THE SOCIALIST LIBRARY. 1.
The Socialist Library.— L
EDITED BY J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P.
SOCIALISM AND POSITIVE SCIENCE
(DARWIN— SPENCER— MARX)
BT
ENRICO FERRI
in
PROFESSOR OF PENAL LAW IN THE UNIVERSITY OF ROME : DIRECTOR OF THE Scuola Positiva : DEPUTY.
TRANSLATED BY EDITH C. HARVEY
From the French Edition of 1896
FIFTH EDITION
LONDON
INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY,
23, BRIDE LANE, E.G.
1909.
EDITIONS
FIRST ............... April 1905
SECOND ............... Sept. 1905
THIRD ............... Nov. 1905
FOURTH... ............ Nov. 1906
FIFTH ............... Feb. 1909
NX
Al
7116S1
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
PART I.
CHAP. PAGE
EDITOR'S PREFACE - v
PREFACE TO FRENCH EDITION - - ix
INTRODUCTION - - - xi
I. VIRCHOW AND HAECKEL AT THE CONGRESS
OF MUNICH ------ i
II. THE EQUALITY OF INDIVIDUALS - 8
III. THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AND ITS VICTIMS 23
IV. THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST - 38 V. SOCIALISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS 47
VI. THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SPECIES 55
VII. "THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE " AND THE " CLASS
STRUGGLE" ------ 62
PART II. T VIII/ EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM 77
IX. THE ORTHODOX ARGUMENT AND THE SOCIA- LIST ARGUMENT AS OPPOSED TO THE THEORY OF EVOLUTION - 79
X. THE LAW OF APPARENT RETROGRESSION AND
COLLECTIVE PROPERTY - - 85
SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY 93
( Xlli EVOLUTION, REVOLUTION, REVOLT, SOCIALISM
AND ANARCHY in
PART III.
XIII. STERILITY OF SOCIOLOGY 137
; XIV. MARX, DARWIN, SPENCER, &c. - - - 140
APPENDICES.
1. LETTER IN REPLY TO HERBERT SPENCER.
2. SOCIALIST SUPERSTITION AND INDIVIDUALIST
SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS.
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
Socialismo e Scienza Positiva was published in Rome in 1894, and in the following year was translated into French (from which this trans- lation is made), German and Spanish. In 1901 it was published in English in America.
After having been an adverse critic of the unscientific Utopian socialism which preceded Marx, Ferri yielded in 1893 to Marx's influ- ence, identified himself with the socialists in the Italian Chamber of which he had been a radical member since 1886, and began to write Socialismo e Scienza Positiva.
In his recently published book on Democracy and Reaction, Mr. Hobhouse points out h6w the conservative and aristocratic interests in Europe have armed themselves for defensive and offensive purposes with the law of the struggle for existence, and its corollary, the survival of the fittest. Ferri's aim in this volume has been to show that Darwinism is not only not in intellectual opposition to socialism, but is its scientific foundation.
In developing his argument, he brings his new faith into organic touch with the studies in criminology, especially social criminology, upon which he had written a great work in 1880, a portion of which has been published in the Criminology Series, edited by Dr. Douglas Mojrison. No part of this present study is more suggestive than the frequent discussions which it contains upon the social
nature of crime, its connection with the char- acteristics of the various stages in social evo- lution, and the limits within which it can be cured by better economic arrangements.
In common with most Marxian socialists, Ferri attacks religion and capitalism, marriage (as we know it) and private property in the means of production, in the same breath. The socialist movement in this country has not only not considered these attacks to be essen- tial to the success of socialism, but has largely disagreed with them. It may be true logically, as Ferri asserts, that once the evolutionary process is granted, it is as easy to swallow the gnat of eternal and self-existent force and matter, as it is to swallow the camel of an eternal and self-existent God. Neither belief may explain the origin of force, of creative power, of will to struggle. But the British socialist, as a rule, has said " Those things have nothing to do with socialism."
