the future even in its
slightest details does not justify those who brand socialism as a utopia
incapable of realization. No one could have, _a priori_, in the dawn of
any civilization predicted its successive developments, as I will
demonstrate when I come to speak of the methods of social renovation.
This is what we are able to affirm with assurance, basing our position
on the most certain inductions of psychology and sociology.
It cannot be denied, as Marx himself declared, that this second
formula--which makes it possible to distinguish, according to some,
anarchy from socialism--represents a more remote and more complex ideal.
But it is equally impossible to deny that, in any case, the formula of
collectivism represents a phase of social evolution, a period of
individual discipline which must necessarily precede communism.[8]
There is no need to believe that socialism will realize in their fulness
all the highest possible ideals of humanity and that after its advent
there will be nothing left to desire or to battle for! Our descendants
would be condemned to idleness and vagabondage if our immediate ideal
was so perfect and all-inclusive as to leave them no ideal at which to
aim.
The individual or the society which no longer has an ideal to strive
toward is dead or about to die.[9] The formula of communism may then be
a more remote ideal, when collectivism shall have been completely
realized by the historical processes which I will consider further on.
We are now in a position to conclude that there is no contradiction
between socialism and Darwinism on the subject of the equality of all
men. Socialism has never laid down this proposition and like Darwinism
its tendency is toward a better life for individuals and for society.
This enables us also to reply to this objection, too often repeated,
that socialism stifles and suppresses human individuality under the
leaden pall of collectivism, by subjecting individuals to uniform
monastic regulations and by making them into so many human bees in the
social honey-comb.
Exactly the opposite of this is true. Is it not obvious that it is under
the present bourgeois organization of society that so many
individualities atrophy and are lost to humanity, which under other
conditions might be developed to their own advantage and to the
advantage of society as a whole? To-day, in fact, apart from some rare
exceptions, every man is valued for what he _possesses_ and not for what
he _is_.[10]
He who is born poor, obviously by no fault of his own, may be endowed by
Nature with artistic or scientific genius, but if his patrimony is
insufficient to enable him to triumph in the first struggles for
development and to complete his education, or if he has not, like the
shepherd Giotto, the luck to meet with a rich Cimabue, he must
inevitably vanish in oblivion in the great prison of wage-slavery, and
society itself thus loses treasures of intellectual power.[11]
He who is born rich, although he owes his fortune to no personal
exertion, even if his mental capacity is below normal, will play a
leading role on the stage of life's theatre, and all servile people will
heap praise and flattery upon him, and he will imagine, simply because
he _has_ money, that he is quite a different person from what in reality
he _is_.[12]
When property shall have become collective, that is to say, under the
socialist regime, every one will be assured of the means of existence,
and the daily labor will simply serve to give free play to the special
aptitudes, more or less original, of each individual, and the best and
most fruitful (potentially) years of life will not be completely taken
up, as they are at present, by the grievous and tragic battle for daily
bread.
Socialism will assure to every one a _human_ life; it will give each
individual true liberty to manifest and develop his or her own physical
and intellectual individuality--individualities which they bring into
the world at birth and which are infinitely varied and unequal.
Socialism does not deny inequality; it merely wishes to utilize this
inequality as one of the factors leading to the free, prolific and
many-sided development of human life.
FOOTNOTES:
[3] J. De Johannis, _Il concetto dell'equaglianza nel socialismo e nella
scienza_, in _Rassegna delle scienza sociali_, Florence, March 15, 1883,
and more recently, Huxley, "On the Natural Inequality of Men," in the
"Nineteenth Century," January, 1890.
[4] Utopian socialism has bequeathed to us as a mental habit, a habit
surviving even in the most intelligent disciples of Marxian socialism,
of asserting the existence of certain equalities--the equality of the
two sexes, for example--assertions which cannot possibly be maintained.
BEBEL, _Woman in the Past, Present and Future_.
Bebel, the propagandist and expounder of Marxian theories, also repeats
this assertion that, from the psycho-physiological point of view, woman
is the equal of man, and he attempts to refute, without success, the
scientific objections that have been made to this thesis.
Since the scientific investigations of Messrs. Lombroso and Ferrero,
embodied in _Donna delinquente, prostituta e normale_, Turin, 1893 (This
book has been translated into English, if my memory serves me
right.--Tr.), one can no longer deny the physiological and psychological
inferiority of woman to man. I have given a Darwinian explanation of
this fact (Scuola positiva, 1893, Nos. 7-8), that Lombroso has since
completely accepted (_Uomo di genio_, 6e édit, 1894. This book is also
available in English, I believe.--Tr.) I pointed out that all the
physio-psychical characteristics of woman are the consequences of her
great biological function, maternity.
A being who creates another being--not in the fleeting moment of a
voluptuous contact, but by the organic and psychical sacrifices of
pregnancy, childbirth and giving suck--cannot preserve for herself as
much strength, physical and mental, as man whose only function in the
reproduction of the species is infinitely less of a drain.
And so, aside from certain individual exceptions, woman has a lower
degree of physical sensibility than man (the current opinion is just the
opposite), because if her sensibility were greater, she could not,
according to the Darwinian law, survive the immense and repeated
sacrifices of maternity, and the species would become extinct. Woman's
intellect is weaker, especially in synthetic power, precisely because
though there are no (Sergi, in _Atti della societa romana di
antropologia_, 1894) women of genius, they nevertheless give birth to
men of genius.
This is so true that greater sensibility and power of intellect are
found in women in whom the function and sentiment of maternity are
undeveloped or are only slightly developed (women of genius generally
have a masculine physiognomy), and many of them attain their complete
intellectual development only after they pass the critical period of
life during which the maternal functions cease finally.
But, if it is scientifically certain that woman represents an inferior
degree of biological evolution, and that she occupies a station, even as
regards her physio-psychical characteristics, midway between the child
and the adult male, it does not follow from this that the socialist
conclusions concerning the woman question are false.
Quite the contrary. Society ought to place woman, as a human being and
as a creatress of men--more worthy therefore of love and respect--in a
better juridical and ethical situation than she enjoys at present. Now
she is too often a beast of burden or an object of luxury. In the same
way when, from the economic point of view, we demand at the present day
special measures in behalf of women, we simply take into consideration
their special physio-psychical conditions. The present economic
individualism exhausts them in factories and rice-fields; socialism, on
the contrary, will require from them only such professional, scientific
or muscular labor as is in perfect harmony with the sacred function of
maternity.
KULISCIOFF, _Il monopolio dell'uomo_, Milan, 1892, 2d edition.--MOZZONI,
_I socialisti e l'emancipazione della donna_, Milan, 1891.
[5] B. MALON, _Le Socialisme Integral_, 2 vol., Paris, 1892.
[6] ZULIANI, _Il privilegio della salute_, Milan, 1893.
[7] LETOURNEAU, _Passé, présent et avenir du travail_, in _Revue
mensuelle de l'école d'anthropologie_, Paris, June 15, 1894.
[8] M. Zerboglio has very justly pointed out that individualism acting
without the pressure of external sanction and by the simple internal
impulse toward good (rightness)--this is the distant ideal of Herbert
Spencer--can be realized only after a phase of collectivism, during
which the individual activity and instincts can be disciplined into
social solidarity and weaned from the essentially anarchist
individualism of our times when every one, if he is clever enough to
"slip through the meshes of the penal code" can do what he pleases
without any regard to his fellows.
[9] "Ah, but a man's reach should exceed his grasp," is the way Robert
Browning expresses this in "Andrea Del Sarto."--Translator.
[10] Note our common expression: He is worth so much.--Tr.
[11]
"Full many a gem of purest ray serene
The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
And waste its fragrance on the desert air.
"Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
The little tyrant of his field withstood,
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
Some Cromwell, guiltless of his country's blood."
--Stanzas from GRAY'S "Elegy in a Country Church-yard." Translator.
[12]
"Cursed be the gold that gilds the straighten'd forehead of
the fool!"
--Tennyson, in "Locksley Hall."
"Gold, yellow, glittering, precious gold!
Thus, much of this will make black, white; foul, fair;
Wrong, right; base, noble; old, young; coward, valiant."
--Shakespeare, in "Timon of Athens."--Translator.
III.
THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AND ITS VICTIMS.
Socialism and Darwinism, it is said, are in conflict on a second point.
Darwinism demonstrates that the immense majority--of plants, animals and
men--are destined to succumb, because only a small minority triumphs "in
the struggle for life"; socialism, on its part, asserts that all ought
to triumph and that no one ought to succumb.
It may be replied, in the first place, that, even in the biological
domain of the "struggle for existence," the disproportion between the
number of individuals who are born and the number of those who survive
regularly and progressively grows smaller and smaller as we ascend in
the biological scale from vegetables to animals, and from animals to
Man.
This law of a decreasing disproportion between the "called" and the
"chosen" is supported by the facts even if we limit our observation to
the various species belonging to the same natural order. The higher and
more complex the organization, the smaller the disproportion.
In fact, in the vegetables, each individual produces every year an
infinite number of seeds, and an infinitesimal number of these survive.
In the animals, the number of young of each individual diminishes and
the number of those who survive continues on the contrary, to increase.
Finally, for the human species, the number of individuals that each one
can beget is very small and most of them survive.
But, moreover, in the cases of all three, vegetables, animals and men,
we find that it is the lower and more simply organized species, the
races and classes less advanced in the scale of existence, who reproduce
their several kinds with the greatest prolificness and in which
generation follows generation most rapidly on account of the brevity of
individual life.
A fern produces millions of spores, and its life is very short--while a
palm tree produces only a few dozen seeds, and lives a century.
A fish produces several thousand eggs--while the elephant or the
chimpanzee have only a few young who live many years.
Within the human species the savage races are the most prolific and
their lives are short--while the civilized races have a low birth-rate
and live longer.
From all this it follows that, even confining ourselves to the purely
biological domain, the number of victors in the struggle for existence
constantly tends to approach nearer and nearer to the number of births
with the advance or ascent in the biological scale from vegetables to
animals, from animals to men, and from the lower species or varieties to
the higher species or varieties.
The iron law of "the struggle for existence," then, constantly reduces
the number of the victims forming its hecatomb with the ascent of the
biological scale, and the rate of decrease becomes more and more rapid
as the forms of life become more complex and more perfect.
It would then be a mistake to invoke against socialism the Darwinian law
of Natural Selection in the form under which that law manifests itself
in the primitive (or lower) forms of life, without taking into account
its continuous attenuation as we pass from vegetables to animals, from
animals to men, and within humanity itself, from the primitive races to
the more advanced races.
And as socialism represents a yet more advanced phase of human progress,
it is still less allowable to use as an objection to it such a gross and
inaccurate interpretation of the Darwinian law.
It is certain that the opponents of socialism have made a wrong use of
the Darwinian law or rather of its "brutal" interpretation in order to
justify modern individualist competition which is too often only a
disguised form of cannibalism, and which has made the maxim _homo homini
lupus_ (man to man a wolf; or, freely, "man eats man") the
characteristic motto of our era, while Hobbes only made it the ruling
principle of the "_state of nature_" of mankind, before the making of
the "social contract."
But because a principle has been abused or misused we are not justified
in concluding that the principle itself is false. Its abuse often serves
as an incentive to define its nature and its limitations more
accurately, so that in practice it may be applied more correctly. This
will be the result of my demonstration of the perfect harmony that
reigns between socialism and Darwinism.
As long ago as the first edition of my work _Socialismo e Criminalità_
(pages 179 _et seq._) I maintained that the struggle for existence is a
law immanent in the human race, as it is a law of all living beings,
although its forms continually change and though it undergoes more and
more attenuation.
This is still the way it appears to me, and consequently, on this point
I disagree with some socialists who have thought they could triumph more
completely over the objection urged against them in the name of
Darwinism by declaring that in human society the "struggle for
existence" is a law which is destined to lose all meaning and
applicability when the social transformation at which socialism aims
shall have been effected.[13]
It is a law which dominates tyrannically all living beings, and it must
cease to act and fall inert at the feet of Man, as if he were not merely
a link inseparable from the great biological chain!
I maintained, and I still maintain, that the struggle for existence is a
law inseparable from life, and consequently from humanity itself, but
that, though remaining an inherent and constant law, it is gradually
transformed in its essence and attenuated in its forms.
Among primitive mankind the struggle for existence is but slightly
differentiated from that which obtains among the other animals. It is
the brutal struggle for daily food or for possession of the
females--hunger and love are, in fact, the two fundamental needs and the
two poles of life--and almost its only method is muscular violence. In a
more advanced phase there is joined to this basic struggle the struggle
for political supremacy (in the clan, in the tribe, in the village, in
the commune, in the State), and, more and more, muscular struggle is
superseded by intellectual struggle.
In the historical period the Graeco-Latin society struggled for _civil_
equality (the abolition of slavery); it triumphed, but it did not halt,
because to live is to struggle; the society of the middle ages struggled
for _religious_ equality; it won the battle, but it did not halt; and at
the end of the last century, it struggled for _political_ equality. Must
it now halt and remain stationary in the present state of progress?
To-day society struggles for _economic_ equality, not for an absolute
material equality, but for that more practical, truer equality of which
I have already spoken. And all the evidence enables us to foresee with
mathematical certainty that this victory will be won to give place to
new struggles and to new ideals among our descendants.
The successive changes in the subject-matter (or the ideals) of the
struggles for existence are accompanied by a progressive mitigation of
the methods of combat. Violent and muscular at first, the struggle is
becoming, more and more, pacific and intellectual, notwithstanding some
atavic recurrences of earlier methods or some psycho-pathological
manifestations of individual violence against society and of social
violence against individuals.
The remarkable work of Mr. Novicow[14] has recently given a signal
confirmation to my opinion, although Novicow has not taken the sexual
struggle into account. I will develop my demonstration more fully in
the chapter devoted to _l'avenir moral de l'humanité_ (the intellectual
future of humanity), in the second edition of _Socialismo e
Criminalità_.
For the moment I have sufficiently replied to the anti-socialist
objection, since I have shown not merely that the disproportion between
the number of births and the number of those who survive tends to
constantly diminish, but also that the "struggle for existence" itself
changes in its essence and grows milder in its processes at each
successive phase of the biological and social evolution.
Socialism may then insist that human conditions of existence ought to be
guaranteed to all men--in exchange for labor furnished to collective
society--without thereby contradicting the Darwinian law of the survival
of the victors in the struggle for existence, since this Darwinian law
ought to be understood and applied in each of its varying
manifestations, in harmony with the law of human progress.
Socialism, scientifically understood, does not deny, and cannot deny,
that among mankind there are always some "losers" in the struggle for
existence.
This question is more directly connected with the relations which exist
between _socialism_ and _criminality_, since those who contend that the
struggle for existence is a law which does not apply to human society,
declare, accordingly, that _crime_ (an abnormal and anti-social form of
the struggle for life, just as _labor_ is its normal and social form) is
destined to disappear. Likewise they think they discover a certain
contradiction between socialism and the teachings of criminal
anthropology concerning the congenital criminal, though these teachings
are also deducted from Darwinism.[15]
I reserve this question for fuller treatment elsewhere. Here is in brief
my thought as a socialist and as a criminal anthropologist.
In the first place the school of scientific criminologists deal with
life as it now is--and undeniably it has the merit of having applied the
methods of experimental science to the study of criminal phenomena, of
having shown the hypocritical absurdity of modern penal systems based on
the notion of free-will and moral delinquency and resulting in the
system of cellular confinement, one of the mental aberrations of the
nineteenth century, as I have elsewhere qualified it. In its stead the
criminologists wish to substitute the simple segregation of individuals
who are not fitted for social life on account of pathological
conditions, congenital or acquired, permanent or transitory.
In the second place, to contend that socialism will cause the
disappearance of all forms of crime is to act upon the impulse of a
generous sentiment, but the contention is not supported by a rigorously
scientific observation of the facts.
