shall see re-appear upon earth the reign of irrational and brutal
physical force, and that we shall witness, _as happens every day_ in the
lowest strata of the population, the triumph of the most violent men."
And he repeats this on pages 209-210; but he forgets that, given the
socialist premise of a better organized social environment, this
brutality, which is the product of the present misery and lack of
education, must necessarily gradually diminish, and at last disappear.
Now, the possibility of this improvement of the social environment,
which socialism asserts, is a thesis that can be discussed; but when a
writer, in order to deny this possibility, opposes to the future the
effects of a present, whose elimination is the precise question at
issue, he falls into that insidious fallacy which it is only necessary
to point out to remove all foundation from his arguments.
* * * * *
And it is as always by grace of this same fallacy that he is able to
declare, on page 213, that under the socialist regime "the fine arts
will be unable to exist. It is easy to say, they will henceforth be
exercised and cultivated for the benefit of the public. Of what public?
Of the great mass of the people _deprived of artistic education_?" As
if, when poverty is once eliminated and labor has become less exhausting
for the popular classes, the comfort and economic security, which would
result from this, would not be sure to develop in them also the taste
for æsthetic pleasure, which they feel and satisfy now, so far as that
is possible for them, in the various forms of popular art, or as may be
seen to-day it Paris and Vienna by the "_Théâtre socialiste_" and at
Brussells by the free musical matinées, instituted by the socialists and
frequented by a constantly growing number of workingmen. It is just the
same with regard to scientific instruction, as witness "University
Extension" in England and Belgium. And all this, notwithstanding the
present total lack of artistic education, but thanks to the exigence
among the workers of these countries of an economic condition lees
wretched than that of the agricultural or even the industrial
proletariat in countries such as Italy.
And from another point of view, what are the museums if not a form of
collective ownership and use of the products of art?
It is again, as always, the same fallacy which (at page 216) makes M.
Garofalo write: "The history of Europe, from the fifth to the thirteenth
centuries, shows us, _by analogy_, what would happen to the world if the
lower classes should come into power.... How to explain the medieval
barbarism and anarchy save by the grossness and ignorance of the
conquerors? _The same fate_ would inevitably await the modern
civilization, if the controlling power should fall into the hands of the
proletarians, who, assuredly, _are intellectually not superior to the
ancient barbarians_ and MORALLY ARE FAR INFERIOR TO THEM!"
Let us disregard this unjustified and unjustifiable insult and this
completely erroneous historical comparison. It is enough to point out
that it is here supposed that by a stroke of a magic wand "the lower
classes" will be able in a single day to gain possession of power
without having been prepared for this by a preliminary moral revolution,
a revolution accomplished in them by the acquired consciousness of their
rights and of their organic solidarity. It will be impossible to compare
the proletarians in whom this moral revolution shall have taken place
with the barbarians of the Middle Ages.
* * * * *
In my book _Socialismo et Criminalità_, published in 1883, and which
to-day my adversaries, including M. Garofalo (p. 128 _et seq._), try to
oppose to the opinions which I have upheld in my more recent book,
_Socialisme et science positive_ (the present work), I have developed
two theses:
I. That the social organization could not be _suddenly_ changed, as was
then maintained in Italy by the sentimental socialists, since the law of
evolution dominates with sovereign power the human world as well as the
inorganic and organic world;
II. That, by analogy, crime could not disappear _absolutely_ from among
mankind, as the Italian socialists of those days vaguely hinted.
Now, in the first place it would not have been at all inconsistent if,
after having partially accepted socialism, which I had already done in
1883, the progressive evolution of my thought, after having studied the
systematic, scientific form given to socialism by Marx and his
co-workers, had led me to recognize (apart from all personal advantage)
the complete truth of socialism. But, especially, precisely because
scientific socialism (since [the work of] Marx, Engels, Malon, de Paepe,
Dramard, Lanessan, Guesde, Schaeffle, George, Bebel, Loria, Colajanni,
Turati, de Greef, Lafargue, Jaurès, Renard, Denis, Plechanow,
Vandervelde, Letourneau, L. Jacoby, Labriola, Kautsky, etc.) is
different from the sentimental socialism which I had alone in mind in
1883, it is for that very reason that I still maintain to-day these two
same principal theses, and I find myself in so doing in perfect harmony
with international scientific socialism.
And as to the absolute disappearance of all criminality, I still
maintain my thesis of 1883, and in the present book (§ 3), I have
written that, even under the socialist regime, there will be--though
infinitely fewer--some who will be conquered in the struggle for
existence and that, though the chronic and epidemic forms of nervous
disease, crime, insanity and suicide, are destined to disappear, the
acute and sporadic forms will not completely disappear.