So also with marriage. Mr. Bryce suggested to the Sociological Society a few days ago (23rd March) that it was necessary to collect and classify, with a view of drawing scientific sociological inferences from them, the facts regarding the working of laws making divorce easy. These facts have not been collected and until they are, dogmatising in a priori fashion upon the sociological future of the marriage tie has not seemed to the British socialist a very profitable mental exercise. He has been content to record two well observed conclusions. The first is, that capi- talism hinders the free play of simple affection in marriage to-day, and is thus responsible not only for many ghastly failures in matri- monial ventures, but also for offspring phy- sically and morally unfit. This Ferri describes as " sexual selection the wrong way " (selection
sexuelle a rebours.) The second is, that capitalist industrial methods are crushing the family out of existence, and whatever family theory may or may not be most in accordance with socialist conceptions, as a matter of actual fact, capitalism and family life cannot flourish together.
Ferri has conclusively shown that the natural basis of the family is menaced by the motives and the conditions of the capitalist regime. When that regime has been supplanted by another such as the socialist contemplates, the family will flourish on congenial soil and in pure air, and its moral and sociological value will decide what laws are to govern its form and determine its stability. Taking these things into consideration, one may, with formidable array of argument, contend that so far from the marriage bond being weakened by socialism, the supreme moral and sociological value of the family organisation will be then so clear, that the secular state will frown upon divorce as much as the Catholic Church does at the present moment. The chief value of this study, however, is the claim that it so successfully makes, that the socialist conception -of human progress and of the social conditions which are to be the characteristics of the next, the socialist, stage in that evolution, is not only in accordance with the processes which Darwin proved to be the method of the development of life from the moneron to man, but is those very processes themselves applied to human society with such modifications as are necessitated by the fact that they now relate to life which can consciously adapt itself to its -circumstances and aid natural evolution by economising in experimental waste. Thus, socialism is naught but Dar-
winism economised, made definite, become an intellectual policy, applied to the conditions of human society.
The translation, which has been made by Miss Harvey, is as literal as the medium of English will allow.
J.R.M. April, 1905.
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
FOR THE FRENCH EDITION.
THIS VOLUME — which it is desired to bring before the large public of French readers — in entering on the complex and vast question of socialism, has a well-defined and limited aim.
I have proposed to indicate, and nearly always by means of rapid and summary observations, the general relations between contemporary socialism and the trend of modern scientific thought.
The opponents of contemporary socialism only see in it, or only wish to see in it, a reproduction of the sentimental socialism of the first half of the igth century. They maintain that socialism is contrary to the data and fundamental inductions of physics, biology and sociology, the marvellous de- velopment and fruitful applications of which are the title to glory of the century just closed.
These opponents of socialism have made use of the individual interpretations and exaggera- tions of certain partisans of Darwinism, of the opinions of such-and-such a sociologist — opinions and interpretations in manifest con- tradiction to 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 is against socialism, so much the worse for science." And this is correct if by science — even with a capital S — is meant all the observations and conclusions ad usum delphini
which orthodox science, academic and official — often in good faith, but sometimes also with a view to personal interest — has always placed at the disposal of dominant minorities.
I have believed it could be shown that positive science is in complete agreement with contemporary socialism which, since Marx and Engels and their successors, differs essen- tially from sentimental socialism both in its scientific discipline and in its political tactics, though it continues the generous efforts to realise an identical aim : social justice for all men.
I have loyally and sincerely maintained my thesis on scientific grounds : I have always recognised the partial truth of the theories of our opponents, and I have not overlooked the title to glory that the bourgeois class and science have acquired since the French Revolution. The disappearance of the bourgeois class and science, which at their coming had marked the disappearance of the clerical and aristocratic class and science, will have as a consequence the triumph of social justice for the whole of humanity, without distinction of classes, and the triumph of truth in its final consequences without reservations.