The scientific school of criminology demonstrates that crime is a
natural and social phenomenon--like insanity and suicide--determined by
the abnormal, organic and psychological constitution of the delinquent
and by the influences of the physical and social environment. The
anthropological, physical and social factors, all, always, act
concurrently in the determination of all offences, the lightest as well
as the gravest--as, moreover, they do in the case of all other human
actions. What varies in the case of each delinquent and each offense, is
the decisive intensity of each order of factors.[16]
For instance, if the case in point is an assassination committed through
jealousy or hallucination, it is the anthropological factor which is the
most important, although nevertheless consideration must also be paid
to the physical environment and the social environment. If it is a
question, on the contrary, of crimes against property or even against
persons, committed by a riotous mob or induced by alcoholism, etc., it
is the social environment which becomes the preponderating factor,
though it is, notwithstanding, impossible to deny the influence of the
physical environment and of the anthropological factor.
We may repeat the same reasoning--in order to make a complete
examination of the objection brought against socialism in the name of
Darwinism--on the subject of the ordinary diseases; crime, moreover, is
a department of human pathology.
All diseases, acute or chronic, infectious or not infectious, severe or
mild, are the product of the anthropological constitution of the
individual and of the influence of the physical and social environment.
The decisiveness of the personal conditions or of the environment varies
in the various diseases; phthisis or heart disease, for instance, depend
principally on the organic constitution of the individual, though it is
necessary to take the influence of the environment into account;
pellagra,[17] cholera, typhus, etc., on the contrary, depend principally
on the physical and social conditions of the environment. And so
phthisis makes its ravages even among well-to-do people, that is to say,
among persons well nourished and well housed, while it is the badly
nourished, that is to say, the poor, who furnish the greatest number of
victims to pellagra and cholera.
It is, consequently, evident that a socialist regime of collective
property which shall assure to every one human conditions of existence,
will largely diminish or possibly annihilate--aided by the scientific
discoveries and improvement in hygienic measures--the diseases which are
principally caused by the conditions of the environment, that is to say
by insufficient nourishment or by the want of protection from inclemency
of the weather; but we shall not witness the disappearance of the
diseases due to traumatic injuries, imprudence, pulmonary affections,
etc.
The same conclusions are valid regarding crime. If we suppress poverty
and the shocking inequality of economic conditions, hunger, acute and
chronic, will no longer serve as a stimulus to crime. Better nourishment
will bring about a physical and moral improvement. The abuses of power
and of wealth will disappear, and there will be a considerable
diminution in the number of crimes due to circumstances (_crimes
d'occasion_), crimes caused principally by the social environment. But
there are some crimes which will not disappear, such as revolting crimes
against decency due to a pathological perversion of the sexual instinct,
homicides induced by epilepsy, thefts which result from a
psycho-pathological degeneration, etc.
For the same reasons popular education will be more widely diffused,
talents of every kind will be able to develop and manifest themselves
freely; but this will not cause the disappearance of idiocy and
imbecility due to hereditary pathological conditions. Nevertheless it
will be possible for different causes to have a preventive and
mitigating influence on the various forms of congenital degeneration
(ordinary diseases, criminality, insanity and nervous disorders). Among
these preventive influences may be: a better economic and social
organization, the prudential counsels, constantly growing in efficacy
given by experimental biology, and less and less frequent procreation,
by means of voluntary abstention, in cases of hereditary disease.
To conclude we will say that, even under the socialist regime--although
they will be infinitely fewer--there will always be some who will be
vanquished in the struggle for existence--these will be the victims of
weakness, of disease, of dissipation, of nervous disorders, of suicide.
We may then affirm that socialism does not deny the Darwinian law of the
struggle for existence. Socialism will, however, have this indisputable
advantage--the epidemic or endemic forms of human degeneracy will be
entirely suppressed by the elimination of their principal cause--the
physical poverty and (its necessary consequence) the mental suffering of
the majority.
Then the struggle for existence, while remaining always the driving
power of the life of society, will assume forms less and less brutal and
more and more humane. It will become an intellectual struggle. Its ideal
of physiological and intellectual progress will constantly grow in
grandeur and sublimity when this progressive idealization of the ideal
shall be made possible by the guarantee to every one of daily bread for
the body and the mind.
The law of the "struggle for life" must not cause us to forget another
law of natural and social Darwinian evolution. It is true many
socialists have given to this latter law an excessive and exclusive
importance, just as some individuals have entirely neglected it. I refer
to the law of solidarity which knits together all the living beings of
one and the same species--for instance animals who live gregariously in
consequence of the abundance of the supply of their common food
(herbivorous animals)--or even of different species. When species thus
mutually aid each other to live they are called by naturalists
_symbiotic_ species, and instead of the struggle for life we have
co-operation for life.
It is incorrect to state that the struggle for life is the sole
sovereign law in Nature and society, just as it is false to contend that
this law is wholly inapplicable to human society. The real truth is that
even in human society the struggle for life is an eternal law which
grows progressively milder in its methods and more elevated in its
ideals. But operating concurrently with this we find a law, the
influence of which upon the social evolution constantly increases, the
law of solidarity or co-operation between living beings.
Even in animal societies mutual aid against the forces of Nature, or
against other animals is of constant occurrence, and this is carried
much further among human beings, even among savage tribes. One notes
this phenomenon especially in tribes which on account of the favorable
character of their environment, or because their subsistence is assured
and abundant, become of the industrial or peaceful type. The military or
warlike type which is unhappily predominant (on account of the
uncertainty and insufficiency of subsistence) among primitive mankind
and in reactionary phases of civilization, presents us with less
frequent examples of it. The industrial type constantly tends, moreover,
as Spencer has shown, to take the place of the warlike type.[18]
Confining ourselves to human society alone, we will say that, while in
the first stages of the social evolution the law of the struggle for
life takes precedence over the law of solidarity, with the growth within
the social organism of the division of labor which binds the various
parts of the social whole more closely together in inter-dependence, the
struggle for life grows milder and is metamorphosed, and the law of
co-operation or solidarity gains more and more both in efficiency and in
the range of its influence, and this is due to that fundamental reason
that Marx pointed out, and which constitutes his great scientific
discovery, the reason that in the one case the conditions of
existence--food especially--are not assured, and in the other case they
are.
In the lives of individuals as in the life of societies, when the means
of subsistence, that is to say, the physical basis of existence, are
assured, the law of solidarity takes precedence over the law of the
struggle for existence, and when they are not assured, the contrary is
true. Among savages, infanticide and parricide are not only permitted
but are obligatory and sanctioned by religion if the tribe inhabits an
island where food is scarce (for instance, in Polynesia), and they are
immoral and criminal acts on continents where the food supply is more
abundant and certain.[19]
Just so, in our present society, as the majority of individuals are not
sure of getting their daily bread, the struggle for life, or "free
competition," as the individualists call it, assumes more cruel and more
brutal forms.
Just as soon as through collective ownership every individual shall be
assured of fitting conditions of existence, the law of solidarity will
become preponderant.
When in a family financial affairs run smoothly and prosperously,
harmony and mutual good-will prevail; as soon as poverty makes its
appearance, discord and struggle ensue. Society as a whole shows us the
picture on a large scale. A better social organization will insure
universal harmony and mutual good-will.
This will be the achievement of socialism, and, to repeat, for this, the
fullest and most fruitful interpretation of the inexorable natural laws
discovered by Darwinism, we are indebted to socialism.
FOOTNOTES:
[13] Such socialists are LABUSQUIERE, LANESSAU, LORIA And COLAJANNI.
[14] NOVICOW, _Les luttes entre sociétés, leurs phases successives_,
Paris, 1893. LERDA, _La lotta per la vita_, in _Pensiero italiano_,
Milan, Feb. and March, 1894.
[15] I regret that M. Loria, ordinarily so profound and acute, has here
been deceived by appearances. He has pointed out this pretended
contradiction in his "Economic Foundations of Society" (available in
English, Tr.). He has been completely answered, in the name of the
school of scientific criminal anthropology, by M. RIVIERI DE ROCCHI, _Il
diritto penale e un'opera recente di Loria in Scuola positiva nella
giurisprudenza penale_ of Feb. 15, 1894, and by M. LOMBROSO, in
_Archivio di psichiatria e scienza penali_, 1894, XIV, fasc. C.
[16] ENRICO FERRI, Sociologie criminelle (French translation), 1893,
Chaps. I. and II.
A recent work has just given scientific confirmation to our inductions:
FORSINARI DI VERCE, _Sulla criminalità e le vicende economiche d'Italia
dal 1873 al 1890_. Turin, 1894. The preface written by Lombroso
concludes in the following words: "We do not wish, therefore, to slight
or neglect the truth of the socialist movement, which is destined to
changed the current of modern European thought and action, and which
contends _ad majorem gloriam_ of its conclusions that _all_ criminality
depends on the influence of the economic environment. We also believe in
this doctrine, though we are unwilling and unable to accept the
erroneous conclusions drawn from it. However enthusiastic we may be, we
will never, in its honor, renounce the truth. We leave this useless
servility to the upholders of classical orthodoxy."
[17] A skin-disease endemic in Northern Italy. Tr.
[18] See in this connection the famous monographs of Kropotkin, _Mutual
aid among the savages_, in the "Nineteenth Century," April 9, 1891, and
_Among the barbarians_, "Nineteenth Century," January, 1892, and also
two recent articles signed: "Un Professeur," which appeared in the
_Revue Socialiste_, of Paris, May and June, 1894, under the title:
_Lutte ou accord pour la vie_.
[19] ENRICO FERRI, _Omicidio nell' antropologia criminale_,
_Introduction_, _Turin_, 1894.
IV.
THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.
The third and last part of the argument of Haeckel is correct if applied
solely to the purely biological and Darwinian domain, but its starting
point is false if it is intended to apply it to the social domain and to
turn it into an objection against socialism.
It is said the struggle for existence assures the survival of the
fittest; it therefore causes an aristocratic, hierarchic gradation of
selected individuals--a continuous progress--and not the democratic
leveling of socialism.
Here again, let us begin by accurately ascertaining the nature of this
famous natural selection which results from the struggle for existence.
The expression which Haeckel uses and which, moreover, is in current
use, "survival of the best or of the best fitted," ought to be
corrected. We must suppress the adjective _best_. This is simply a
persisting relic of that teleology which used to see in Nature and
history a premeditated goal to be reached by means of a process of
continuous amelioration or progress.
Darwinism, on the contrary, and still more the theory of universal
evolution, has completely banished the notion of final causes from
modern scientific thought and from the interpretation of natural
phenomena. Evolution consists both of involution and dissolution. It
may be true, and indeed it is true, that by comparing the two extremes
of the path traversed by humanity we find that there has really been a
true progress, an improvement taking it all in all; but, in any case,
progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but, as Goethe has
said, a spiral with rhythms of progress and of retrogression, of
evolution and of dissolution.
Every cycle of evolution, in the individual life as in the collective
life, bears within it the germs of the corresponding cycle of
dissolution; and, inversely, the latter, by the decay of the form
already worn out, prepares in the eternal laboratory new evolutions and
new forms of life.
It is thus that in the world of human society every phase of
civilization bears within it and is constantly developing the germs of
its own dissolution from which issues a new phase of civilization--which
will be more or less different from its predecessor in geographical
situation and range--in the eternal rhythm of living humanity. The
ancient hieratic civilizations of the Orient decay, and through their
dissolution they give birth to the Graeco-Roman world, which in turn is
followed by the feudal and aristocratic civilization of Central Europe;
it also decays and disintegrates through its own excesses, like the
preceding civilizations, and it is replaced by the bourgeois
civilization which has reached its culminating point in the Anglo-Saxon
world. But it is already experiencing the first tremors of the fever of
dissolution, while from its womb there emerges and is developing the
socialist civilization which will flourish over a vaster domain than
that of any of the civilizations which have preceded it.[20]
Hence it is not correct to assert that the natural selection caused by
the struggle for existence assures the survival of the _best_; in fact,
it assures the survival of the best _fitted_.
This is a very great difference, alike in natural Darwinism and in
social Darwinism.
The struggle for existence necessarily causes the survival of the
individuals best fitted for the environment and the particular
historical period in which they live.
In the natural, biological domain, the free play of natural
(_cosmiques_) forces and conditions causes a progressive advance or
ascent of living forms, from the microbe up to Man.
In human society, on the contrary, that is to say, in the super-organic
evolution of Herbert Spencer, the intervention of other forces and the
occurrence of other conditions sometimes causes a retrograde selection
which always assures the survival of those who are best fitted for a
given environment at a given time, but the controlling principle of this
selection is in turn affected by the vicious conditions--if they are
vicious--of the environment.
Here we are dealing with the question of "social selection," or rather
"social selections," for there is more than one kind of social
selection. By starting from this idea--not clearly comprehended--some
writers, both socialists and non-socialists, have come to deny that the
Darwinian theories have any application to human society.
It is known, indeed, that in the contemporaneous civilized world natural
selection is injuriously interfered with by _military_ selection, by
_matrimonial_ selection, and, above all, by _economic_ selection.[21]
The temporary celibacy imposed upon soldiers certainly has a deplorable
effect upon the human race. It is the young men who on account of
comparatively poor physical constitutions are excused from military
service, who marry the first, while the healthier individuals are
condemned to a transitory sterility, and in the great cities run the
risk of contagion from syphilis which unfortunately has permanent
effects.
Marriage also, corrupted as it is in the existent society by economic
considerations, is ordinarily in practice a sort of retrogressive sexual
selection. Women who are true degenerates, but who have good dowries or
"prospects," readily find husbands on the marriage market, while the
most robust women of the people or of the middle class who have no
dowries are condemned to the sterility of compulsory old-maiddom or to
surrender themselves to a more or less gilded prostitution.[22]
It is indisputable that the present economic conditions exercise an
influence upon all the social relations of men. The monopoly of wealth
assures to its possessor the victory in the struggle for existence. Rich
people, even though they are less robust, have longer lives than those
who are ill-fed. The day-and-night-work, under inhuman conditions,
imposed upon grown men, and the still more baleful labor imposed upon
women and children by modern capitalism causes a constant deterioration
in the biological conditions of the toiling masses.[23]
In addition to all these we must not forget the moral selection--which
is really immoral or retrograde--made at present by capitalism in its
struggle with the proletariat, and which favors the survival of those
with servile characters, while it persecutes and strives to suppress all
those who are strong in character, and all who do not seem disposed to
tamely submit to the yoke of the present economic order.[24]
The first impression which springs from the recognition of these facts
is that the Darwinian law of natural selection does not hold good in
human society--in short, is inapplicable to human society.
I have maintained, and I do maintain, on the contrary, in the first
place, that these various kinds of retrograde social selection are not
in contradiction with the Darwinian law, and that, moreover, they serve
as the material for an argument in favor of socialism. Nothing but
socialism, in fact, can make this inexorable law of natural selection
work more beneficently.
As a matter of fact, the Darwinian law does not cause the "survival of
the _best_," but simply the "survival of the _fittest_."
It is obvious that the forms of degeneracy produced by the divers kinds
of social selection and notably by the present economic organization
merely promote, indeed, and with growing efficiency, the survival of
those best fitted for this very economic organization.
If the victors in the struggle for existence are the worst and the
weakest, this does not mean that the Darwinian law does not hold good;
it means simply that the environment is corrupt (and corrupting), and
that those who survive are precisely those who are the fittest for this
corrupt environment.
In my studies of criminal psychology I have too often had to recognize
the fact that in prisons and in the criminal world it is the most cruel
or the most cunning criminals who enjoy the fruits of victory; it is
just the same in our modern economic individualist system; the victory
goes to him who has the fewest scruples; the struggle for existence
favors him who is fittest for a world where a man is valued for what he
has (no matter how he got it), and not for what he is.
The Darwinian law of natural selection functions then even in human
society. The error of those who deny this proposition springs from the
fact that they confound the present environment and the present
transitory historical era--which are known in history as the _bourgeois_
environment and period, just as the Middle Ages are called
_feudal_--with all history and all humanity, and therefore they fail to
see that the disastrous effects of modern, retrograde, social selection
are only confirmations of the Darwinian law of the "survival of the
_fittest_." Popular common sense has long recognized this influence of
the surroundings, as is shown by many a common proverb, and its
scientific explanation is to be found in the necessary biological
relations which exist between a given environment and the individuals
who are born, struggle and survive in that environment.