At this statement M. Garofalo manifests a surprise which, as I can not
suppose it simulated, I declare truly inexplicable in a sociologist and
a criminologist; for this reminds me too strongly of the ignorant
surprise shown by a review of classical jurisprudence in regard to a new
scientific fact recorded by the _Archives de psychiatrie_ of M.
Lombroso, the case being the disappearance of every criminal tendency in
a woman after the surgical removal of her ovaries.
But that the trepanning of the skull in a case of traumatic epilepsy or
that ovariotomy can cure the central nervous system and, therefore,
restore the character and even the morality of the individual, these are
facts that can be unknown only to a metaphysical idealist, an opponent
of the positivist school of criminology.
And yet this is how M. Garofalo comments on my induction (p. 240); this
commentary is reproduced again on pages 95, 100, 134 and 291:
"It is truly extraordinary that M. Ferri, notwithstanding that criminal
anthropology, of which he has so long been (and still is) one of the
most ardent partisans, should have allowed himself to be so blinded by
the mirage of socialism. A statement such as that which I have quoted at
first leaves the reader stunned, since he sees absolutely _no
connection_ between nervous diseases and collective ownership. It would
be just as sensible to say that by the study of algebra one can make
sure of one's first-born child being a male." How exactly like the
remarks of the Review of jurisprudence concerning the case of the
removal of the ovaries!
Now, let us see whether it is possible, by a supreme effort of our
feeble intellect, to point out a connection between nervous diseases and
collective ownership.
That poverty, _i. e._, inadequate physical and mental nutrition--in the
life of the individual and through hereditary transmission--is, if not
the only and exclusive cause, certainly the principal cause of human
degeneration, is henceforth an indisputable and undisputed fact.
That the poverty and misery of the working class--and notably of the
unhappy triad of the unemployed, the displaced [by machinery, trusts,
etc.] and those who have been expropriated by taxation--is destined to
disappear with the socialization of the land and the means of
production:--this is the proposition that socialism maintains and
demonstrates.
It is, therefore, natural that under the socialist régime, with the
disappearance of poverty, there should be eliminated the principal
source of popular degeneracy in the epidemic and chronic forms of
diseases, crimes, insanity and suicide; this can, moreover, be seen at
present--on a small scale, but clearly enough to positively confirm the
general induction--since diseases [nervous], crimes, insanity and
suicide increase during famines and crises, while they diminish in years
when the economic conditions are less wretched.
There is still more to be said. Even among the aristocracy and
bourgeoisie, no one can fail to see that the feverish competition and
cannibalistic strife of our present system beget nervous disorders,
crime and suicide, which would be rendered quite unnecessary by the
establishment of a socialist régime, which would banish worry and
uneasiness for the morrow from the human race.
There then you see established the relation between collective ownership
and nervous diseases or degeneration in general, not only among the
popular and more numerous classes, but also in the bourgeois and
aristocratic classes.
It is, indeed, astonishing that the anti-socialist prejudice of M.
Garofalo should have been strong enough to cause him to forget that
truth which is nevertheless a legitimate induction of criminal biology
and sociology, the truth that besides the congenital criminal there are
other types of criminals who are more numerous and more directly
produced by the vitiated social environment. And, finally, if the
congenital criminal is not himself the direct product of the
environment, he is indirectly its product through the degeneration begun
in his ancestors, by some acute disease in some cases, but by
debilitating poverty in the majority of cases, and afterward
hereditarily transmitted and aggravated in accordance with the
inexorable laws discovered by modern science.
* * * * *
M. Garofalo's book, which was announced as an assault of science upon
socialism, has been, even from this point of view, a complete
disappointment, as even the Italian anti-socialists have confessed in
several of the most orthodox Reviews.
It now remains for me to reply briefly to his observations--and they are
few and far between--on the relations which exist between contemporary
socialism and the general trend and tendency of thought in the exact
sciences.
Disregarding the arguments which I had developed on this subject by
pointing out that there is an essential connection between economic and
social transmutation (Marx) and the theories of biological transmutation
(Darwin) and of universal transmutation (Spencer), M. Garofalo has
thought it prudent to take up for consideration only "the struggle for
existence" and the relations between "evolution and revolution."
As to the first, five pages (96-100) are enough to enable him to
declare, without supporting his declaration by any positive argument
which is not merely a different verbal expression of the same idea, that
the Darwinian law of the struggle for existence has not undergone and
can not undergo any transformation except that which will change the
violent struggle into competition (the struggle of skill and
intelligence) and that this law is irreconcilable with socialism; for it
necessarily requires the sacrifice of the conquered, while socialism
"would guarantee to all men their material existence, so they would have
no cause for anxiety."