The appendix contains my replies to a letter of Herbert Spencer and to the anti- socialistic book of M. Garofalo. It shows what is the actual state of social science, the struggle between ultra-conservative ortho- doxy, which is prevented by its traditional syllogisms from seeing the sad facts of contem- porary life, and between the new heterodoxy which is increasingly asserting itself among the learned as also in the collective intelligence.
ENRICO FERRI. Brussels, Nov., 1895.
INTRODUCTION.
A CONVINCED follower of Darwin and Spencer, I • purpose demonstrating that Marxian socialism — the only kind that has a positive method and scientific worth, and that has power henceforward to inspire and group the social democrats of the whole civilised world — is only the practical and fruitful comple- ment in social life of that modern scientific revolution, which, inaugurated several centur- ies back by the revival of the experimental method in all the branches of human know- ledge, has triumphed in our days, thanks to the labours of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer.
It is true that Darwin, and especially Spencer, stopped short half -way from the final conclusions of religious, political and social order, which necessarily follow from ;their indisputable premises. But that is only an individual episode which cannot stop the inevitable march of science or delay the fulfilment of its practical consequences which accord admirably with the saddest necessities of contemporary life. This is but one more obligation to us to render justice to the scientific and political life of Karl Marx, who completes the renovation of modern scientific thought.
Feeling and thought are the two inseparable motive forces in the individual and the collective life.
Socialism, w.hich was only a few years ago at the mercy of the deep-rooted but undiscip- lined fluctuations of humanitarian sentiment-
alism, found in the work of Marx and of those who developed and completed it, its scientific and social guide. In that lies the explanation of each of its conquests.
Civilisation is the most fruitful and beauti- ful development of human energies, but it also contains an infectious virus of enormous power. By the side of the splendour of artistic, scientific and industrial work, it accumulates cankered products, idleness, misery, folly, rcrime, physical and moral suicide — that is to say, slavery.
Pessimism — this mournful symptom of a life without an ideal, and, in part, the effect of the exhaustion, or even of the degeneracy of the nervous system — extols final annihilation in order to conquer pain.
We, on the contrary, have faith in the eternal " healing power of Nature," and socialism is exactly that breath of a new and better life which will deliver humanity — possibly after some access of fever — from the noxious products of the present phase of civilisation, and which in a future phase will give a new expansion to the healthy and fruitful energies of all human beings.
ENRICO FERRI. Rome, June, 1894.
SOCIALISM AND POSITIVE SCIENCE.
PART I. CHAPTER I.
VIRCHOW AND HAECKEL AT THE CONGRESS OF MUNICH.
ON the 1 8th September, 1877, Ernest Haeckel, the celebrated embryologist of Jena, gave an eloquent address at the Congress of Naturalists, held at Munich, in defence and explanation of Darwinism, at that time the subject of most stormy controversies.
Some days after, Virchow, the great path- ologist— a fighter in the parliamentary " pro- gressive " party, who hates new theories in politics as much as in science — violently attacked the Darwinian theory of organic evolution, and with a very just presentiment launched against it the cry of alarm and the political anathema; " Darwinism leads directly to Socialism."
The German followers of Darwin, with
Oscar Schmidt and Haeckel at their head, protested immediately ; and in order not to add this grave political opposition to that then raised against Darwinism from the religious, philosophical, and biological schools, they maintained that on the contrary the Darwinian theory is in open and absolute opposition to socialism.
" If the socialists were prudent (wrote Oscar Schmidt in the Ausland, 2jih November, 1877) they would do all in their power to hush up in silence the theory of descent, for this doc- trine proclaims aloud that socialistic ideas are impracticable."
" In fact," said Haeckel, * " there is no scientific doctrine that proclaims more openly than the theory of descent, that the equality of individuals, to which socialism tends, is an impossibility, that this chimerical equality is in absolute contradiction to the necessary inequality of individuals existing as a matter of fact everywhere.
" Socialism demands for all citizens equal rights, equal duties, equal wealth, equal enjoyments ; the theory of descent establishes, on the contrary, that the realisation of these wishes is purely and simply impossible, that, in human as in animal societies, the rights, the duties, the wealth, the enjoyments of all the associated members neither will, nor cap, ever be equal.
