material means, but especially without solidarity and without an
intelligent conception of the goal and without a high moral purpose,
they ought to rise against the classes in power, is really to play into
the hands of those very classes, since the latter are sure of the
material victory when the evolution is not ripe and the revolution is
not ready.[73]
And so it has been possible to show in the case of the late Sicilian
rebellion, in spite of all the lies of those interested in hiding the
truth, that in those districts where socialism was most advanced and
best understood there were no deeds of personal violence, no revolts,
as, for example, among the peasants of Piana dei Greci, of whom Nicola
Barbato had made intelligent socialists; while those convulsive
movements occurred outside of the field of the socialist propaganda as a
rebellion against the exactions of the local governments and of the
_camorre_,[74] or in those districts where the socialist propaganda was
less intelligent and was stifled by the fierce passions caused by hunger
and misery.[75]
History demonstrates that the countries where revolts have been the most
frequent are those in which social progress is the least advanced. The
popular energies exhaust and destroy themselves in these feverish,
convulsive excesses, which alternate with periods of discouragement and
despair--which are the fitting environment of the Buddhist theory of
_electoral abstention_--a very convenient theory for the conservative
parties. In such countries we never see that continuity of premeditated
action, slower and less effective in appearance, but in reality the only
kind of action that can accomplish those things which appear to us as
the miracles of history.
Therefore Marxian socialism in all countries has proclaimed that from
this time forth the principal means of social transformation must be
_the conquest of the public powers_ (in local administrations as well as
in national Parliaments) as one of the results of the organization of
the laborers into a class-conscious party. The further the political
organization of the laborers, in civilized countries, shall progress,
the more one will see realized, by a resistless evolution, the socialist
organization of society, at first by partial concessions, but ever
growing more important, wrested from the capitalist class by the
working-class (the law restricting the working-day to Eight Hours, for
example), and then by the complete transformation of individual
ownership into social ownership.
As to the question whether this complete transformation, which is at
present being prepared for by a process of gradual evolution which is
nearing the critical and decisive period of the social revolution, can
be accomplished without the aid of other means of transformation--such
as rebellion and individual violence--this is a question which no one
can answer in advance. Marxian socialists are not prophets.
Our sincere wish is that the social revolution, when its evolution shall
be ripe, may be effected peacefully, as so many other revolutions have
been, without blood-shed--like the English Revolution, which preceded by
a century, with its _Bill of Rights_, the French Revolution; like the
Italian Revolution in Tuscany in 1859; like the Brazilian Revolution,
with the exile of the Emperor Dom Pedro, in 1892.
It is certain that socialism by spreading education and culture among
the people, by organizing the workers into a class-conscious party under
its banner, is only increasing the probability of the fulfilment of our
hope, and is dissipating the old forebodings of a _reaction_ after the
advent of socialism, which were indeed justified when socialism was
still utopian in its means of realization instead of being, as it now
is, a natural and spontaneous, and therefore inevitable and irrevocable,
phase of the evolution of humanity.
Where will this social revolution start? I am firmly convinced that if
the Latin peoples, being Southerners, are more ready for revolt, which
may suffice for purely political transformations, the peoples of the
North, the Germans and Anglo-Saxons are better prepared for the tranquil
and orderly but inexorable process of the true revolution, understood as
the critical phase of an organic, incomplete, preparatory evolution,
which is the only effective process for a truly social transformation.
It is in Germany and England, where the greater development of bourgeois
industrialism inevitably aggravates its detrimental consequences, and
thereby magnifies the necessity for socialism, that the great social
metamorphosis will perhaps being--though indeed it has begun
everywhere--and from there it will spread across old Europe, just as at
the close of the last century the signal for the political and bourgeois
revolution was raised by France.