But my friend, the Baron Garofalo, quietly and completely ignores the
fundamental argument that the socialists oppose to the individualist
interpretation that has hitherto been given of the struggle for life and
which still affects the minds of some socialists so far as to make them
think that the law of the struggle for life is not true and that
Darwinism is irreconcilable with socialism.
The socialists, in fact, think that the laws of life are the following,
and that they are concurrent and inseparable: _the struggle for
existence_ and _solidarity in the struggle against natural forces_. If
the first law is in spirit individualist, the second is essentially
socialistic.
Now, not to repeat what I have written elsewhere, it is sufficient here
for me to establish this positive fact that all human evolution is
effected through the constantly increasing predominance of the law of
solidarity over the law of the struggle for existence.
The forms of the struggle are transformed and grow milder, as I showed
as long ago as 1883, and M. Garofalo accepts this way of looking at the
matter when he recognizes that the muscular struggle is ever tending to
become an intellectual struggle. But he has in view only the formal
evolution; he wholly disregards the progressive decrease in the
importance of the struggling function under the action of the other
parallel law of solidarity in the struggle.
Here comes in that constant principle in sociology, that the social
forms and forces co-exist always, but that their relative importance
changes from epoch to epoch and from place to place.
Just as in the individual egoism and altruism co-exist and will co-exist
always--for egoism is the basis of personal existence--but with a
continuous and progressive restriction and transformation of egoism,
corresponding to the expansion of altruism, in passing from the fierce
egoism of savage humanity to the less brutal egoism of the present
epoch, and finally to the more fraternal egoism of the coming society;
in the same way in the social organism, for example, the military type
and the industrial type always co-exist, but with a progressively
increasing predominance of the latter over the former.
The same truth applies to the different forms of the family, and also to
many other institutions, of which Spencerian sociology had given only
the _descriptive_ evolution and of which the Marxian theory of economic
determinism has given the _genetic_ evolution, by explaining that the
religious and juridical customs and institutions, the social types, the
forms of the family, etc., are only the reflex of the economic
structure which differs in varying localities (on islands or continents,
according to the abundance or scarcity of food) and also varies from
epoch to epoch. And--to complete the Marxian theory--this economic
structure is, in the case of each social group, the resultant of its
race energies developing themselves in such or such a physical
environment, at I have said elsewhere.
The same rule holds in the case of the two co-existing laws of the
_struggle for existence_ and of _solidarity in the struggle_, the first
of which predominates where the economic conditions are more difficult;
while the second predominates with the growth of the economic security
of the majority. But while this security will become complete under the
régime of socialism, which will assure to every man who works the
material means of life, this will not exclude the intellectual forms of
the struggle for existence which M. Tchisch recently said should be
interpreted not only in the sense of a _struggle for life_, but also in
the sense of a _struggle for the enrichment of life_.[95]
In fact, when once the material life of every one is assured, together
with the duty of labor for _all_ the members of society, man will
continue always to struggle _for the enrichment of life_, that is to
say, for the fuller development of his physical and moral individuality.
And it is only under the régime of socialism that, the predominance of
the law of solidarity being decisive, the struggle for existence will
change its form and substance, while persisting as an eternal striving
toward a better life in the _solidaire_ development of the individual
and the collectivity.
But M. Garofalo devotes more attention to the practical (?) relations
between socialism and the law of evolution. And in _substance_, once
more making use of the objection already so often raised against Marxism
and its tactics, he formulates his indictment thus:
"The new socialists who, on the one hand, pretend to speak in the name
of sociological science and of the natural laws of evolution, declare
themselves politically, on the other hand, as revolutionists. Now,
evidently science has nothing to do with their political action.
Although they take pains to say that by "revolution" they do not mean
either a riot or a revolt--an explanation also contained in the
dictionary[96]--this fact always remains, _viz._: that they are
unwilling to await the _spontaneous_ organization of society under the
new economic arrangement foreseen by them in a more or less remote
future. For if they should thus quietly await its coming, who among them
would survive to prove to the incredulous the truth of their
predictions?
It is a question then of an evolution _artificially hastened_, that is
to say, in other words, of the _use of force_ to transform society in
accordance with their wishes." (p. 30.)
"The socialists of the Marxian school do not expect the transformation
to be effected by a slow evolution, but by a _revolution of the people_,
and they even fix the epoch of its occurence." (p. 53.)
"Henceforth the socialists must make a decision and take one horn of the
dilemma or the other.
"Either they must be _theoretical evolutionists_, WHO WAIT PATIENTLY
until the time shall be ripe;
Or, on the contrary, they must be _revolutionary democrats_; and if they
take this horn, it is nonsense to talk of evolution, accumulation,
spontaneous concentration, etc. ACCOMPLISH THEN THIS REVOLUTION, IF YOU
HAVE THE POWER." (p. 151.)