* Les preuves du transformisme. Reply to Virchow. Paris, 1879. Translated Soury, pp. no, &c.
"The great law of differentiation teaches that, as well in the general theory of evolution as in its biological part — the theory of descent —the variety of phenomena arises from an original unity, the diversity of functions from a primitive identity, the complexity of organisation from a primordial simplicity. The conditions of existence are from their entry into life unequal for all individuals. There must be added hereditary qualities and innate tendencies which vary more or less. How could one's work-in life and the results that proceed from it be equal for all ?
"The more social life is developed, the more the great principle of the division of labour becomes of importance, the more the stability of the whole state demands that its members should divide among themselves the varied duties of life, and as the work to be accomplished by individuals, and the expen- diture of strength, talent, abilities, which it necessitates, differs in the highest degree, it is natural that the reward of this work should also differ. These are facts so simple and so evident, that every intelligent and enlightened politician ought, it seems to me, to extol the theory of descent and general doctrine of evolution as the best antidote to the absurd levelling Utopias of socialism.
" And it is Darwinism, the theory of selec- tion, that Virchow, in his denunciation, has had more in view even than transform ism, the theory of descent, which are always confused. Darwinism is anything rather than socialistic.
"If one wishes to attribute a political tendency to this English theory— which is allowable — this tendency would only be aristocratic, not at all democratic, still less socialistic.
"The theory of selection teaches that in the life of humanity, as in that of plants and animals, everywhere and always a small privileged minority alone succeeds in living and developing itself ; the immense majority, on the contrary, suffer and succumb more or less prematurely. The germs of every kind of plant and animal, and the young that are produced from them, are innumerable. But the number of those which have the good fortune to develop to their complete maturity and which attain the aim of their existence, is comparatively insignificant.
" The cruel and pitiless ' struggle for exis- tence ' which goes on everywhere in animate nature, and most naturally go on, this eternal and inexorable competition of all that lives, is an undeniable fact. Only the small num- ber chosen from the strongest and fittest can sustain this competition victoriously : the large majority of the unhappy competitors must necessarily perish. This tragic fatality may well be deplored, but it cannot be denied nor changed. All are called, but few are chosen.
" The selection, the ' election,' of these ' chosen ones,' is necessarily connected with the defeat or the loss of a great number of their living fellow creatures. Thus, another
learned Englishman has called the funda- mental principle of Darwinism : ' the survival of the fittest, the victory of the best.'
" In every case the principle of the selection is anything rather than democratic : it is, on the contrary, thoroughly aristocratic. If, then, Darwinism, pushed to its final consequences, has, according to Virchow, ' a very dangerous side for the politician,' that is doubtless because it favours aristocratic aspirations."
I have reproduced in their entirety, and even in their form, all the arguments of Haeckel because they are those repeated — in varying tones and with expressions that only differ from these in precision and eloquence — by the opponents of socialism who like to assume a scientific manner, and who, to facilitate their dispute, make use of these ready-made phrases which have more currency, even in science, than one would imagine.
It is easy, however, to show in this discus- sion, that Virchow's point of view was more exact and clear, and that the history of the last twenty years has proved him to be right.
It has happened, in fact, that Darwinism and socialism have both progressed with a marvellous force of expansion. The first gained from thenceforth the unanimous sup- port of the scientists for its fundamental theory ; the second continued to develop in its general aspirations and political discipline, flooding all Jhe channels of the social con- science like a torrential inundation from
internal wounds due to the daily increase of physical and moral disease, or like a slow, capillary, irrevocable infiltration into minds freed from all prejudices and unable to satisfy themselves with the personal advantages procured by the orthodox "raking in" of profits.
But as theories, political or scientific, are natural phenomena, and not the capricious and ephemeral blossom of the free will of those who make and propagate them, it is evident that if these two currents of modern thought have both been able to triumph over the first and strongest opposition of scientific and political conservatism, and if the phalanx of their disciples is daily augmented, that of itself is sufficient to prove — I would almost say by a law of intellectual symbiosis — that they are neither irreconcilable nor contra- dictory.