On the other hand, this truth constitutes an unanswerable argument in
favor of socialism. By freeing the environment from all the corruptions
with which our unbridled economic individualism pollutes it, socialism
will necessarily correct the ill effects of natural and social
selection. In a physically and morally wholesome environment, the
individuals best fitted to it, those who will therefore survive, will
be the physically and morally healthy.
In the struggle for existence the victory will then go to him who has
the greatest and most prolific physical, intellectual and moral
energies. The collectivist economic organization, by assuring to
everyone the conditions of existence, will and necessarily must, result
in the physical and moral improvement of the human race.
To this some one replies: Suppose we grant that socialism and Darwinian
selection may be reconciled, is it not obvious that the survival of the
fittest tends to establish an aristocratic gradation of individuals,
which is contrary to socialistic leveling?
I have already answered this objection in part by pointing out that
socialism will assure to all individuals--instead of as at present only
to a privileged few or to society's heroes--freedom to assert and
develop their own individualities. Then in truth the result of the
struggle for existence will be the survival of the best and this for the
very reason that in a wholesome environment the victory is won by the
healthiest individuals. Social Darwinism, then, as a continuation and
complement of natural (biological) Darwinism, will result in a selection
of the best.
To respond fully to this insistence upon an unlimited aristocratic
selection, I must call attention to another natural law which serves to
complete that rhythm of action and reaction which results in the
equilibrium of life.
To the Darwinian law of natural inequalities we must add another law
which is inseparable from it, and which Jacoby, following in the track
of the labors of Morel, Lucas, Galton, De Caudole, Ribot, Spencer,
Royer, Lombroso, and others, has clearly demonstrated and expounded.
This same Nature, which makes "choice" and aristocratic gradation a
condition of vital progress, afterwards restores the equilibrium by a
leveling and democratic law.
"From the infinite throng of humanity there emerge individuals, families
and races which tend to rise above the common level; painfully climbing
the steep heights they reach the summits of power, wealth, intelligence
and talent, and, having reached the goal, they are hurled down and
disappear in the abysses of insanity and degeneration. Death is the
great leveler; by destroying every one who rises above the common herd,
it democratizes humanity."[25]
Every one who attempts to create a monopoly of natural forces comes into
violent conflict with that supreme law of Nature which has given to all
living beings the use and disposal of the natural agents: air and light,
water and land.
Everybody who is too much above or too much below the average of
humanity--an average which rises with the flux of time, but is
absolutely fixed at any given moment of history--does not live and
disappears from the stage.
The idiot and the man of genius, the starving wretch and the
millionaire, the dwarf and the giant, are so many natural or social
monsters, and Nature inexorably blasts them with degeneracy or
sterility, no matter whether they be the product of the organic life, or
the effect of the social organization.
And so, all families possessing a monopoly of any kind--monopoly of
power, of wealth or of talent--are inevitably destined to become in
their latest offshoots imbeciles, sterile or suicides, and finally to
become extinct. Noble houses, dynasties of sovereigns, descendants of
millionaires--all follow the common law which, here again, serves to
confirm the inductions--in this sense, equalitarian--of science and of
socialism.
FOOTNOTES:
[20] One of the most characteristic processes of social dissolution is
_parasitism_. MASSART and VANDERVELDE, Parasitism, organic and social.
(English translation.) Swan, Sonnenschein & Co., London.
[21] BROCA, _Les sélections_ (§ 6. Les sélections sociales) in _Mémoires
d' anthropologie_, Paris, 1877, III., 205. LAPOUGE, _Les sélections
sociales_, in _Revue d' anthrop._, 1887, p. 519. LORIA, _Discourse su
Carlo Darwin_, SIENNE, 1882. VADALA, _Darwinismo naturale e Darwinismo
sociale_, Turin, 1883. BORDIER, _La vie des sociétés_, Paris, 1887.
SERGI, _Le degenerazione umane_, Milan, 1889, p. 158. BEBEL, Woman in
the past, present and future.
[22] MAX NORDAU, Conventional Lies of our Civilization. (English trans.)
Laird & Lee, Chicago, 1895.
[23] While this is shown by all official statistics, it is signally
shown by the facts collated by M. Pagliani, the present Director-General
of the Bureau of Health in the Interior Department, who has shown that
the bodies of the poor are more backward and less developed than those
of the rich, and that this difference, though but slightly manifest at
birth, becomes greater and greater in after life, _i. e._ as soon as the
influence of the economic conditions makes itself felt in all its
inexorable tyranny.
[24] TURATI, _Selezione servile_, in _Critica Sociale_, June 1, 1894.
SERGI, _Degenerazione umane_, Milan, 1889.
[25] JACOBY, _Etudes sur la sélection dans ses rapports avec l'hérédité
chez l'homme_, Paris, 1881, p. 606.
LOMBROSO, _L'uomo di genio_, 6th edition, Turin, 1894, has developed and
complemented this law. This law, so easily forgotten, is neglected by
RITCHIE (Darwinism and Politics. London. Sonnenschein, 1891.) in the
section called "Does the doctrine of Heredity support Aristocracy?"
V.
SOCIALISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS.
Not one of the three contradictions between socialism and Darwinism,
which Haeckel formulated, and which so many others have echoed since,
resists a candid and more accurate examination of the natural laws which
bear the name of Charles Darwin.
I add that not only is Darwinism not in contradiction with socialism,
but that it constitutes one of its fundamental scientific premises. As
Virchow justly remarked, socialism is nothing but a logical and vital
corollary, in part of Darwinism, in part of Spencerian evolution.
The theory of Darwin, whether we wish it or not, by demonstrating that
man is descended from the animals, has dealt a severe blow to the belief
in God as the creator of the universe and of man by a special _fiat_.
This, moreover, is why the most bitter opposition, and the only
opposition which still continues, to its scientific inductions, was made
and is made in the name of religion.
It is true that Darwin did not declare himself an atheist[26] and that
Spencer is not one; it is also true that, strictly speaking, the theory
of Darwin, like that of Spencer, can also be reconciled with the belief
in God, since it may be admitted that God created matter and force, and
that both afterward evolved into their successive forms in accordance
with the initial creative impulse. Nevertheless, it cannot be denied
that these theories, by rendering the idea of causality more and more
inflexible and universal, lead necessarily to the negation of God, since
there always remains this question: And God, who created him? And if it
is replied that God has always existed, the same reply may be flung back
by asserting that the universe has always existed. To use the phrase of
Ardigò, human thought is only able to conceive the chain which binds
effects to causes as terminating at a given point, purely
conventional.[27]
God, as Laplace said, is an hypothesis of which exact science has no
need; he is, according to Herzen, at the most an X, which represents not
the _unknowable_--as Spencer and Dubois Raymond contend--but all that
which humanity does not yet know. Therefore, it is a variable X which
decreases in direct ratio to the progress of the discoveries of science.
It is for this very reason that science and religion are in inverse
ratio to each other; the one diminishes and grows weaker in the same
proportion that the other increases and grows stronger in its struggle
against the unknown.[28]
And if this is one of the consequences of Darwinism, its influence on
the development of socialism is quite obvious.
The disappearance of faith in the hereafter, where the poor shall become
the elect of the Lord, and where the miseries of the "vale of tears"
will find an eternal compensation in paradise, gives greater strength to
the desire for some semblance of an "earthly paradise" here below even
for the unfortunate and the poor, who are the great majority.
Hartmann and Guyau[29] have shown that the evolution of religious
beliefs may be summarized thus: All religions include, with various
other matters, the promise of happiness; but the primitive religions
concede that this happiness will be realized during the life of the
individual himself, and the later religions, through an excess of
reaction, place its realization after death, outside the human world; in
the final phase, this realization of happiness is once more placed
within the field of human life, no longer in the ephemeral moment of the
individual existence, but indeed in the continuous evolution of all
mankind.
On this side, then, socialism is closely related to the religious
evolution, and tends to substitute itself for religion, since its aim is
for humanity to have its own "earthly paradise" here, without having to
wait for it in the _hereafter_, which, to say the least, is very
problematical.
Therefore, it has been very justly remarked that the socialist movement
has many traits in common with, for example, primitive Christianity,
notably that ardent faith in the ideal that has definitively deserted
the arid field of bourgeois skepticism, and some savants, not
socialists, such as Messrs. Wallace, de Lavaleye and the Roberty, etc.,
admit that it is entirely possible for socialism to replace by its
humanitarian faith the faith in the hereafter of the former religions.
More direct and potent than these relations (between socialism and faith
in a hereafter) are, however, the relations which exist between
socialism and the belief in God.
It is true that Marxian Socialism, since the Congress held at Erfurt
(1891), has rightly declared that religious beliefs are private
affairs[30] and that, therefore, the Socialist party combats religious
intolerance under all its forms, whether it be directed against
Catholics[31] or against Jews, as I have shown in an article against
_Anti-Semitism_.[32] But this breadth of superiority of view is, at
bottom, only a consequence of the confidence in final victory.
It is because socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs,
whether one regards them, with Sergi,[33] as pathological phenomena of
human psychology, or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, are
destined to perish by atrophy with the extension of even elementary
scientific culture. This is why socialism does not feel the necessity of
waging a special warfare against these religious beliefs which are
destined to disappear. It has assumed this attitude although it knows
that the absence or the impairment of the belief in God is one of the
most powerful factors for its extension, because the priests of all
religions have been, throughout all the phases of history, the most
potent allies of the ruling classes in keeping the masses pliant and
submissive under the yoke by means of the enchantment of religion, just
as the tamer keeps wild beasts submissive by the terrors of the cracks
of his whip.
And this is so true that the most clear-sighted conservatives, even
though they are atheists, regret that the religious sentiment--that
precious narcotic--is diminishing among the masses, because they see in
it, though their pharisaism does not permit them to say it openly, an
instrument of political domination.[34]
Unfortunately, or fortunately, the religious sentiment cannot be
re-established by royal decree. If it is disappearing, the blame for
this cannot be laid at the door of any particular individual, and there
is no need of a special propaganda against it, because its antidote
impregnates the air we breathe--saturated with the inductions of
experimental science--and religion no longer meets with conditions
favorable to its development as it did amid the superstitious ignorance
of past centuries.
I have thus shown the direct influence of modern science, science based
on observation and experiment,--which has substituted the idea of
natural causality for the ideas of miracle and divinity,--on the
extremely rapid development and on the experimental foundation of
contemporary socialism.
Democratic socialism does not look with unfriendly eyes upon "Catholic
Socialism" (the Christian Socialism of Southern Europe), since it has
nothing to fear from it.
Catholic socialism, in fact, aids in the propagation of socialist ideas,
especially in the rural districts where religious faith and practices
are still very vigorous, but it will not win and wear the palm of
victory _ad majorem dei gloriam_. As I have shown, there is a growing
antagonism between science and religion, and the socialist varnish
cannot preserve Catholicism. The "earthly" socialism has, moreover, a
much greater attractive power.
When the peasants shall have become familiar with the views of Catholic
socialism, it will be very easy for democratic socialism to rally them
under its own flag--they will, indeed, convert themselves.
Socialism occupies an analogous position with regard to republicanism.
Just as atheism is a private affair which concerns the individual
conscience, so a republican form of government is a private affair which
interests only a part of the bourgeoisie. Certainly, by the time that
socialism draws near to its day of triumph, atheism will have made
immense progress, and a republican form of government will have been
established in many countries which to-day submit to a monarchical
regime. But it is not socialism which develops atheism, any more than it
is socialism which will establish republicanism. Atheism is a product of
the theories of Darwin and Spencer in the present bourgeois
civilization, and republicanism has been and will be, in the various
countries, the work of a portion of the capitalist bourgeoisie, as was
recently said in some of the conservative newspapers of Milan (_Corriere
della sera_ and _Idea liberale_), when "the monarchy shall no longer
serve the interests of the country," that is to say of the class in
power.
The evolution from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy and to
republicanism is an obvious historical law; in the present phase of
civilization the only difference between the two latter is in the
elective or hereditary character of the head of the State. In the
various countries of Europe, the bourgeoisie themselves Hill demand the
transition from monarchy to republicanism, in order to put off as long
as possible the triumph of socialism. In Italy as in France, in England
as in Spain, we see only too many republicans or "radicals" whose
attitude with regard to social questions is more bourgeois and more
conservative than that of the intelligent conservatives. At
Montecitorio, for example, there is Imbriani whose opinions on religious
and social matters are more conservative than those of M. di Rudini.
Imbriani, whose personality is moreover very attractive, has never
attacked the priests or monks--this man who attacks the entire universe
and very often with good reason, although without much success on
account of mistaken methods--and he was the only one to oppose even the
consideration of a law proposed by the _Député_ Ferrari, which increased
the tax on estates inherited by collateral heirs!
Socialism then has no more interest in preaching republicanism than it
has in preaching atheism. To each his role (or task), is the law of
division of labor. The struggle for atheism is the business of science;
the establishment of republicanism in the various countries of Europe
has been and will be the work of the bourgeoisie themselves--whether
they be conservative or radical. All this constitutes the historical
progress toward socialism, and individuals are powerless to prevent or
delay the succession of the phases of the moral, political and social
evolution.
FOOTNOTES:
[26] Darwin never made a declaration of atheism, but that was in fact
his way of looking at the problem ("_sa manière de voir_.").
While Haeckel, concerned solely with triumphing over the opposition,
said at the Congress of Eisenach (1882) that Darwin was not an atheist,
Büchner, on the contrary, published shortly afterward a letter which
Darwin had written him, and in which he avowed that "since the age of
forty years, his scientific studies had led him to atheism."
(See also, "Charles Darwin and Karl Marx: A Comparison," by Ed. Aveling.
Published by the Twentieth Century Press, London.--Translator.)
In the same way, John Stuart Mill never declared himself a Socialist,
but that, nevertheless, in opinion he was one, is made evident by his
autobiography and his posthumous fragments on Socialism. (See "The
Socialism of John Stuart Mill." Humboldt Pub. Co., New York.--Tr.)
[27] ARDIGÒ, _La Formazione naturale_, Vol. II. of his _Opere
filologiche_, and Vol. VI., _La Ragione_, Padone, 1894.
[28] Guyau, _L'Irréligion de l'avenir_. Paris. 1887.
[29] The dominant factor, nevertheless, in religious beliefs, is the
hereditary or traditional _sentimental_ factor; this it is which always
renders them respectable when they are professed in good faith, and
often makes them even appeal to our sympathies,--and this is precisely
because of the ingenuous or refined sensibility of the persons in whom
religious faith is the most vital and sincere.
[30] NITTI, _Le Socialisme catholique_, Paris, 1894, p. 27 and 393.
[31] Its usual form in America.--Translator.
[32] _Nuova Rassegna_, August, 1894.
[33] SERGI, _L'origine dei fenomeni psichici e loro significazione
biologica_, Milan, 1885, p. 334, _et seq._
[34] DURKHEIM, _De la division du travail social_. Paris. 1893. As
regards the pretended influence of religion on personal morality I have
shown how very slight a foundation there was for this opinion in my
studies on criminal psychology, and more particularly in _Omicidio nell'
antropologia criminale_.
VI.
THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SPECIES.
It can also be shown that scientific socialism proceeds directly from
Darwinism by an examination of the different modes of conceiving of the
individual in relation to the species.
The eighteenth century closed with the exclusive glorification of the
individual, of the _man_--as an entity in himself. In the works of
Rousseau this was only a beneficent, though exaggerated re-action
against the political and sacerdotal tyranny of the Middle Ages.
This individualism led directly to that artificiality in politics, which
I will consider a little further on in studying the relations between
the theory of evolution and socialism, and which is common to the ruling
classes under the bourgeois regime and to the individualistic
anarchists,--since both alike imagine that the social organization can
be changed in a day by the magical effect of a bomb,--more or less
murderous.
Modern biology has radically changed this conception of the _individual_
and it has demonstrated, in the domain of biology as in that of
sociology, that the individual is himself only an aggregation of more
simple living elements, and likewise that the individual in himself, the
_Selbstwesen_ of the Germans, does not exist in independent isolation,
but only as a member of a society (_Gliedwesen_).
Every living object is an association, a collectivity.