However this may be, we have just demonstrated once more the profound
difference there is between socialism and anarchism--which our opponents
and the servile press endeavor to confound[76] and, at all events, I
have demonstrated that Marxian socialism is in harmony with modern
science and is its logical continuation. That is exactly the reason why
it has made the theory of evolution the basis of its inductions and why
it thus marks the truly living and final phase--and, therefore, the only
phase recognized by the intelligence of the collectivist democracy--of
socialism which had theretofore remained floating in the nebulosities of
sentiment and why it has taken as its guide the unerring compass of
scientific thought, rejuvenated by the works of Darwin and Spencer.
FOOTNOTES:
[62] We have a typical example of this in the new Italian penal code,
which, as I said before its enforcement, shows no signs of special
adaptation to Italian conditions.
It might just as well be a code made for Greece or Norway, and it has
borrowed from the countries of the north the system of confinement in
cells, which even then in the north was recognized in all its costly
absurdity as a system devised for the brutalization of men.
[63] BEBEL, _Zukunftstaat und Sozialdemokratie_, 1893.
[64] It is this artificial socialism which Herbert Spencer attacks.
[65] See "Socialism: a Reply to the Pope's Encyclical," by Robert
Blatchford. The International Publishing Co., New York.--Tr.
[66] To this State socialism apply most of the individualist and
anarchist objections of Spencer In "_Man vs. State_." D. Appleton & Co.,
New York.
You will recall on this subject the celebrated debate between Spencer
and Laveleye: "The State and the Individual or Social Darwinism and
Christianity," in the "Contemporary Review," 1885.
Lafargue has also replied to Spencer, but has not pointed out the fact
that Spencer's criticisms apply, not to democratic socialism, our
socialism, but to State socialism.
See also CICCOTTI on this subject.
[67] At the moment when I was correcting the proofs of the Italian
edition of this work, M. Crispi had just proposed the "exceptional laws
for the public safety," which, using the outrages of the anarchists as a
pretext, aimed by this method to strike a blow at and to suppress
socialism.
Repressive laws can suppress men, but not ideas. Has the failure of the
exceptional laws against the socialist party in Germany been forgotten?
It is possible to increase the number of crimes, to suppress public
liberties ... but that is no remedy. Socialism will continue its forward
march just the same.
[68] LOMBROSO and LASCHI, _Le Crime politique_, etc., and the monograph
of ELISEE RECLUS, Evolution et Révolution.
[69] WALTER BAGEHOT, Physics and Politics. D. Appleton & Co.
[70] It is this lack of even elementary knowledge of geology, biology,
etc., which makes the vague ideal of anarchy so attractive to many men
or the people with really bright minds, but with no scientific training,
even though they repudiate the employment of violent methods.
In my opinion a more wide-spread instruction in the natural
sciences--together with their substitution for the classics--would do
more than any repressive laws to suppress the outrages of anarchy.
[71] HAMON, _Les Hommes et les théories de l'anarchie_, Paris,
1893.--LOMBROSO, _Ultime scoperte ed applicazioni dell' antropologia
criminale_, Turin, 1893.
[72] At the moment when I was correcting the proofs of the Italian
edition of this book, the emotion had not yet subsided which grew out of
the harmless attack upon Crispi, at Rome, on the 16th of June, and
especially the much keener emotion produced by the death of the
President of the French Republic, Sadi Carnot, on the 24th of June.
I reproduce here, as documentary evidence, the declaration published by
a section of the _Socialist Party of Italian Workers_ in the _Secolo_ of
the 27-28 June, and distributed by thousands in Milan as a manifesto,
and which was not mentioned by either the Conservative or the
Progressive newspapers, who tried by their silence to perpetrate the
confusion between socialism and anarchy.
Here is the declaration:
_The Socialist Party to the Workingmen of Italy._--Down with
assassins! "Humanity now understands that life is sacred, and does
not tolerate brutal violations of this great principle which is
morally the soul of socialism." C. PRAMPOLINI.
"He who struggles for the right to life, in exchange for his labor,
condemns every assault upon human life,--whether it be the work of
bourgeois exploitation in factories, or of the bombs or daggers of
unintelligent revolutionists.
