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.