The monad itself, the living cell, the irreducible expression of
biological individuality, is also an aggregate of various parts
(nucleus, _nucléole_, protoplasm), and each one of them in its turn is
an aggregate of molecules which are aggregates of atoms.
The atom does not exist alone, as an individual; the atom is invisible
and impalpable and it does not live.
And the complexity of the aggregation, the federation of the parts
constantly increases with the ascent in the zoological series from
protozoa to Man.
Unifying, Jacobin artificiality corresponds to the metaphysics of
individualism, just as the conception of national and international
federalism corresponds to the scientific character of modern socialism.
The organism of a mammal is simply a federation of tissues, organs and
anatomical machinery; the organism of a society can consist of nothing
but a federation of communes, provinces and regions; the organism of
humanity can be nothing but a federation of nations.
If it is absurd to conceive of a mammal whose head should have to move
in the same fashion as the extremities and all of whose extremities
would have to perform the same motions simultaneously, there is no less
absurdity in a political and administrative organization in which the
extreme northern province or the mountainous province, for instance,
have to have the same bureaucratic machinery, the same body of laws, the
same methods, etc., as the extreme southern province or the province
made up of plains, solely through the passion for symmetrical
uniformity, that pathological expression of unity.
If we disregard those considerations of a political order which make it
possible to conclude, as I have done elsewhere,[35] that the only
possible organization for Italy, as for every other country, appeared to
me to be that of an administrative federalism combined with political
unity, we can regard it as manifest, that at the close of the nineteenth
century the individual, as an independent entity, is dethroned alike in
biology and sociology.
The individual exists, but only in so far as he forms a part of a social
aggregate.
Robinson Crusoe--that perfect type of individualism--can not possibly be
aught but a legend or a pathological specimen.
The species--that is to say, the social aggregate--is the great, the
living and eternal reality of life, as has been demonstrated by
Darwinism and confirmed by all the inductive sciences from astronomy to
sociology.
At the close of the eighteenth century Rousseau thought that the
individual alone existed, and that society was an artificial product of
the "social contract" and, as he attributed (just as Aristotle had done
in the case of slavery) a permanent human character to the transitory
manifestations of the period, such as the rottenness of the regime under
which he lived, he further thought that Society was the cause of all
evils, and that individuals are all born good and equal. At the end of
the nineteenth century, on the contrary, all the inductive sciences
agree in recognizing that society, the social aggregate, is a fact of
Nature, inseparable from life, in the vegetable species as in the animal
species, from the lowest "animal colonies" of zoophytes up to societies
of mammals (herbivora), and to human society.[36]
All that is best in the individual, he owes to the social life, although
every phase of evolution is marked at its decline by pathological
conditions of social decay--essentially transitory, however--which
inevitably precede a new cycle of social renovation.
The individual, as such, if he could live, would fulfill only one of the
two fundamental requirements (needs) of existence: alimentation--that is
to say, the selfish preservation of his own organism, by means of that
primordial and fundamental function, which Aristotle designated by the
name of _ctesi_--the conquest of food.
But all individuals have to live in society because a second fundamental
requirement of life imposes itself upon the individual, _viz._, the
reproduction of beings like himself for the preservation of the species.
It is this life of relationship and reproduction (sexual and social)
which gives birth to the moral or social sense, which enables the
individual not only _to be, but to co-exist with his fellows_.
It may be said that these two fundamental instincts of life--bread and
love--by their functioning maintain a social equilibrium in the life of
animals, and especially in Man.
It is love which causes, in the great majority of men, the principal
physiological and psychical expenditure of the forces accumulated in
larger or smaller quantities by the consumption of daily bread, and
which the daily labor has not absorbed or which parasitic inaction has
left intact.
Even more--love is the only pleasure which truly has a universal and
equalitarian character. The people have named it "the paradise of the
poor;" and religions have always bidden them to enjoy it without
limits--"be fruitful and multiply"--because the erotic exhaustion which
results from it, especially in males, diminishes or hides beneath the
pall of forgetfulness the tortures of hunger and servile labor, and
permanently enervates the energy of the individual; and to this extent
it performs a function useful to the ruling class.
But indissolubly linked to this effect of the sexual instinct there is
an other, the increase of the population. Hence it happens that the
desire to eternize a given social order is thwarted and defeated by the
pressure of this population which in our epoch assumes the
characteristic form of the _proletariat_,--and the social evolution
continues its inexorable and inevitable forward march.
It follows from our discussion that while at the end of the eighteenth
century it was thought that Society was made for the individual--and
from that the deduction could be made that millions of individuals could
and ought to toil and suffer for the exclusive advantage of a few
individuals--at the end of our century the inductive sciences have
demonstrated, just the opposite, that it is the individual who lives for
the species and that the latter is the only eternal reality of life.
There we have the starting-point of the sociological or socialist
tendency of modern scientific thought in the face of the exaggerated
individualism inherited from the last century.
Modern biology also demonstrates that it is necessary to avoid the
opposite excess--into which certain schools of utopian socialism and of
communism fall--the excess of regarding only the interests of Society
and altogether neglecting the individual. An other biological law shows
us, in fact, that the existence of the aggregation is the resultant of
the life of all the individuals, just as the existence of an individual
is the resultant of the life of its constituent cells.
We have demonstrated that the socialism which characterizes the end of
the nineteenth century and which will illumine the dawn of the coming
century is in perfect harmony with the entire current of modern thought.
This harmony manifests itself even on the fundamental question of the
predominance given to the vital necessity of collective or social
solidarity over the dogmatic exaggerations of individualism, and if the
latter at the close of the last century was the outward sign of a potent
and fruitful awakening, it inevitably leads, through the pathological
manifestations of unbridled competition, to the "libertarian" explosions
of anarchism which preaches "individual action," and which is entirely
oblivious of human and social solidarity.
We now come to the last point of contact and essential oneness that
there is between Darwinism and socialism.
FOOTNOTES:
[35] _Sociologie criminelle_, French trans., Paris, 1892.
[36] I cannot consider here the recent attempt at eclecticism made by M.
Fouillée and others. M. Fouillée wishes to oppose, or at least to add,
to the _naturalistic_ conception of society the consensual or
_contractual_ conception. Evidently, since no theory is absolutely
false, there is even in this consensual theory a share of truth, and the
liberty of emigration may be an instance of it--as long as this liberty
is compatible with the economic interests of the class in power. But,
obviously, this consent, which does not exist at the birth of each
individual into such or such a society (and this fact of birth is the
most decisive and tyrannical factor in life) also has very little to do
with the development of his aptitudes and tendencies, dominated as they
are by the iron law of the economic and political organization in which
he is an atom.
VIII.
THE "STRUGGLE FOR LIFE" AND THE "CLASS-STRUGGLE."
Darwinism has demonstrated that the entire mechanism of animal evolution
may be reduced to the struggle for existence between individuals of the
same species on the one hand, and between each species and the whole
world of living beings.
In the same way all the machinery of social evolution has been reduced
by Marxian socialism to the law of the _Struggle between Classes_. This
theory not only gives us the secret motive-power and the only scientific
explanation of the history of mankind; it also furnishes the ideal and
rigid standard of discipline for political socialism and thus enables it
to avoid all the elastic, vaporous, inconclusive uncertainties of
sentimental socialism.
The only scientific explanation of the history of animal life is to be
found in the grand Darwinian law of the _struggle for existence_; it
alone enables us to determine the natural causes of the appearance,
development and disappearance of vegetable and animal species from
paleontological times down to our own day. In the same way the only
explanation of the history of human life is to be found in the grand
Marxian law of the _struggle between classes_; thanks to it the annals
of primitive, barbarous and civilized humanity cease to be a capricious
and superficial kaleidoscopic arrangement of individual episodes in
order to become a grand and inevitable drama, determined--whether the
actors realize it or not, in its smallest internal details as well as in
its catastrophes--by the _economic conditions_, which form the
indispensable, physical basis of life and by the _struggle between the
classes_ to obtain and keep control of the economic forces, upon which
all the others--political, juridical and moral--necessarily depend.
I will have occasion to speak more at length--in studying the relations
between sociology and socialism--of this grand conception, which is the
imperishable glory of Marx and which assures him in sociology the place
which Darwin occupies in biology and Spencer in philosophy.[37]
For the moment it suffices for me to point out this new point of contact
between Socialism and Darwinism. The expression, _Class-Struggle_, so
repugnant when first heard or seen (and I confess that it produced this
impression on me when I had not yet grasped the scientific
import of the Marxian theory), furnishes us, if it be correctly
understood, the primary law of human history and, therefore, it alone
can give us the certain index of the advent of the new phase of
evolution which Socialism foresees and which it strives to hasten.
To assert the existence of the class-struggle is equivalent to saying
that human society, like all other living organisms, is not a
homogeneous whole, the sum of a greater or smaller number of
individuals; it is, on the contrary, a living organism which is made up
of diverse parts, and their differentiation constantly increases in
direct ratio to the degree of social evolution attained.
Just as a protozoon is almost wholly composed of albuminoid gelatine,
while a mammal is composed of tissues widely varying in kind, in the
same way a tribe of primitive savages, without a chief, is composed
simply of a few families and the aggregation is the result of mere
material propinquity, while a civilized society of the historical or
contemporaneous period is made up of social classes which differ, the
one from the other, either through the physio-psychical constitutions of
their component members, or through the whole of their customs and
tendencies, and their personal, family or social life.
These different classes may be rigorously separated. In ancient India
they range from the _brahman_ to the _sudra_: in the Europe of the
Middle Ages, from the Emperor and the Pope to the feudatory and the
vassal, down to the artisan, and an individual cannot pass from one
class into another, as his social condition is determined solely by the
hazard of birth. Classes may lose their legal character, as happened in
Europe and America after the French Revolution, and exceptionally there
may be an instance of an individual passing from one class into another,
analogously to the endosmose and exosmose of molecules, or, to use the
phrase of M. Dumont, by a sort of "social capillarity." But, in any
case, these different classes exist as an assured reality and they
resist every juridical attempt at leveling as long as the fundamental
reason for their differentiation remains.
It is Karl Marx who, better than any one else, has proved the truth of
this theory by the mass of sociological observations which he has drawn
from societies under the most diverse economic conditions.
The names (of the classes), the circumstances and phenomena of their
hostile contact and conflict may vary with the varying phases of social
evolution, but the tragic essence of history always appears in the
antagonism between those who hold the monopoly of the means of
production--and these are few--and those who have been robbed
(expropriated) of them--and these are the great majority.
_Warriors_ and _shepherds_ in the primitive societies, as soon as first,
family and then individual ownership of land has superseded the
primitive collectivism; _patricians_ and _plebeians_--_feudatories_ and
_vassals_--_nobles_ and _common people_--_bourgeoisie_ and
_proletariat_; these are so many manifestations of one and the same
fact--the monopoly of wealth on one side, and productive labor on the
other.
Now, the great importance of the Marxian law--the struggle between
classes--consists principally in the fact that it indicates with great
exactness _just what_ is in truth the vital point of the social question
and _by what method_ its solution may be reached.
As long as no one had shown on positive evidence the economic basis of
the political, juridical and moral life, the aspirations of the great
majority for the amelioration of social conditions aimed vaguely at the
demand and the partial conquest of some _accessory_ instrumentality,
such as freedom of worship, political suffrage, public education, etc.
And certainly, I have no desire to deny the great utility of these
conquests.
But the _sancta sanctorum_ always remained impenetrable to the eyes of
the masses, and as economic power continued to be the privilege of a
few, all the conquests and all the concessions had no real basis,
separated, as they were, from the solid and fecund foundation which
alone can give life and abiding power.
Now, that Socialism has shown--even before Marx, but never before with
so much scientific precision--that individual ownership, private
property in land and the means of production is the vital point of the
question--the problem is formulated in exact terms in the consciousness
of contemporaneous humanity.
What method will it be necessary to employ in order to abolish this
monopoly of economic power, and the mass of suffering and ills, of hate
and injustice which flow from it?
The method of the _Class Struggle_, based on the scientifically proven
fact that every class tends to preserve and increase its acquired
advantages and privileges, teaches the class deprived of economic power
that in order to succeed in conquering it, the struggle (we will
consider, further on, the forms of this struggle) must be a struggle of
class against class, and not of individual against individual.
Hatred toward such or such an individual--even if it result in his
death--does not advance us a single step toward the solution of the
problem; it rather retards its solution, because it provokes a reaction
in the general feeling against personal violence and it violates the
principle of _respect for the human person_ which socialism proclaims
most emphatically for the benefit of all and against all opponents. The
solution of the problem does not become easier because it is recognized
that the present abnormal condition, which is becoming more and more
acute--misery for the masses and pleasure for a few--is not the
consequence of the bad intentions of such or such an individual.
Viewed from this side also socialism is, in fact, in perfect harmony
with modern science, which denies the free will of man and sees in human
activity, individual and collective, a necessary effect whose
determining causes are the conditions of race and environment, acting
concurrently.[38]
Crime, suicide, insanity, misery are not the fruits of free will, of
individual faults, as metaphysical spiritualism believes, and neither is
it an effect of free will, a fault of the individual capitalist if the
workingman is badly paid, if he is without work, if he is poor and
miserable.
All social phenomena are the necessary resultants of the historical
conditions and of the environment. In the modern world the facility and
the greater frequency of communication and relations of every kind
between all parts of the earth have also increased the dependence of
every fact--economic, political, juridical, ethical, artistic or
scientific--upon the most remote and apparently unrelated conditions of
the life of the great world.
The present organization of private property with no restrictions upon
the right of inheritance by descent or upon personal accumulation; the
ever increasing and more perfect application of scientific discoveries
to the facilitation of human labor--the labor of adapting the materials
furnished by Nature to human needs; the telegraph and the steam-engine,
the constantly overflowing torrent of human migrations--all these bind,
with invisible but infrangible threads, the existence of a family of
peasants, work-people or petty trades-people to the life of the whole
world. And the harvest of coffee, cotton or wheat in the most distant
countries makes its effects felt in all parts of the civilized world,
just as the decrease or increase of the sun-spots are phenomena
co-incident with the periodical agricultural crises and have a direct
influence on the destinies of millions of men.
This magnificent scientific conception of the "unity of physical
forces," to use the expression of P. Secchi, or of universal solidarity
is far, indeed, from that infantile conception which finds the causes of
human phenomena in the free wills of individuals.
If a socialist were to attempt, even for philanthropic purposes, to
establish a factory in order to give work to the unemployed, and if he
were to produce articles out of fashion or for which there was no
general demand, he would soon become bankrupt in spite of his
philanthropic intentions by an inevitable effect of inexorable economic
laws.
Or, again, if a socialist should give the laborers in his establishment
wages two or three times as high as the current rate of wages, he would
evidently have the same fate, since he would be dominated by the same
economic laws, and he would have to sell his commodities at a loss or
keep them unsold in his warehouses, because his prices for the same
qualities of goods would be above the market price.
He would be declared a bankrupt and the only consolation the world would
offer him would be to call him an _honest man_ (_brave homme_); and in
the present phase of "mercantile ethics" we know what this expression
means.[39]
Therefore, without regard to the personal relations, more or less
cordial, between capitalists and workingmen, their respective economic
situations are inexorably determined by the present (industrial)
organization, in accordance with the law of surplus-labor which enabled
Marx to explain and demonstrate irrefutably how the capitalist is able
to accumulate wealth without working,--because the laborer produces in
his day's work an amount of wealth exceeding in value the wage he
receives, and this surplus-product forms the gratuitous (unearned)
profit of the capitalist. Even if we deduct from the total profits his
pay for technical and administrative superintendence, this unearned
surplus-product still remains.
Land, abandoned to the sun and the rain, does not, of itself, produce
either wheat or wine. Minerals do not come forth, unaided, from the
bowels of the earth. A bag of dollars shut up in a safe does not produce
dollars, as a cow produces calves.
The production of wealth results only from a transformation of
(Nature-given) materials effected by human labor. And it is only because
the peasant tills the land, because the miner extracts minerals, because
the laborer sets machinery in motion, because the chemist makes
experiments in his laboratory, because the engineer invents machinery,
etc., that the capitalist or the landlord--though the wealth inherited
from his father may have cost him no labor, and though he may practise
_absenteeism_ and thus make no personal exertion--is able every year to
enjoy riches that others have produced for him, in exchange for wretched
lodgings and inadequate nourishment--while the workers are, in most
cases, poisoned by the miasmatic vapors from rivers or marshes, by gas
in mines and by dust in factories--in brief, in exchange for wages which
are always inadequate, to assure the workers conditions of existence
worthy of human creatures.