"The Socialist Party which has this principle for a shibboleth,
which expects everything from the class-conscious organization of
the working class, execrates the crime committed against the person
of the President of the French Republic, as a brutal deed, as the
negation of every principle of revolutionary logic.
"It is necessary to arouse in the proletariat the consciousness of
their own rights, to furnish them the _structure_ of organization,
and to induce them to _function_ as a new organism. It is necessary
to conquer the public powers by the means which modern civilization
gives us.
"To revolt, to throw at haphazard a bomb among the spectators in a
theatre, or to kill an individual, is the act of barbarians or of
ignorant people. The _Socialist Party_ sees in such deeds the
violent manifestation of _bourgeois_ sentiments.
"We are the adversaries of all the violences of bourgeois
exploitation, of the guillotine, of musketry discharges (aimed at
strikers, etc.), and of anarchist outrages. _Hurrah for
Socialism!_"
Socialism represses all these sterile and repugnant forms of individual
violence.
Carnot's death accomplished nothing except to arouse a transitory
atavistic hatred of Italians. Afterward, the French Republic elected
another President and everything was as before. The same may be said of
Russia after the assassination of Alexander II.
But the question may be regarded from another point of view, which the
conservatives, the progressives and the radicals too completely forget.
The very day of these outrages two explosions of gas took place, one in
the mines of Karwinn (Austria), and the other in the mines of Cardiff
(England); the first _caused the death of 257 miners_ ..., the second
_the death of 210_!!
Although the death of an honorable man, like Carnot, may be regretted,
it is not to be compared to the mass of human sufferings, misery and woe
which fell upon these 467 working-class _families_, equally innocent as
he.
It will be said, it is true, that the murder of Carnot was the
_voluntary_ act of a fanatic, while no one directly killed these 467
miners!--And certainly this is a difference.
But it must be remarked that if the death of these 467 miners is not
_directly_ the voluntary work of any one, it is _indirectly_ a result of
individual capitalism, which, to swell its revenues, reduces expenses to
the lowest possible point, does not curtail the hours of labor, and does
not take all the _preventive_ measures indicated by science and
sometimes even enjoined by law, which is in such cases not respected,
for the justice of every country is as flexible to accommodate the
interests of the ruling class as it is rigid when applied against the
interests of the working-class.
If the mines were collectively owned, it is certain the owners would be
less stingy about taking all the technical preventive precautions
(electric lighting, for instance), which would diminish the number of
these frightful catastrophes which infinitely increase the anonymous
multitude of the martyrs of toil and which do not even trouble the
digestion of the _share-holders_ in mining companies.
That is what the individualist regime gives us; all this will be
transformed by the socialist regime.
[73] RIENZI, _l'Anarchisme_; DEVILLE, _l'Anarchisme_.
[74] A. ROSSI, _l'Agitazione in Sicilia_, Milan, 1894. COLAJANNI, _In
Sicilia_, Rome, 1894.
[75] The _camorre_ were tyrannical secret societies that were formerly
prevalent and powerful in Italy.--Translator.
[76] I must recognize that one of the recent historians of socialism,
_M. l'Abbé Winterer_--more candid and honorable than more than one
jesuitical journalist--distinguishes always, in each country, the
_socialist_ movement from the _anarchist_ movement.
WINTERER, _le Socialisme contemporain_, Paris, 1894, 2nd edition.
PART THIRD.
SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIALISM.
XIII.
THE STERILITY OF SOCIOLOGY.
One of the strangest facts in the history of the scientific thought of
the nineteenth century is that, though the profound scientific
revolution caused by Darwinism and Spencerian evolution has
reinvigorated with new youth all the physical, biological and even
psychological sciences, when it reached the domain of the social
sciences, it only superficially rippled the tranquil and orthodox
surface of the lake of that social science _par excellence_, political
economy.