I do not wish to dwell on this curious "instigation to civil war" by
such an orthodox conservative as the Baron Garofalo, although he might
be suspected of the not specially Christian wish to see this "revolution
of the people" break out at once, while the people are still
disorganized and weak and while it would be easier for the dominant
class to bleed them copiously....
Let us try rather to deliver M. Garofalo from another trouble; for on
page 119 he exclaims pathetically: "I declare on my honor I do not
understand how a sincere socialist can to-day be a revolutionist. I
would be sincerely grateful to anyone who would explain this to me, for
to me this is an enigma, so great is the contradiction between the
theory and the methods of the socialists."
Well then, console yourself, my excellent friend! Just as in the case of
the relationship between collective ownership and human degeneration,
which seemed so "enigmatical" to this same Baron Garofalo--and although
he has not offered his gratitude for the solution of this enigma to the
socialist Oedipus who explained it to him--here also, in the case of
this other enigma, the explanation is very simple.
On the subject of the social question the attitudes assumed in the
domain of science, or on the field of politics, are the following:
1st. That of the _conservatives_, such as M. Garofalo. These, judging
the world, not by the conditions objectively established, but by their
own subjective impressions, consider that they are well enough off under
the present régime, and contend that everything is for the best in this
best of all possible worlds, and oppose in all cases, with a very
logical egoism, every change which is not merely a superficial change;
2nd. That of the _reformers_, who, like all the eclectics, whose number
is infinite, give, as the Italian proverb says, one blow to the cask and
another to the hoop and do not deny--O, no!--the inconveniences and even
the absurdities of the present ... but, not to compromise themselves too
far, hasten to say that they must confine themselves to minor
ameliorations, to superficial reforms, that is to say, to treating the
symptoms instead of the disease, a therapeutic method as easy and as
barren of abiding results in dealing with the social organism as with
the individual organism;
3rd. That, finally, of the _revolutionaries_, who rightly call
themselves thus because they think and say that the effective remedy is
not to be found in superficial reforms, but in a radical reorganization
of society, beginning at the very foundation, private property, and
which will be so profound that it will truly constitute a social
revolution.
It is in this sense that Galileo accomplished a scientific revolution;
for he did not confine himself to reforms of the astronomical system
received in his time, but he radically changed its fundamental lines.
And it is in this same sense that Jacquart effected an industrial
revolution, since he did not confine himself to reforming the hand-loom,
as it had existed for centuries, but radically changed its structure and
productive power.
Therefore, when socialists speak of socialism as _revolutionary_, they
mean by this to describe the programme to be realized and the final goal
to be attained and not--as M. Garofalo, in spite of the dictionary,
continues to believe--the method or the tactics to be employed in
achieving this goal, the social revolution.
And right here appears the profound difference between the method of
sentimental socialism and that of scientific socialism--henceforth the
only socialism in the civilized world--which has received through the
work of Marx, Engels and their successors that systematic form which is
the distinctive mark of all the _evolutionary_ sciences. And that is why
and how I have been able to demonstrate that contemporary socialism is
in full harmony with the scientific doctrine of evolution.
Socialism is in fact evolutionary, but not in the sense that M. Garofalo
prefers of "waiting patiently until the times shall be ripe" and until
society "shall organize _spontaneously_ under the new economic
arrangement," as if science necessarily must consist in Oriental
contemplation and academic Platonism--as it has done for too
long--instead of investigating the conditions of actual, every-day
life, and applying its inductions to them.
Certainly, "science for the sake of science," is a formula very
satisfactory to the avowed conservatives--and that is only logical--and
also to the eclectics; but modern positivism prefers the formula of
"science for life's sake" and, therefore, thinks that "the ripeness of
the times" and "the new economic arrangement" will certainly not be
realized by spontaneous generation and that therefore it is necessary to
act, in harmony with the inductions of science, in order to bring this
realization to pass.
To act, but _how_?
There is the question of methods and tactics, which differentiates
utopian socialism from scientific socialism; the former fancied it
possible to alter the economic organization of society from top to
bottom by the improvised miracle of a popular insurrection; the latter,
on the contrary, declares that the law of evolution is supreme and that,
therefore, the social revolution can be nothing but the final phase of a
preliminary evolution, which will consist--through scientific study and
propaganda work--in the realization of the exhortation of Marx:
_Proletarians of all countries, unite!_
There then is the explanation of the _easy_ enigma, presented by the
fact that socialism, though revolutionary in its programme, follows the
laws of evolution in its method of realization, and that is the secret
of its vitality and power, and that is also what makes it so essentially
different from that mystical and violent anarchism, which class
prejudices or the exigencies of venal journalism assert is nothing but
a consequence of socialism, while in fact it is the practical negation
of socialism.
* * * * *