Even under a system of absolute _métayage_ (share-farming)--which has
been called a form of practical socialism--we always have this question
left unanswered. By what miracle does the landlord, who does not work,
get his barns and houses filled with wheat and oil and wine in
sufficient quantities to enable him to live in ample comfort, while the
_métayer_ (the tenant on shares) is obliged to work every day, in order
to wrest from the earth enough to support himself and his family in
wretchedness?
And the system of _métayage_ does at least give the tenant the
tranquillizing assurance that he will reach the end of the year without
experiencing all the horrors of enforced idleness to which the ordinary
day or wage laborers are condemned in both city and country. But, in
substance, the whole problem in its entirety remains unsolved (even
under this system), and there is always one man who lives in comfort,
without working, because ten others live poorly by working.[40]
This is the way the system of private property works, and these are the
consequences it produces, without any regard to the wills or wishes of
individuals.
Therefore, every attempt made against such or such an individual is
condemned to remain barren of results; it is the ruling tendency of
Society, the objective point which must be changed, it is private
ownership which must be abolished, not by a _partition_ ("dividing up"),
which would result in the most extreme and pernicious form of private
ownership, since by the end of a year the persistence of the old
individualist principle would restore the _status quo ante_, and all the
advantage would accrue solely to the most crafty and the least
scrupulous.
Our aim must be the abolition of private ownership and the establishment
of collective and social ownership in land and the means of production.
This substitution cannot be the subject for a decree,--though the
intention to effect it by a decree is attributed to us--but it is in
course of accomplishment under our eyes, every day, from hour to hour,
directly or indirectly.
Directly, because civilization shows us the continuous substitution of
public ownership and social functions for private ownership and
individual functions. Roads, postal systems, railways, museums, city
lighting-plants, water-plants, schools, etc., which were only a few
years since private properties and functions, have become social
properties and functions. And it would be absurd to imagine that this
direct process of socialization is destined to come to a halt to-day,
instead of becoming progressively more and more marked, in accordance
with every tendency of our modern life.
Indirectly, since it is the outcome toward which the economic
individualism of the bourgeoisie tends. The bourgeois class, which takes
its name from the dwellers in the _bourgs_ (towns) which the feudal
chateau and the Church--symbols of the class then dominant--protected,
is the result of fecund labor intelligently directed toward its goal and
of historical conditions which have changed the economic structure and
tendency of the world (the discovery of America, for instance). This
class achieved its revolution in the end of the eighteenth century, and
conquered the political power. In the history of the civilized world, it
has inscribed a page in letters of gold by those wondrous developments
in the lives of nations that are truly epic in character, and by its
marvelous applications of science to industry ... but it is now
traversing the downward branch of the parabola, and symptoms are
appearing which announce to us--and offer proof of their
announcement--its dissolution; without its disappearance, moreover, the
advent and establishment of a new social phase would be impossible.
Economic individualism carried out to its ultimate logical consequences,
necessarily causes the progressive multiplication of property in hands
of a constantly diminishing number of persons. _Milliardaire_
(billionaire) is a new word, which is characteristic of the nineteenth
century, and this new word serves to express and emphasize that
phenomenon--in which Henry George saw the historic law of
individualism--of the rich becoming richer while the poor become
poorer.[41]
Now it is evident that the smaller is the number of those who hold
possession of the land and the means of production the easier is their
expropriation--with or without indemnification--for the benefit of a
single proprietor which is and can be Society alone.
Land is the physical basis of the social organism. It is then absurd for
it to belong to a few and not to the whole social collectivity; it would
not be any more absurd for the air we breathe to be the monopoly of a
few _airlords_.
That (the socialization of the land and the means of production) is
truly the supreme goal of socialism, but evidently it can not be reached
by attacking such or such a landlord, or such or such a capitalist. The
individualist mode of conflict is destined to remain barren of results,
or, to say the least, it requires a terribly extravagant expenditure of
strength and efforts to obtain merely partial or provisional results.
And so those politicians, whose conception of statesmanship is a career
of daily, trivial protests, who see nothing in politics but a struggle
between individuals--and those tactics no longer produce any effect
either on the public or on legislative assemblies, because they have at
last become wonted to them--produce just about as much effect as would
fantastic champions of hygiene who should attempt to render a marsh
inhabitable by killing the mosquitoes one by one with shots from a
revolver, instead of adopting as their method and their goal the
draining of the pestilential marsh.
No individual conflicts, no personal violence, but a Class Struggle. It
is necessary to make the immense army of workers of all trades and of
all professions conscious of these fundamental truths. It is necessary
to show them that their class interests are in opposition to the
interests of the class who possess the economic power, and that it is by
class-conscious organization that they will conquer this economic power
through the instrumentality of the other public powers that modern
civilization has assured to free peoples. It may, nevertheless, be
foreseen that, in every country, the ruling class, before yielding, will
abridge or destroy even these public liberties which were without danger
for them when they were in the hands of laborers not organized into a
class-conscious party, but forming the rearguard of other purely
political parties, as radical on secondary questions as they are
profoundly conservative on the fundamental question of the economic
organization of property.
A Class-Struggle, therefore a struggle of class against class; and a
struggle (this is understood), by the methods of which I will soon speak
in discussing the four modes of social transformation:
evolution--revolution--rebellion--individual violence. But a
Class-Struggle in the Darwinian sense, which renews in the history of
Man the magnificent drama of the struggle for life between species,
instead of degrading us to the savage and meaningless brute strife of
individual with individual.
We can stop here. The examination of the relations between Darwinism and
socialism might lead us much further, but it would go on constantly
eliminating the pretended contradiction between the two currents of
modern scientific thought, and it would, on the contrary, confirm the
essential, natural and indissoluble harmony that there is between them.
Thus the penetrating view of Virchow is confirmed by that of Leopold
Jacoby.
"The same year in which appeared Darwin's book (1859) and coming from a
quite different direction, an identical impulse was given to a very
important development of social science by a work which long passed
unnoticed, and which bore the title: _Critique de l'économie politique_
by KARL MARX--it was the forerunner of _Capital_.
"What Darwin's book on the _Origin of Species_ is on the subject of the
genesis and evolution of organic life from non-sentient nature up to
Man, the work of Marx is on the subject of the genesis and evolution of
association among human beings, of States and the social forms of
humanity."[42]
And this is why Germany, which has been the most fruitful field for the
development of the Darwinian theories, is also the most fruitful field
for the intelligent, systematic propaganda of socialist ideas.
And it is precisely for this reason that in Berlin, in the windows of
the book-stores of the socialist propaganda, the works of Charles Darwin
occupy the place of honor beside those of Karl Marx.[43]
FOOTNOTES:
[37] LARFARGUE, _Le Matérialisme économique_, in _Ere nouvelle_, 1893.
[38] Avoiding both of the mutually exclusive theses that civilization is
a consequence of race or a product of the environment, I have always
maintained--by my theory of the natural factors in criminality--that it
is the resultant of the combined action of the race and the environment.
Among the recent works which support the thesis of the exclusive or
predominant influence of race, I must mention LE BON, _Les lois
psychologiques de l'évolution des peuples_, Paris, 1894. This work is,
however, very superficial. I refer the reader for a more thorough
examination of these two theses to Chap. IV of my book _Omicidio nell'
anthropologia criminale_, Turin, 1894.
[39] I use the expression "mercantile ethics," which LETOURNEAU used in
his book on the Evolution of Ethics (_L'évolution de la morale_), Paris,
1887. In his scientific study of the facts relating to ethics,
Letourneau has distinguished four phases: _animal_ ethics--_savage_
ethics--_barbarous_ ethics--_mercantile_ (or bourgeois) ethics; these
phases will be followed by a higher phase of ethics which Malon has
called _social_ ethics.
[40] Some persons, still imbued with political (Jacobin) artificiality,
think that in order to solve the social question it will be necessary to
generalize the system of _métayage_. They imagine, then--though they do
not say so--a royal or presidential decree: "Art. 1. Let all men become
métayers!"
And it does not occur to them that if métayage, which was the rule, has
become a less and less frequent exception, this must be the necessary
result of natural causes.
The cause of the transformation is to be found in the fact that
_métayage_ represents (is a form typical of) petty agricultural
industry, and that it is unable to compete with modern agricultural
industry organized on a large scale and well equipped with machinery,
just as handicrafts have not been able to endure competition with modern
manufacturing industry. It is true that there still are to-day some
handicraft industries in a few villages, but these are rudimentary
organs which merely represent an anterior phase (of production), and
which no longer have any important function in the economic world. They
are, like the rudimentary organs of the higher species of animals,
according to the theory of Darwin, permanent witnesses of past epochs.
The same Darwinian and economic law applies to _métayage_, which is also
evidently destined to the same fate as handicrafts.
_Conf._ the excellent propagandist pamphlet of BIEL, _Ai contadini
toscani_, Colle d' Elsa, 1894.
[41] HENRY GEORGE, Progress and Poverty, New York, 1898. Doubleday &
McClure Co.
[42] L. JACOBY, _L'Idea dell' evoluzione_, in _Bibliotheca dell'
economista_, série III, vol. IX, 2d part, p. 69.
[43] At the death of Darwin the _Sozialdemokrat_ of the 27th of April,
1882, wrote: "The proletariat who are struggling for their emancipation
will ever honor the memory of Charles Darwin."
Conf. LAFARGUE, _La théorie darwinienne_.
I am well aware that in these last years, perhaps in consequence of the
relations between Darwinism and socialism, consideration has again been
given to the objections to the theory of Darwin, made by Voegeli, and
more recently by Weismann, on the hereditary transmissibility of
acquired characters. See SPENCER, _The Inadequacy of Natural Selection_,
Paris, 1894.--VIRCHOW, _Transformisme et descendance_, Berlin, 1893. But
all this merely concerns such or such a detail of Darwinism, while the
fundamental theory of metamorphic organic development remains
impregnable.
PART SECOND.
EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM.
The theory of universal evolution which--apart from such or such a more
or less disputable detail--is truly characteristic of the vital tendency
of modern scientific thought, has also been made to appear in absolute
contradiction with the theories and the practical ideals of socialism.
In this case the fallacy is obvious.
If socialism is understood as that vague complex of sentimental
aspirations so often crystallized into the artificial utopian creations
of a new human world to be substituted by some sort of magic in a single
day for the old world in which we live; then it is quite true that the
scientific theory of evolution condemns the presumptions and the
illusions of artificial or utopian political theories, which, whether
they are reactionary or revolutionary, are always romantic, or in the
words of the American Senator Ingalls, are "iridescent dreams."
But, unfortunately for our adversaries, contemporary socialism is an
entirely different thing from the socialism which preceded the work of
Marx. Apart from the same sentiment of protest against present
injustices and the same aspirations toward a better future, there is
nothing in common between these two socialisms, neither in their logical
structure nor in their deductions, unless it be the clear vision, which
in modern socialism becomes a mathematically exact prediction (thanks to
the theories of evolution) of the final social organization--based on
the collective ownership of the land and the means of production.
These are the conclusions to which we are led by the evidence of the
facts--facts verified by a scientific examination of the three principal
contradictions which our opponents have sought to set up between
socialism and scientific evolution.
From this point it is impossible not to see the direct causal connection
between Marxian socialism and scientific evolution, since it must be
recognized that the former is simply the logical consequence of the
application of the evolutionary theory to the domain of economics.
IX.
THE ORTHODOX THESIS AND THE SOCIALIST THESIS IN THE LIGHT OF THE
EVOLUTION THEORY.
What, in substance, is the message of socialism? That the present
economic world can not be immutable and eternal, that it merely
represents a transitory phase of social evolution and that an ulterior
phase, a differently organized world, is destined to succeed it.
That this new organization must be collectivist or socialist--and no
longer individualist--results, as an ultimate and certain conclusion,
from the examination we have made of Darwinism and socialism.
I must now demonstrate that this fundamental affirmation of
socialism--leaving out of consideration for the moment all the details
of that future organization, of which I will speak further on--is in
perfect harmony with the experiential theory of evolutionism.
Upon what point are orthodox political economy and socialism in absolute
conflict? Political economy has held and holds that the economic laws
governing the production and distribution of wealth which it has
established are _natural laws_ ... not in the sense that they are laws
naturally determined by the conditions of the social organism (which
would be correct), but that they are _absolute laws_, that is to say
that they apply to humanity at all times and in all places, and,
consequently, that they are immutable in their principal points, though
they may be subject to modification in details.[44]
Scientific socialism holds, on the contrary, that the laws established
by classical political economy, since the time of Adam Smith, are laws
peculiar to the present period in the history of civilized humanity, and
that they are, consequently, laws essentially _relative_ to the period
of their analysis and discovery, and that just as they no longer fit the
facts when the attempt is made to extend their application to past
historical epochs and, still more, to pre-historic and ante-historic
times, so it is absurd to attempt to apply them to the future and thus
vainly try to petrify and perpetuate present social forms.
Of these two fundamental theses, the orthodox thesis and the socialist
thesis, which is the one which best agrees with the scientific theory of
universal evolution?
The answer can not be doubtful.[45]
The theory of evolution, of which Herbert Spencer was the true creator,
by applying to sociology the tendency to relativism which the historical
school had followed in its studies in law and political economy (even
then heterodox on more than one point), has shown that everything
changes; that the present phase--of the facts in astronomy, geology,
biology and sociology--is only the resultant of thousands on thousands
of incessant, inevitable, natural transformations; that the present
differs from the past and that the future will certainly be different
from the present.
Spencerism has done nothing but to collate a vast amount of scientific
evidence, from all branches of human knowledge, in support of these two
abstract thoughts of Leibnitz and Hegel: "The present is the child of
the past, but it is the parent of the future," and "Nothing is;
everything is becoming." This demonstration had already been made in the
case of geology by Lyell who substituted for the traditional
catastrophic theory of cataclysmic changes, the scientific theory of the
gradual and continuous transformation of the earth.[46]
It is true that, notwithstanding his encyclopædic knowledge, Herbert
Spencer has not made a really profound study of political economy, or
that at least he has not furnished us the evidence of the _facts_ to
support his assertions in this field as he has done in the natural
sciences. This does not alter the fact, however, that socialism is,
after all, in its fundamental conception only the logical application of
the scientific theory of natural evolution to economic phenomena.
It was Karl Marx who, in 1859 in his _Critique de l'économie politique_,
and even before then, in 1847, in the famous _Manifesto_ written in
collaboration with Engels, nearly ten years before Spencer's _First
Principles_, and finally in _Capital_ (1867) supplemented, or rather
completed, in the social domain, the scientific revolution begun by
Darwin and Spencer.
The old metaphysics conceived of ethics--law--economics--as a finished
compilation of absolute and eternal laws. This is the conception of
Plato. It takes into consideration only historical times and it has, as
an instrument of research, only the fantastic logic of the school-men.
The generations which preceded us, have all been imbued with this notion
of the absoluteness of natural laws, the conflicting laws of a dual
universe of matter and spirit. Modern science, on the contrary, starts
from the magnificent synthetic conception of monism, that is to say, of
a single substance underlying all phenomena--matter and force being
recognized as inseparable and indestructible, continuously evolving in a
succession of forms--forms relative to their respective times and
places. It has radically changed the direction of modern thought and
directed it toward the grand idea of universal evolution.[47]
Ethics, law and politics are mere superstructures, effects of the
economic structure; they vary with its variations, from one parallel (of
latitude or longitude) to another, and from one century to another.
This is the great discovery which the genius of Karl Marx has expounded
in his _Critique de l'économie politique_. I will examine further on the
question as to what this sole source or basis of the varying economic
conditions is, but the important point now is to emphasize their
constant variability, from the pre-historic ages down to historical
times and to the different periods of the latter.
Moral codes, religious creeds, juridical institutions both civil and
criminal, political organization:--all are constantly undergoing
transformation and all are relative to their respective historical and
material environments.