It has led, it is true, through the initiative of Auguste Comte--whose
name has been somewhat obscured by those of Darwin and Spencer, but who
was certainly one of the greatest and most prolific geniuses of our
age--to the creation of a new science, _Sociology_, which should be,
together with the natural history of human societies, the crowning glory
of the new scientific edifice erected by the experimental method.
I do not deny that sociology, in the department of purely descriptive
anatomy of the social organism, has made great and fruitful new
contributions to contemporary science, even developing into some
specialized branches of sociology, of which _criminal sociology_, thanks
to the labors of the Italian school, has become one of the most
important results.
But when the politico-social question is entered upon, the new science
of sociology is overpowered by a sort of hypnotic sleep and remains
suspended in a sterile, colorless limbo, thus permitting sociologists to
be in public economy, as in politics, conservatives or radicals, in
accordance with their respective whims or subjective tendencies.
And while Darwinian biology, by the scientific determination of the
relations between the individual and the species, and evolutionist
sociology itself by describing in human society the organs and the
functions of a new organism, was making the individual a cell in the
animal organism, Herbert Spencer was loudly proclaiming his English
individualism extending to the most absolute theoretical anarchism.
A period of stagnation was inevitable in the scientific productive
activity of sociology, after the first original observations in
descriptive social anatomy and in the natural history of human
societies. Sociology represented thus a sort of arrested development in
experimental scientific thought, because those who cultivated it,
wittingly or unwittingly, recoiled before the logical and radical
conclusions that the modern scientific revolution was destined to
establish in the social domain--the most important domain of all if
science was to become the handmaid of life, instead of contenting itself
with that barren formula, science for the sake of science.
The secret of this strange phenomenon consists not only in the fact
that, as Malagodi said,[77] sociology is still in the period of
scientific _analysis_ and not yet in that of _synthesis_, but especially
in the fact that the logical consequences of Darwinism and of scientific
evolutionism applied to the study of human society lead inexorably to
socialism, as I have demonstrated in the foregoing pages.
FOOTNOTE:
[77] MALAGODI, _Il Socialismo e la scienza_. In _Critica Sociale_, Aug.
1, 1892.
XIV.
MARX COMPLETES DARWIN AND SPENCER. CONSERVATIVES AND SOCIALISTS.
To Karl Marx is due the honor of having scientifically formulated these
logical applications of experiential science to the domain of social
economy. Beyond doubt, the exposition of these truths is surrounded, in
his writings, with a multitude of technical details and of apparently
dogmatic formulæ, but may not the same be said of the FIRST PRINCIPLES
of Spencer, and are not the luminous passages on _evolution_ in it
surrounded with a dense fog of abstractions on time, space, the
unknowable, etc.? Until these last few years a vain effort was made to
consign, by a conspiracy of silence, the masterly work of Marx to
oblivion, but now his name is coming to rank with those of Charles
Darwin and Herbert Spencer as the three Titans of the scientific
revolution which begot the intellectual renaissance and gave fresh
potency to the civilizing thought of the latter half of the nineteenth
century.
The ideas by which the genius of Karl Marx completed in the domain of
social economy the revolution effected by science are in number three.
The first is the discovery of the law of surplus-labor. This law gives
us a scientific explanation of the accumulation of private property not
created by the labor of the accumulator; as this law has a more
peculiarly technical character, we will not lay further stress upon it
here, as we have given a general idea of it in the preceding pages.
The two other Marxian theories are more directly related to our
observations on scientific socialism, since they undoubtedly furnish us
the sure and infallible key to the life of society.
I allude, first, to the idea expressed by Marx, as long ago as 1859, in
his _Critique de l'économie politique_, that the economic phenomena form
the foundation and the determining conditions of all other human or
social manifestations, and that, consequently, ethics, law and politics
are only derivative phenomena determined by the economic factor, in
accordance with the conditions of each particular people in every phase
of history and under all climatic conditions.
