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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.