To slay one's parents is the greatest of crimes in Europe and America;
it is, on the contrary, a duty enjoined by religion in the island of
Sumatra; in the same way, cannibalism is a permitted usage in Central
Africa, and such it also was in Europe and America in pre-historic ages.
The family is, at first (as among animals), only a sort of sexual
communism; then polyandry and the matriarchal system were established
where the supply of food was scanty and permitted only a very limited
increase of population; we find polygamy and the patriarchal system
appearing whenever and wherever the tyranny of this fundamental economic
cause of polyandry ceases to be felt; with the advent of historical
times appears the monogamic form of the family the best and the most
advanced form, although it is still requisite for it to be freed from
the rigid conventionalism of the indissoluble tie and the disguised and
legalised prostitution (the fruits of economic causes) which pollute it
among us to-day.
How can any one hold that the constitution of property is bound to
remain eternally just as it is, immutable, in the midst of the
tremendous stream of changing social institutions and moral codes, all
passing through evolutions and continuous and profound transformations?
Property alone is subject to no changes and will remain petrified in its
present form, _i. e._, a monopoly by a few of the land and the means of
production![48]
This is the absurd contention of economic and juridical orthodoxy. To
the irresistible proofs and demonstrations of the evolutionist theory,
they make only this one concession: the subordinate rules may vary, the
_abuses_ may be diminished. The principle itself is unassailable and a
few individuals may seize upon and appropriate the land and the means of
production necessary to the life of the whole social organism which thus
remains completely and eternally under the more or less direct
domination of those who have control over the physical foundation of
life.[49]
Nothing more than a perfectly clear statement of the two fundamental
theses--the thesis of classical law and economics, and the economic and
juridical thesis of socialism--is necessary to determine, without
further discussion, this first point of the controversy. At all events,
the theory of evolution is in perfect, unquestionable harmony with the
inductions of socialism and, or the contrary, it flatly contradicts the
hypothesis of the absoluteness and immutability of the "natural" laws of
economies, etc.
FOOTNOTES:
[44] U. RABBENO, _Le leggi economiche e il socialismo_, in _Rivista di
filos. scientif._, 1884, vol. III., fasc. 5.
[45] This is the thesis of COLAJANNI, in _Il socialismo_, Catane, 1884,
P. 277. He errs when he thinks that I combatted this position in my book
_Socialismo e criminalità_.
[46] MORSELLI, _Antropologia generale--Lezioni sull' uomo secondo la
teoria dell' evoluzione_, Turin, 1890-94, gives an excellent _resumé_ of
these general indications of modern scientific thought in their
application to all branches of knowledge from geology to anthropology.
[47] BONARDI, _Evoluzionismo e socialismo_, Florence, 1894.
[48] ARCANGELI, _Le evoluzioni della proprietà_, in _Critica sociale_,
July 1, 1894.
[49] This is exactly analogous to the conflict between the partisans and
the opponents of free-will.
The old metaphysics accorded to man (alone, a marvelous exception from
all the rest of the universe) an absolutely free will.
Modern physio-psychology absolutely denies every form of the free-will
dogma in the name of the laws of natural causality.
An intermediate position is occupied by those who, while recognizing
that the freedom of man's will is not absolute, hold that at least a
remnant of freedom must be conceded to the human will, because otherwise
there would no longer be any merit or any blameworthiness, any vice or
any virtue, etc.
I considered this question in my first work: _Teoria dell' imputabilità
e negazione del libero arbitrio_ (Florence, 1878, out of print), and in
the third chapter of my _Sociologie criminelle_, French trans., Paris,
1892.
I speak of it here only in order to show the analogy in the form of the
debate on the economico-social question, and therefore the possibility
of predicting a similar ultimate solution.
The true conservative, drawing his inspiration from the metaphysical
tradition, sticks to the old philosophical or economic ideas with all
their rigid absolutism; at least he is logical.
The determinist, in the name of science, upholds diametrically opposite
ideas, in the domain of psychology as well as in those of the economic
or juridical sciences.
The eclectic, in politics as in psychology, in political economy as in
law, is a conservative through and through, but he fondly hopes to
escape the difficulties of the conservative position by making a few
partial concessions to save appearances. But if the eclecticism is a
convenient and agreeable attitude for its champions, it is, like
hybridism, sterile, and neither life nor science owe anything to it.
Therefore, the socialists are logical when they contend that in the last
analysis there are only two political parties: the individualists
(conservatives [or Republicans], progressives [or Democrats] and
radicals [or Populists]) and the socialists.
X.
THE LAW OF APPARENT RETROGRESSION AND COLLECTIVE OWNERSHIP.
Admitting, say our adversaries, that in demanding a social
transformation socialism is in apparent accord with the evolutionist
theory, it does not follow that its positive conclusions--notably the
substitution of social ownership for individual ownership--are justified
by that theory. Still further, they add, we maintain that those
conclusions are in absolute contradiction with that very theory, and
that they are therefore, to say the least, utopian and absurd.
The first alleged contradiction between socialism and evolutionism is
that the return to collective ownership of the land would be, at the
same time, a return to the primitive, savage state of mankind, and
socialism would indeed be a transformation, but a transformation in a
backward direction, that is to say, against the current of the social
evolution which has led us from the primitive form of collective
property in land to the present form of individual property in land--the
form characteristic of advanced civilization. Socialism, then, would be
a return to barbarism.
This objection contains an element of truth which can not be denied; it
rightly points out that collective ownership should be a
return--apparent--to the primitive social organization. But the
conclusion drawn from this truth is absolutely false and anti-scientific
because it altogether neglects a law--which is usually forgotten--but
which is no less true, no less founded on scientific observation of the
facts than is the law of social evolution.
This is a sociological law which an able French physician merely pointed
out in his studies on the relations between Transmutation and
Socialism,[50] and the truth and full importance of which I showed in my
_Sociologie criminelle_ (1892)--before I became a militant
socialist--and which I again emphasized in my recent controversy with
Morselli on the subject of divorce.[51]
This law of apparent retrogression proves that the reversion of social
institutions to primitive forms and types is a fact of constant
recurrence.
Before referring to some obvious illustrations of this law, I would
recall to your notice the fact that M. Cognetti de Martiis, as far back
as 1881, had a vague perception of this sociological law. His work,
_Forme primitive nell' evoluzione economica_, (Turin, 1881), so
remarkable for the fullness, accuracy and reliability of its collation
of relevant facts, made it possible to foresee the possibility of the
reappearance in the future economic evolution of the primitive forms
characteristic of the status which formed the starting-point of the
social evolution.
I also remember having heard Carducci say, in his lectures at the
University of Bologna, that the later development of the forms and the
substance of literature is often merely the reproduction of the forms
and the substance of the primitive Græco-Oriental literature; in the
same way, the modern scientific theory of monism, the very soul of
universal evolution and the typical and definitive form of systematic,
scientific, experiential human thought boldly fronting the facts of the
external world--following upon the brilliant but erratic speculations of
metaphysics--is only a return to the ideas of the Greek philosophers and
of Lucretius, the great poet of naturalism.
The examples of this reversion to primitive forms are only too obvious
and too numerous, even in the category of social institutions.
I have already spoken of the religions evolution. According to Hartmann,
in the primitive stage of human development happiness appeared
attainable during the lifetime of the individual; this appeared
impossible later on and its realization was referred to the life beyond
the tomb; and now the tendency is to refer its realization to the
earthly life of humanity, not to the life of the individual as in
primitive times, but to series of generations yet unborn.
The same is true in the political domain. Herbert Spencer remarks
(Principles of Sociology, Vol. II, Part V, Chap. V,) that the will of
all--the sovereign element among primitive mankind--gradually gives way
to the will of a single person, then to those of a few (these are the
various aristocracies: military, hereditary, professional or feudal),
and the popular will finally tends again to become sovereign with the
progress of democracy (universal suffrage--the referendum--direct
legislation by the people, etc.).
The right to administer punishment, a simple defensive function among
primitive mankind tends to become the same once more. Criminal law no
longer pretends to be a teleological agency for the distribution of
ideal justice. This pretension in former days was an illusion that the
belief in the freedom of the will had erected on the natural foundation
of society's right of self-defense. Scientific investigations into the
nature of crime, as a natural and social phenomenon, have demonstrated
to-day how absurd and unjustified was the pretension of the lawmaker and
the judge to weigh and measure the guilt of the delinquent to make the
punishment exactly counterbalance it, instead of contenting themselves
with excluding from civil society, temporarily or permanently, the
individuals unable to adapt themselves to its requirements, as is done
in the case of the insane and the victims of contagious diseases.
The same truth applies to marriage. The right of freely dissolving the
tie, which was recognized in primitive society, has been gradually
replaced by the absolute formulæ of theology and mysticism which fancy
that the "free will" can settle the destiny of a person by a
monosyllable pronounced at a time when the physical equilibrium is as
unstable as it is during courtship and at marriage. Later on the
reversion to the spontaneous and primitive form of a union based on
mutual consent imposes itself on men, and the matrimonial union, with
the increase in the frequency and facility of divorce, reverts to its
original forms and restores to the family, that it to say to the social
cell, a healthier constitution.
This some phenomenon may be traced in the organization of property.
Spencer himself has been forced to recognize that there has been an
inexorable tendency to a reversion to primitive collectivism since
ownership in land, at first a family attribute, then industrial, as he
has himself demonstrated, has reached its culminating point, so that in
some countries (Torrens act in Australia) land has become a sort of
_personal_ property, transferable as readily as a share in a
stock-company.
Read as proof what such an _individualist_ as Herbert Spencer has
written:
"At first sight it seems fairly inferable that the absolute ownership of
land by private persons, must be the _ultimate_ state which
industrialism brings about. But though industrialism has thus far tended
to individualize possession of land, while individualizing all other
possession, _it may be doubted whether the final stage is at present
reached_. Ownership established by force does not stand on the same
footing as ownership established by contract, and though multiplied
sales and purchases, treating the two ownerships in the same way, have
tacitly assimilated them, the assimilation may eventually be denied. The
analogy furnished by assumed rights of possession over human beings,
helps us to recognize this possibility. For while prisoners of war,
taken by force and held as property in a vague way (being at first much
on a footing with other members of a household), were reduced more
definitely to the form of property when the buying and selling of slaves
became general; and while it might, centuries ago, have been thence
inferred that the ownership of man by man was an ownership in course of
being permanently established;[52] yet we see that a later stage of
civilization, reversing this process, has destroyed ownership of man by
man. Similarly, at a stage still more advanced, it may be that _private
ownership of land will disappear_."[53]
Moreover, this process of the socialization of property, though a
partial and subordinate process, is nevertheless so evident and
continuous that to deny its existence would be to maintain that the
economic and consequently the juridical tendency of the organization of
property is not in the direction of a greater and greater magnification
of the interests and rights of the collectivity over those of the
individual. This, which is only a preponderance to-day, will become by
an inevitable evolution a complete substitution as regards property in
land and the means of production.
The fundamental thesis of Socialism is then, to repeat it again, in
perfect harmony with that sociological law of apparent retrogression,
the natural reasons for which have been so admirably analyzed by M.
Loria, thus: the thought and the life of primitive mankind are moulded
and directed by the natural environment along the simplest and most
fundamental lines; then the progress of intelligence and the complexity
of life increasing by a law of evolution give us an analytical
development of the principal elements contained in the first genus of
each institution; this analytical development is often, when once
finished, detrimental to each one of its elements; humanity itself,
arrived at a certain stage of evolution, reconstructs and combines in a
final synthesis these different elements, and thus returns to its
primitive starting-point.[54]
This reversion to primitive forms is not, however, a pure and simple
repetition. Therefore it is called the law of _apparent_ retrogression,
and this removes all force from the objection that socialism would be a
"return to primitive _barbarism_." It is not a pure and simple
repetition, but it is the concluding phase of a cycle, of a grand
rhythm, as M. Asturaro recently put it, which infallibly and inevitably
preserves in their integrity the achievements and conquests of the long
preceding evolution, in so far as they are vital and fruitful; and the
final outcome is far superior, objectively and subjectively, to the
primitive social embryo.
The track of the social evolution is not represented by a closed circle,
which, like the serpent in the old symbol, cuts off all hope of a better
future; but, to use the figure of Goethe, it is represented by a spiral,
which seems to return upon itself, but which always advances and
ascends.
FOOTNOTES:
[50] L. DRAMARD, _Transformisme et socialisme_, in _Revue Socialiste_,
Jan. and Feb., 1885.
[51] _Divorzio e sociologia_, in _Scuola positiva nella geurisprudenza
penale_, Rome, 1893, No. 16.
[52] It is known that Aristotle, mistaking for an absolute sociological
law a law relative to his own time, declared that slavery was a natural
institution, and that men were divided, _by Nature_, into two
classes--free men and slaves.
[53] SPENCER, Principles of Sociology, Vol. II, Part. V., Chap. XV., p.
553. New York, 1897. D. Appleton & Co.
This idea, which Spencer had expressed in 1850 in his _Social Statics_
is found again in his recent work, _Justice_ (Chap. XI, and Appendix 3).
It is true that he has made a step backward. He thinks that the amount
of the indemnity to be given to the present holders of the land would be
so great that this would make next to impossible that "nationalization
of the land" which, as long ago as 1881, Henry George considered as the
only _remedy_, and that Gladstone had the courage to propose as a
solution of the Irish question. Spencer adds: "I adhere to the inference
originally drawn, _that the aggregate of men forming the community are
the supreme owners of the land_, but a fuller consideration of the
matter has led me to the conclusion that individual ownership, subject
to State suzerainty, should be maintained."
The "profound study" which Spencer has made in Justice--(and, let us say
between parentheses, this work, together with his "_Positive and
Negative Beneficence_" furnishes sad evidence of the senile mental
retrogression that even Herbert Spencer has been unable to escape;
moreover its subjective aridity is in strange contrast with the
marvelous wealth of scientific evidence poured forth in his earlier
works)--is based on these two arguments: I. The present landed
proprietors are not the direct descendants of the first conquerors; they
have, in general, acquired their titles by free contract; II. Society is
entitled to the ownership of the virgin soil, as it was before it was
cleared, before any improvements or buildings were put upon it by
private owners; the indemnity which would have to be paid for these
improvements would reach an enormous figure.
The answer is that the first argument would hold good if socialism
proposed to _punish_ the present owners; but the question presents
itself in a different form. Society places the expropriation of the
owners of land on the ground of "public utility," and the individual
right must give way before the rights of society. Just as it does at
present, leaving out of consideration for the moment the question of
indemnity. To reply to the second argument, in the first place, it must
not be forgotten that the improvements are not exclusively the work of
the personal exertions of the owners. They represent, at first, an
enormous accumulation of fatigue and blood that many generations of
laborers have left upon the soil, in order to bring it to its present
state of cultivation ... and all of this for the profit of others; there
is also this fact to be remembered that society itself, the social life,
has been a great factor in producing these improvements (or increased
values), since public roads, railways, the use of machinery in
agriculture, etc., have been the means of bestowing freely upon the
landowners large unearned increments that have greatly swollen the
prices of their lands.
Why, finally, if we are to consider the amount and the character of this
indemnity, should this indemnity be _total_ and _absolute_? Why, even
under present conditions, if a landowner, for various reasons, such as
cherished memories connected with the land, values it at a sentimental
price, he would be forced under the right of eminent domain to accept
the market value, without any extra payment for his affection or
sentiment. It would be just the same in the case of the collective
appropriation which would, moreover, be facilitated by the progressive
concentration of the land in the hands of a few great landed
proprietors. If we were to assure these proprietors, _for the term of
the natural lives_, a comfortable and tranquil life, it would suffice to
make the indemnity meet all the requirements of the most rigorous
equity.
[54] LORIA, _La Teoria economica della constituzione politica_, Turin,
1886. p. 141. The second edition of this work has appeared in French,
considerably enlarged: _Les bases économiques de la constitution
sociale_, Paris, 1893. (This has also been translated into
English.--Tr.)