This idea which corresponds to that great biological law which states
the dependence of the function on the nature and capacities of the organ
and which makes each individual the result of the innate and acquired
conditions of his physiological organism, living in a given environment,
so that a biological application may be given to the famous saying:
"Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,"--this sublime
idea which unfolds before our eyes the majestic drama of history, no
longer as the arbitrary succession of great men on the stage of the
social theatre, but rather as the resultant of the economic conditions
of each people, this sublime idea, after having been partially applied
by Thorold Rogers[78] has been so brilliantly expounded and illustrated
by Achille Loria,[79] that I believe it unnecessary to say anything more
about it.
One idea, however, still appears to me necessary to complete this
Marxian theory, as I remarked in the first edition of my book:
_Socialismo e criminalità_.
It is necessary, indeed, to rid this impregnable theory of that species
of narrow dogmatism with which it is clothed in Marx and still more in
Loria.
It is perfectly true that every phenomenon, as well as every
institution--moral, juridical or political--is simply the result of the
economic phenomena and conditions of the transitory physical and
historical environment. But, as a consequence of that law of natural
causality which tells us that every effect is always the resultant of
numerous concurrent causes and not of one cause alone, and that every
effect becomes in its turn a cause of other phenomena, it is necessary
to amend and complete the too rigid form that has been given to this
true idea.
Just as all the psychical manifestations of the individual are the
resultant of the organic conditions (temperament) and of the environment
in which he lives, in the same way, all the social
manifestations--moral, juridical or political--of a people are the
resultant of their organic conditions (race) and of the environment, as
these are the determining causes of the given economic organization
which is the physical basis of life.
In their turn, the individual psychical conditions become causes and
effect, although with less power, the individual organic conditions and
the issue of the struggle for life. In the same way, the moral,
juridical and political institutions, from effects become causes (there
is, in fact, for modern science no _substantial_ difference between
cause and effect, except that the effect is always the latter of two
related phenomena, and the cause always the former) and react in their
turn, although with less efficacy, on the economic conditions.
An individual who has studied the laws of hygiene may influence
beneficently, for instance, the imperfections of his digestive
apparatus, but always within the very narrow limits of his organic
capacities. A scientific discovery, an electoral law may have an effect
on industry or on the conditions of labor, but always within limits
fixed by the framework of the fundamental economic organization. This is
why moral, juridical and political institutions have a greater influence
on the relations between the various subdivisions of the class
controlling the economic power (capitalists, industrial magnates, landed
proprietors) than on the relations between the
capitalist--property-owners on the one side and the toilers on the
other.
It suffices here for me to have mentioned this Marxian law and I will
refer to the suggestive book of Achille Loria the reader who desires to
see how this law scientifically explains all the phenomena, from the
most trivial to the most imposing, of the social life. This law is truly
the most scientific and the most prolific sociological theory that has
ever been discovered by the genius of man. It furnishes, as I have
already remarked, a scientific, physiological, experiential explanation
of social history in the most magnificent dramas as well as of personal
history in its most trivial episodes--on explanation in perfect harmony
with the entire trend--which has been described as materialistic--of
modern scientific thought.[80]
If we leave out of consideration the two unscientific explanations of
free will and divine providence, we find that two one-sided and
therefore incomplete, although correct and scientific, explanations of
human history have been given. I refer to the _physical determinism_ of
Montesquieu, Buckle and Metschnikoff, and to the _anthropological
determinism_ of the ethnologists who find the explanation of the events
of history in the organic and psychical characteristics of the various
races of men.
Karl Marx sums up, combines and completes these two theories by his
_economic determinism_.
The economic conditions--which are the resultant of the _ethnical_
energies and aptitudes acting in a given _physical_ environment--are the
determining basis of all the moral, juridical and political phenomenal
manifestations of human life, both individual and social.
This is the sublime conception, the fact-founded and scientific Marxian
theory, which fears no criticism, resting as it does on the best
established results of geology and biology, of psychology and sociology.