This law of apparent retrogression alone overthrows the greater part of
the far too superficial criticisms that Guyot makes upon socialism in
_La Tyrannie socialiste_, Paris, 1893 (published in English, by Swan
Sonnenschein, London,) and in _Les Principes de 1789 et le Socialisme_,
Paris, 1894.
XI.
THE SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY.
The conclusion of the preceding chapter will be of use to us in the
examination of the second contradiction that, it is pretended, exists
between socialism and the theory of evolution. It is asserted and
repeated in all possible tones that socialism constitutes a tyranny
under a new form which will destroy all the blessings of liberty won
with such toil and difficulty in our century, at the cost of so many
sacrifices and of so many martyrs.
I have already shown, in speaking of anthropological inequalities, that
socialism will, on the contrary, assure to all individuals the
conditions of a human existence and the possibility of developing with
the utmost freedom and completeness their own respective
individualities.
It is sufficient here for me to refer to another law, which the
scientific theory of evolution has established, to demonstrate (since I
cannot in this monograph enter into details) that it is an error to
assume that the advent of socialism would result in the suppression of
the vital and vitalizing part of personal and political liberty.
It is a law of natural evolution, set forth and illustrated with
remarkable clearness by M. Ardigò[55], that each succeeding phase of
the natural and social evolution does not destroy the vital and
life-giving manifestations of the preceding phases, but that, on the
contrary, it preserves their existence in so far as they are vital and
only eliminates their pathological manifestations.
In the biological evolution, the manifestations of vegetable life do not
efface the first glimmerings of the dawn of life that are seen even
before in the crystallization of minerals, any more than the
manifestations of animal life efface those of vegetable life. The human
form of life also permits the continued existence of the forms and links
which precede it in the great series of living beings, but, more than
this, the later forms only really live in so far as they are the product
of the primitive forms and co-exist with them.
The social evolution follows the same law: and this is precisely the
interpretation of transition periods given by scientific evolutionism.
They did not annihilate the conquests of the preceding civilizations,
but they preserved, on the contrary, whatever was vital in them and
fecundated them for the Renaissance of a new civilization.
This law, which dominates all the magnificent development of the social
life, equally governs the fate and the parabolic career of all social
institutions.
One phase of social evolution by following upon another phase
eliminates, it is true, the parts that are not vital, the pathological
products of preceding institutions, but it preserves and develops the
parts that are healthy and vigorous while ever elevating more and more
the physical and moral diapason of humanity.
By this natural process the great stream of humanity issued from the
virgin forests of savage life and developed with majestic grandeur
during the periods of barbarism and the present civilization, which are
superior in some respects to the preceding phases of the social life,
but in many others are marred by the very products of their own
degeneracy, as I pointed out in speaking of reactionary varieties of
social selection.
And, as an example of this, it is certain that the laborers of the
contemporaneous period, of the bourgeois civilization have, in general,
a better physical and moral life than those of past centuries, but it
cannot be denied none the less that their condition as free
_wage-workers_ is inferior in more than one particular to the condition
of the _slaves_ of antiquity and of the _serfs_ of the Middle Ages.
The _slave_ of antiquity was, it is true, the absolute property of his
master, of the _free_ man, and he was condemned to well nigh an animal
existence, but it was to the interest of his master to assure him daily
bread at the least, for the slave formed a part of his estate, like his
cattle and horses.
Just so, the serf or villein of the Middle Ages enjoyed certain
customary rights which attached him to the soil and assured him at the
least--save in case of famine--of daily bread.
The free wage-worker of the modern world, on the contrary, is always
condemned to labor inhuman both in its duration and its character, and
this is the justification of that demand for an Eight-Hours day which
can already count more than one victory and which is destined to a sure
triumph. As no permanent legal relation binds the wage-slave either to
the capitalist proprietor or to the soil, his daily bread is not assured
to him, because the proprietor no longer has any interest to feed and
support the laborers who toil in his factory or on his field. The death
or sickness of the laborer cannot, in fact, cause any decrease of his
estate and he can always draw from the inexhaustible multitude of
laborers who are forced by lack of employment to offer themselves on the
market.
That is why--not because present-day proprietors are more wicked than
those of former times, but because even the moral sentiments are the
result of economic conditions--the landed proprietor or the
superintendent of his estate hastens to have a veterinary called if, in
his stable, a cow becomes ill, while he is in no hurry to have a doctor
called if it is the son of the cow-herd who is attacked by disease.
Certainly there may be--and these are more or less frequent
exceptions--here and there a proprietor who contradicts this rule,
especially when he lives in daily contact with his laborers. Neither can
it be denied that the rich classes are moved at times by the spirit of
benevolence--even apart from the _charity fad_--and that they thus put
to rest the inner voice, the symptom of the moral disease from which
they suffer, but the inexorable rule is nevertheless as follows: with
the modern form of industry the laborer has gained political liberty,
the right of suffrage, of association, etc. (rights which he is allowed
to use only when he does not utilize them to form a class-party, based
on intelligent apprehension of the essential point of the social
question), but he has lost the guarantee of daily bread and of a home.
Socialism wishes to give this guarantee to all individuals--and it
demonstrates the mathematical possibility of this by the substitution of
social ownership for individual ownership of the means of
production--but it does not follow from this that socialism will do away
with all the useful and truly fruitful conquests of the present phase of
civilization, and of the preceding phases.
And here is a characteristic example of this: the invention of
industrial and agricultural machinery, that marvelous application of
science to the transformation of natural forces which ought to have had
only beneficent consequences, has caused and is still causing the misery
and ruin of thousands and thousands of laborers. The substitution of
machines for human labor has inevitably condemned multitudes of workers
to the tortures of enforced idleness and to the ruthless action of the
iron law of minimum wages barely sufficient to prevent them from dying
of hunger.
The first instinctive reaction or impulse of these unfortunates was and
still is, unhappily, to destroy the machines and to see in them only the
instruments of their undeserved sufferings.
But the destruction of the machines would be, in fact, only a pure and
simple return to barbarism, and this is not the wish or purpose of
socialism which represents a higher phase of human civilization.
And this is why socialism alone can furnish a solution of this tragic
difficulty which can not be solved by economic individualism which
involves the constant employment and introduction of improved machinery
because its use gives an evident and irresistible advantage to the
capitalist.
It is necessary--and there is no other solution--that the machines
become collective or social property. Then, obviously, their only effect
will be to diminish the aggregate amount of labor and muscular effort
necessary to produce a given quantity of products. And thus the daily
work of each worker will be decreased, and his standard of existence
will constantly rise and become more closely correspondent with the
dignity of a human being.
This effect is already manifest, to a limited extent, in those cases
where, for instance, several small farm proprietors found co-operative
societies for the purchase of, for example, threshing-machines. If there
should be joined to the small proprietors, in a grand fraternal
co-operation, the laborers or peasants (and this will be possible only
when the land shall have become social property), and if the machines
were municipal property, for example, as are the fire-engines, and if
the commune were to grant their use for the labors of the fields, the
machines would no longer produce any evil effects and all men would see
in them their liberators.
It is thus that socialism, because it represents a higher phase of human
evolution, would eliminate from the present phase only the bad products
of our unbridled economic individualism which creates, at one pole, the
billionaires or "Napoleons of Finance" who enrich themselves in a few
years by seizing upon--in ways more or less clearly described in the
penal code--the public funds, and which, at the other pole, accumulates
vast multitudes of poverty-stricken wretches in the slums of the cities
or in the houses of straw and mud which reproduce in the South of Italy,
the quarters of the Helots of antiquity, or in the valley of the Po, the
huts of the Australian bushmen.[56]
No intelligent socialist has ever dreamt of not recognizing all that the
bourgeoisie has done for human civilization, or of tearing out the pages
of gold that it has written in the history of the civilized world by its
brilliant development of the various nations, by its marvelous
applications of science to industry, and by the commercial and
intellectual relations which it has developed between different peoples.
These are permanent conquests of human progress, and socialism does not
deny them any more than it wishes to destroy them, and it accords a just
tribute of recognition to the generous pioneers who have achieved them.
The attitude of socialism toward the bourgeoisie might be compared to
that of atheists who do not wish either to destroy or to refuse their
admiration to a painting of Raphael or to a statue of Michel-Angelo,
because these works represent and give the seal of eternity to religious
legends.
But socialism sees in the present bourgeois civilization, arrived at its
decline, the sad symptoms of an irremediable dissolution, and it
contends that it is necessary to rid the social organism of its
infectious _poison_, and this not by ridding it of such or such a
bankrupt, of such or such a corrupt official, of such or such a
dishonest contractor ... but by going to the root of the evil, to the
indisputable source of the virulent infection. By radically transforming
the regime--through the substitution of social ownership for individual
ownership--it is necessary to renew the healthy and vital forces of
human society, to enable it to rise to a higher phase of civilization.
Then, it is true, the privileged classes will no longer be able to pass
their lives in idleness, luxury and dissipation, and they will have to
make up their minds to lead an industrious and less ostentatious life,
but the immense majority of men will rise to the heights of serene
dignity, security and joyous brotherhood, instead of living in the
sorrows, anxieties and bitter strife of the present.
An analogous response may be made to that banal objection that socialism
will suppress all liberty--that objection repeated to satiety by all
those who more or less consciously conceal, under the colors of
political liberalism, the tendencies of economic conservatism.
That repugnance which many people, even in good faith, show toward
socialism, is it not the manifestation of another law of human evolution
which Herbert Spencer has formulated thus: "Every progress effected is
an obstacle to further progress"?
This is, in fact, a natural psychological tendency, a tendency analogous
to _fetishism_, to refuse to consider the ideal attained, the progress
effected as a simple instrument, a starting-point for further progress
and for the attainment of new ideals, instead of contentedly halting to
adore as a fetish the progress already effected, which men are prone to
look upon as being so complete that it leaves no room for new ideals and
higher aspirations.
Just as the savage adores the fruit-tree, whose benefits he enjoys, for
itself and not for the fruits it can yield, and, in the end, makes a
fetish of it, an idol too holy to be touched and, therefore, barren;
just as the miser who has learned in our individualist world the value
of money, ends by adoring the money in itself and for itself, as a
fetish and an idol, and keeps it buried in a safe where it remains
sterile, instead of employing it as a means for procuring himself new
pleasures; in the same way, the sincere liberal, the son of the French
Revolution, has made Liberty an idol which is its own goal, a sterile
fetish, instead of making use of it as an instrument for new conquests,
for the realization of new ideals.
It is understood that under a regime of political tyranny, the first and
most urgent ideal was necessarily the conquest of liberty and of
political sovereignty.
And we who arrive upon the field after the battle is fought and the
victory won, we gladly pay our tribute of gratitude for that conquest to
all the martyrs and heroes who bought it at the price of their blood.
But Liberty is not and can not be its own end and object!
What is the liberty of holding public assemblages or the liberty of
thought worth if the stomach has not its daily bread, and if millions of
individuals have their moral strength paralyzed as a consequence of
bodily or cerebral anemia?
Of what worth is the theoretic share in political sovereignty, the right
to vote, if the people remain enslaved by misery, lack of employment,
and acute or chronic hunger?
Liberty for liberty's sake--there you have the progress achieved turned
into an obstacle to future progress; it is a sort of political
masturbation, it is impotency face to face with the new necessities of
life.
Socialism, on the other hand, says that just as the subsequent phase of
the social evolution does not efface the conquests of the preceding
phases, neither does it wish to suppress the liberty so gloriously
conquered, by the bourgeois world in 1789--but it does desire the
laborers, after they have become conscious of the interests and needs of
their class, to make use of that liberty to realize a more equitable and
more human social organization.
Nevertheless, it is only too indisputable that under the system of
private property and its inevitable consequence, the monopoly of
economic power, the liberty of the man who does not share in this
monopoly, is only an impotent and sentimental toy. And when the workers,
with a clear consciousness of their class-interests, wish to make use of
this liberty, then the holders of political power are forced to disown
the great liberal principles, "the principles of '89," by suppressing
all public liberty, and they vainly fancy that they will be able, in
this way, to stop the inevitable march of human evolution.
As much must be said of another accusation made against socialists.
They renounce their fatherland (_patrie_), it is said, in the name of
internationalism.
This also is false.
The national _épopées_ which, in our century, have reconquered for Italy
and Germany their unity and their independence, have really constituted
great steps forward, and we are grateful to those who have given us a
free country.
But our country can not become an obstacle to future progress, to the
fraternity of all peoples, freed from national hatreds which are truly a
relic of barbarism, or a mere bit of theatrical scenery to hide the
interests of capitalism which has been shrewd enough to realize, for its
own benefit, the broadest internationalism.
It was a true moral and social progress to rise above the phase of the
communal wars in Italy, and to feel ourselves all brothers of one and
the same nation; it will be just the same when we shall have risen above
the phase of "patriotic" rivalries to feel ourselves all brothers of one
and the same humanity.
It is, nevertheless, not difficult for us to penetrate, thanks to the
historical key of class-interests, the secret of the contradictions, in
which the classes in power move. When they form an international
league--the London banker, thanks to telegraphy, is master of the
markets in Pekin, New York and St. Petersburg--it is greatly to the
advantage of that ruling class to maintain the artificial divisions
between the laborers of the whole world, or even those of old Europe
alone, because it is only the division of the workers which makes
possible the maintenance of the power of the capitalists. And to attain
their object, it suffices to exploit the primitive fund of savage hatred
for "foreigners."
But this does not keep international socialism from being, even from
this point of view, a definite moral scheme and an inevitable phase of
human evolution.
Just so, and in consequence of the same sociological law, it is not
correct to assert that, by establishing collective ownership, socialism
will suppress every kind of individual ownership.
We must repeat again that one phase of evolution can not suppress all
that has been accomplished during the preceding phases; it suppresses
only the manifestations which have ceased to be vital, and it suppresses
them because they are in contradiction with the new conditions of
existence begotten by the new phases of evolution.
In substituting social ownership for individual ownership of the land
and the means of production, it is obvious that it will not be necessary
to suppress private property in the food necessary to the individual,
nor in clothing and objects of personal use which will continue to be
objects of individual or family consumption.
This form of individual ownership will then always continue to exist,
since it is necessary and perfectly consistent with social ownership of
the land, mines, factories, houses, machines, tools and instruments of
labor, and means of transportation.
The collective ownership of libraries--which we see in operation under
our eyes--does it deprive individuals of the personal use of rare and
expensive books which they would be unable to procure in any other way,
and does it not largely increase the utility that can be derived from
these books, when compared to the services that these books could render
if they were shut up in the private library of a useless book-collector?
In the same way, the collective ownership of the land and the means of
production, by securing to everyone the use of the machines, tools and
land, will only increase their utility a hundred-fold.
And let no one say that, when men shall no longer have the exclusive and
transferable (by inheritance, etc.) _ownership_ of wealth, they will no
longer be impelled to labor because they will no longer be constrained
to work by personal or family self-interest.[57] We see, for example,
that, even in our present individualist world, those survivals of
collective property in land--to which Laveleye has so strikingly called
the attention of sociologists--continue to be cultivated and yield a
return which is not lower than that yielded by lands held in private
ownership, although these communist or collectivist farmers have only
the right of use and enjoyment, and not the absolute title.[58]
If some of these survivals of collective ownership are disappearing, or
if their administration is bad, this can not be an argument against
socialism, since it is easy to understand that, in the present economic
organization based on absolute individualism, these organisms do not
have an environment which furnishes them the conditions of a possible
existence.
It is as though one were to wish a fish to live out of water, or a
mammal in an atmosphere containing no oxygen.
These are the same considerations which condemn to a certain death all
those famous experiments--the socialist, communist or anarchist colonies
which it has been attempted to establish in various places as
"experimental trials of socialism." It seems not to have been
understood that such experiments could only result in inevitable
abortions, obliged as they are to develop in an individualist economic
and moral environment which can not furnish them the conditions
essential for their physiological development, conditions which they
will, on the contrary, have when the whole social organization shall be
guided by the collectivist principle, that is to say, when society shall
be _socialized_.[59]
Then individual tendencies and psychological aptitudes will adapt
themselves to the environment. It is natural that in an individualist
environment, a world of free competition, in which every individual sees
in every other if not an adversary, at least a competitor, anti-social
egoism should be the tendency which is inevitably most highly developed,
as a necessary result of the instinct of self-preservation, especially
in these latest phases of a civilization which seems to be driven at
full steam, compared to the pacific and gentle individualism of past
centuries.
In an environment where every one, in exchange for intellectual or
manual labor furnished to society, will be assured of his daily bread
and will thus be saved from daily anxiety, it is evident that egoism
will have far fewer stimulants, fewer occasions to manifest itself than
solidarity, sympathy and altruism will have. Then that pitiless
maxim--_homo homini lupus_--will cease to be true--a maxim which,
whether we admit it or not, poisons so much of our present life.
I can not dwell longer on these details and I conclude here the
examination of this second pretended opposition between socialism and
evolution by again pointing out that the sociological law which declares
that the subsequent phase (of social evolution) does not efface the
vital and fruitful manifestations of the preceding phases of evolution,
gives us, in regard to the social organization in process of formation,
a more exact (_positive_ or fact-founded) idea than our opponents think,
who always imagine that they have to refute the romantic and sentimental
socialism of the first half of this century.[60]
This shows how little weight there is in the objection recently raised
against socialism, in the name of a learned but vague sociological
eclecticism, by a distinguished Italian professor, M. Vanni.
"Contemporary socialism is not identified with individualism, since it
places at the foundation of the social organization a principle which is
not that of individual autonomy, but rather its negation. If,
notwithstanding this, it promulgates individualist ideas, which are in
contradiction with its principles, this does not signify that it has
changed its nature, or that it has ceased to be socialism: it means
simply that it lives upon and by contradictions."[61]
When socialism, by assuring to every one the means of livelihood,
contends that it will permit the assertion and the development of all
individualities, it does not fall into a contradiction of principles,
but being, as it is, the approaching phase of human civilization, it
can not suppress nor efface whatever is vital, that is to say,
compatible with the new social form, in the preceding phases. And just
as socialist internationalism is not in conflict with patriotism, since
it recognizes whatever is healthy and true in that sentiment, and
eliminates only the pathological part, jingoism, in the same way,
socialism does not draw its life from contradiction, but it follows, on
the contrary, the fundamental laws of natural evolution, in developing
and preserving the vital part of individualism, and in suppressing only
its pathological manifestations which are responsible for the fact that
in the modern world, as Prampolini said, 90 per cent. of the cells of
the social organization are condemned to anemia because 10 per cent. are
ill with hyper-emia and hyper-trophy.
FOOTNOTES:
[55] ARDIGÒ, _La formazione naturale_, Vol. II. of his _Opere
filosofiche_, Padua, 1897.
[56] My master, Pietro Ellero, has given in _La Tirrandie borghese_, an
eloquent description of this social and political pathology as it
appears in Italy.
[57] RICHTER, _Où mène le socialisme_, Paris, 1892.
[58] M. Loria, in _Les Bases économiques de la constitution sociale_,
Paris, 1894, part 1st, demonstrates, moreover, that in a society based
on collective ownership selfishness, rightly understood will still
remain the principal motive of human actions, but that it will then be
the means of realizing a social harmony of which it is the worst enemy
under the regime of individualism.
Here is an example of this, on a small scale, but instructive. The means
of transportation have, in large cities, followed the ordinary process
of progressive socialization. At first, everybody went on foot,
excepting only a few rich persons who were able to have horses and
carriages; later, carriages were made available for the public at a
fixed rate of hire (the _fiacres_ which have been used in Paris a little
more than a century, and which took their name from Saint Fiacre because
the first cab stood beneath his image); then, the dearness of
_fiacre_-hire led to a further socialization by means of omnibuses and
tramways. Another step forward and the socialization will be complete.
Let the cab service, omnibus service, street railways, _bicyclettes_,
etc., become a municipal service or function and every one will be able
to make use of it gratis just as he freely enjoys the railways when they
become a national public service.
But, then--this is the individualist objection--everybody will wish to
ride in cabs or on trolleys, and the service having to attempt to
satisfy all, will be perfectly satisfactory to no one.
This is not correct. If the transformation had to be made suddenly, this
might be a temporary consequence. But even now many ride gratis (on
passes, etc.) on both railways and tramways.
And so it seems to us that every one will wish to ride on the street
cars because the fact that it is now impossible for many to enjoy this
mode of locomotion gives rise to the desire for the forbidden fruit. But
when the enjoyment of it shall be free (and there could be restrictions
based on the necessity for such transportation) another egoistic motive
will come into play--the physiological need of walking, especially for
well-fed people who have been engaged in sedentary labor.
And so you see how individual selfishness, in this example of collective
ownership on a small scale, would act in harmony with the social
requirements.
[59] Thus it is easy to understand how unfounded is the reasoning among
the opponents of socialism that the failure of communist or socialist
colonies is an objective demonstration of "the instability of a
socialist arrangement" (of society).
[60] This is what Yves Guyot, for example, does in _Les Principes de
1789_, Paris, 1894, when he declares, in the name of individualist
psychology, that "socialism is restrictive and individualism expansive."
This thesis is, moreover, in part true, if it is transposed.
The vulgar psychology, which answers the purposes of M. Guyot (_La
Tyrannie socialiste_, liv. III, ch. I.), is content with superficial
observations. It declares, for instance, that if the laborer works
twelve hours, he will produce evidently a third more than if he works
eight hours, and this is the reason why industrial capitalism has
opposed and does oppose the minimum programme of the three
eighths--eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep and eight hours for
meals and recreation.
A more scientific physio-psychological observation demonstrates, on the
contrary, as I said long ago, that "man is a machine, but he does not
function after the fashion of a machine," in the sense that man is a
living machine, and not an inorganic machine.
Every one knows that a locomotive or a sewing machine does in twelve
hours a quantity of work greater by one-third than it does in eight
hours; but man is a living machine, subject to the law of physical
mechanics, but also to those of biological mechanics. Intellectual
labor, like muscular labor, is not uniform in quality and intensity
throughout its duration. Within the individual limits of _fatigue_ and
exhaustion, it obeys the law which Quetelet expressed by his binomial
curve, and which I believe to be one of the fundamental laws of living
and inorganic nature. At the start the force or the speed is very
slight--afterward a maximum of force or speed is attained--and at last
the force or speed again becomes very slight.
With manual labor, as with intellectual labor, there is a maximum, after
which the muscular and cerebral forces decline, and then the work drags
along slowly and without vigor until the end of the forced daily labor.
Consider also the beneficient _suggestive_ influence of a reduction of
hours, and you will readily understand why the recent English reports
are so unanswerable on the excellent results, even from the capitalist
point of view, of the Eight-Hour reform. The workingmen are less
fatigued, and the production is undiminished.
When these economic reforms, and all those which are based on an exact
physio-psychology, shall be effected under the socialist regime--that is
to say, without the friction and the loss of force that would be
inevitable under capitalist individualism--it is evident that they will
have immense material and moral advantages, notwithstanding the _a
priori_ objections of the present individualism which can not see or
which forgets the profound reflex effects of a change of the social
environment on individual psychology.
[61] ICILIO VANNI, _La funzione practica della filosofia del diritto
considerata in sè e in rapporto al socialismo contemporaneo_, Bologne,
1894.
XII.
EVOLUTION--REVOLUTION--REBELLION--INDIVIDUAL VIOLENCE--SOCIALISM AND
ANARCHY.
The last and the gravest of the contradictions that it is attempted to
set up between socialism and the scientific theory of evolution, relates
to the question of _how_ socialism, in practice, will be inaugurated and
realized.
Some think that socialism ought, at the present time, to set forth, in
all its details, the precise and symmetrical form of the future social
organization.--"Show me a practical description of the new society, and
I will then decide whether I ought to prefer it to the present society."
Others--and this is a consequence of that first false
conception--imagine that socialism wishes in a single day to change the
face of the world, and that we will be able to go to sleep in a world
completely bourgeois and to wake up next morning in a world completely
socialist.
How is it possible not to see, some one then says, that all this is
directly and thoroughly in conflict with the law of evolution, a law
based on the two fundamental ideas--which are characteristic of the new
tendencies of scientific thought and which are in conflict with the old
metaphysics--of the _naturalness_ and the _gradualness_ of all phenomena
in all domains of universal life, from astronomy to sociology.
It is indisputable that these two objections were, in great part, well
founded when they were directed against what Engels has called "utopian
socialism."
When socialism, before the time of Karl Marx, was merely the sentimental
expression of a humanitarianism as noble as it was neglectful of the
most elementary principles of exact science, it was altogether natural
for its partisans to give rein to the impetuosity of their generous
natures both in their vehement protests against social injustices and in
their reveries and day-dreams of a better world, to which the
imagination strove to give precise contours, as witness all the utopias
from the REPUBLIC of Plato to the LOOKING BACKWARD of Bellamy.
It is easy to understand what opportunities these constructions afforded
to criticism. The latter was false in part, moreover, because it was the
offspring of the habits of thought peculiar to the modern world, and
which will change with the change in the environment, but it was well
founded in part also because the enormous complexity of social phenomena
makes it impossible to prophesy in regard to all the details of a social
organization which will differ from ours more profoundly than the
present society differs from that of the Middle Ages, because the
bourgeois world has retained the same foundation, individualism, as the
society which preceded it, while the socialist world will have a
fundamentally different polarization.
These prophetic constructions of a new social order are, moreover, the
natural product of that artificiality in politics and sociology, with
which the most orthodox individualists are equally deeply imbued,
individualists who imagine, as Spencer has remarked, that human society
is like a piece of dough to which the law can give one form rather than
another, without taking into account the organic and psychical, ethical
and historical qualities, tendencies and aptitudes of the different
peoples.
Sentimental socialism has furnished some attempts at utopian
construction, but the modern world of politics has presented and does
present still more of them with the ridiculous and chaotic mess of laws
and codes which surround every man from his birth to his death, and even
before he is born and after he is dead, in an inextricable network of
codes, laws, decrees and regulations which stifle him like the silk-worm
in the cocoon.
And every day, experience shows us that our legislators, imbued with
this political and social artificiality, do nothing but copy the laws of
the most dissimilar peoples, according as the fashion comes from Paris
or Berlin,--instead of carefully studying the facts of actual life, the
conditions of existence and the interests of the people in their
respective countries, in order to adapt their laws to them, laws
which--if this is not done--remain, as abundant examples show, dead
letters because the reality of the facts of life does not permit them to
strike their roots into the social soil and to develop a fruitful
life.[62]
On the subject of artificial social constructions, the socialists might
say to the individualists: let him who is without sin, cast the first
stone.
The true reply is wholly different. Scientific socialism represents a
much more advanced phase of socialist thought; it is in perfect harmony
with modern, experiential science, and it has completely abandoned the
fantastic idea of prophesying, at the present time, what human society
will be under the new collectivist organization.
What scientific socialism can affirm and does affirm with mathematical
certainty, is that the current, the trajectory, of human evolution is in
the general direction pointed out and foreseen by socialism, that is to
say, in the direction of a continuously and progressively increasing
preponderance of the interests and importance of the species over the
interests and importance of the individual--and, therefore, in the
direction of a continuous _socialization_ of the economic life, and with
and in consequence of that, of the juridical, moral and political life.
As to the petty details of the new social edifice, we are unable to
foresee them, precisely because the new social edifice will be, and is,
a _natural_ and _spontaneous_ product of human evolution, a product
which is already in process of formation, and the general outlines of
which are already visible, and not an artificial construction of the
imagination of some utopian or idealist.
The situation is the same in the social sciences and the natural
sciences. In embryology the celebrated law of Haeckel tells us that the
development of the _individual_ embryo reproduces in miniature the
various forms of development of the animal _species_ which have preceded
it in the zoological series. But the biologist, by studying a human
embryo of a few days' or a few weeks' growth, can not tell whether it
will be male or female, and still less whether it will be a strong or a
weak individual, phlegmatic or nervous, intelligent or not.
He can only tell the general lines of the future evolution of that
individual, and must leave it to time to show the exact character of all
the particular details of its personality, which will be developed
naturally and spontaneously, in conformity with the hereditary organic
conditions and the conditions of the environment in which it will live.
This is what can be and what must be the reply of every socialist. This
is the position taken by Bebel in the German _Reichstag_[63] in his
reply to those who wish to know at the present time what all the details
of the future State will be, and who skilfully profiting by the
ingenuity of the socialist romancers, criticize their artificial
fantasies which are true in their general outlines, but arbitrary in
their details.
It would have been just the same thing if, before the French
Revolution,--which, as it were, hatched out the bourgeois world,
prepared and matured during the previous evolution,--the nobility and
the clergy, the classes then in power, had asked the representatives of
the Third Estate--bourgeois by birth, though some aristocrats or priests
embraced the cause of the bourgeoisie against the privileges of their
caste, as the Marquis de Mirabeau and the Abbé Sieyès--"But what sort of
a world will this new world of yours be? Show us first its exact plan,
and after that we will decide!"
The Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, would not have been able to answer
this question, because it was impossible for them to foresee what the
human society of the nineteenth century was to be. But this did not
prevent the bourgeois revolution from taking place because it
represented the next natural and inevitable phase of an eternal
evolution. This is now the position of socialism with relation to the
bourgeois world. And if this bourgeois world, born only about a century
ago, is destined to have a much shorter historical cycle than the feudal
(aristocratico-clerical) world, this is simply because the marvelous
scientific progress of the nineteenth century has increased a
hundred-fold the rapidity of life in time and has nearly annihilated
space, and, therefore, civilized humanity traverses now in ten years the
same road that it took, in the Middle Ages, a century or two to travel.
The continuously accelerated velocity of human evolution is also one of
the laws established and proved by modern social science.
It is the artificial constructions of sentimental socialism which have
given birth to the idea--correct so far as they are concerned--that
_socialism_ is synonymous with _tyranny_.
It is evident that if the new social organization is not the spontaneous
form naturally produced by the human evolution, but rather an artificial
construction that has issued complete in every detail from the brain of
some social architect, the latter will be unable to avoid regulating the
new social machinery by an infinite number of rules and by the superior
authority which he will assign to a controlling intelligence, either
individual or collective. It is easy to understand then, how such an
organization gives rise in its opponents--who see in the individualist
world only the advantages of liberty, and who forget the evils which so
copiously flow from it--the impression of a system of monastic or
military discipline.[64]
Another contemporary artificial product has contributed to confirm this
impression--_State Socialism_. At bottom, it does not differ from
sentimental or utopian socialism, and as Liebknecht said at the
socialist congress of Berlin (1892), it would be "a State Capitalism
which would join political slavery to economic exploitation." State
Socialism is a symptom of the irresistible power of scientific and
democratic socialism--as is shown by the famous _rescripts_ of Emperor
William convoking an international conference to solve (this is the
infantile idea of the decree) the problems of labor, and the famous
Encyclical on "The Condition of Labor" of the very able Pope, Leo XIII,
who has handled the subject with great tact and cleverness.[65] But
these imperial rescripts and these papal encyclicals--because it is
impossible to leap over or suppress the phases of the social
evolution--could only result abortively in our bourgeois, individualist
and _laissez faire_ world. Certainly it would not have been displeasing
to this bourgeois world to see the vigorous contemporary socialism
strangled to death in the amorous embraces of official artificiality and
of State Socialism, for it had become evident in Germany and elsewhere,
that neither laws nor repressive measures of any kind could kill it.[66]
All that arsenal of rules and regulations and provisions for inspection
and superintendence has nothing in common with scientific socialism
which foresees clearly that the executive guidance of the new social
organization will be no more confused than is the present administration
of the State, the provinces and the communes, and will, on the
contrary, be much better adapted to subserve the interests of both
society and the individual, since it will be a natural product and not a
parasitic product of the new social organization. Just so, the nervous
system of a mammal is the regulating apparatus of its organism; it is,
certainly, more complex than that of the organism of a fish or of a
mollusc, but it has not, for that reason, tyrannically stifled the
autonomy of the other organs and anatomical machinery, or of the cells
in their living confederation.
It is understood, then, that to refute socialism, something more is
needed than the mere repetition of the current objections against that
artificial and sentimental socialism which still continues to exist, I
confess, in the nebulous mass of popular ideas. But every day it is
losing ground before the intelligent partisans--
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