Moreover, the three principal arguments to which the anti -socialistic reasoning of Haeckel is substantially reduced, cannot be maintained against the most elementary criticism nor the most superficial observation of daily life.
I. Socialism tends to an imaginary equality of everybody and everything. Darwinism, on the contrary, not only states, but explains the organic reasons for the natural inequality of the aptitudes and even of the needs of individuals.
'II. In the life of humanity, as in that of plants and animals, the immense majority of those who are born are destined to perish
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because only a small minority triumph in the " struggle for existence." Socialism claims, on the contrary, that all ought to triumph in this struggle, and that no one ought to be conquered.
III. The struggle for existence secures the survival of the best, the victory of the " fittest," and there consequently follows an aristocratic gradation of selected individuals, instead of the democratic, collectivist levelling of socialism.
CHAPTER II.
THE EQUALITY OF INDIVIDUALS.
There is absolutely no foundation for the first of the objections made to socialism in the name of Darwinism.
If it were true that socialism aspires to the equality of all individuals, it would be correct to assert that Darwinism condemns it irre- vocably.0
But though people even to-day fluently / repeat — some in good faith, like parrots that recite ready-made phrases, others in bad faith and through polemical dexterity — that social- ism is synonymous with equality and level- ling, the truth is, on the contrary, that scientific socialism — that which is inspired by the theory of Marx, and which alone deserves at the present day to be defended or attacked — has never denied the inequality of indi- viduals as of all living beings — an inequality innate and acquired, physical and moral.f
* J. de Johannis, II concetto dell' eguaglianza nel socialismo e nella scienza, in Rassegna delle scienze sociali. Florence, i5th March, 1883, and more recently Huxley, On the Natural Inequality of Man in the Nineteenth Century, January, 1890.
t Utopian Socialism has left as a mental habit, even with the most convinced followers of Marxian socialism, the affirmation of certain inequalities — the equality of the two sexes for example — which cannot be sustained in any manner. Rebel ( Woman in the Past, Present and Future, trans. London, 1885), the propagandist and apostle of Marxian theories, this clever and eloquent strategist of democratic socialism, still repeats the affirmation that
It is as if one said that socialism claims that a royal decree or a popular vote could establish that " from henceforth all men shall have a stature of five feet seven inches !"
But really socialism is something more serious and more difficult to refute.
Socialism says : " Men are unequal, but they are all men."
And, in fact, although every individual is born and develops in a manner more or less different from all other individuals — just as there are not two leaves in a forest the same, so in the whole world there are not two men exactly equal — yet every man from the fact alone that he is a human being has a. right to the existence of a man and not of a slave or beast of burden.
We also know that all men cannot accom- plish the same work to-day, when social inequalities are added to natural inequalities,
from a physio-psychical point of view woman is the equal of man, and he attempts unsuccessfully to refute the scientific objections that have been raised to this thesis.
After the scientific researches of MM. Lombroso and Ferrero (Donna delinquente, prostituta e normals, Turin, 1893), the physiological and psychological inferiority of woman compared with man cannot be denied. I have given a Darwinian explanation of this fact (Scuola positiva, 1893, nos. 7 and 8) which Lombroso has since completely accepted (Uomo di genio, 6th edition, 1894) in drawing attention to the fact that all the physio- psychical characteristics of women are the result of her great biological function — maternity.
A being that creates from herself another — not in the fleeting moment of a voluptuous contract, but by the organic and psychical sacrifice of pregnancy, childbirth and suckling — cannot preserve for herself as much strength as the man who has only an infinitely less heavy function iff the reproduction of the species.
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and that they could not do so any more under a socialist regime when the social organisa- tion will tend to diminish congenital inequal- ities. There will always be people whose brain or muscular system will be more fit for scientific or artistic work, whilst others will be more fit for manual work or for work of mechanical precision, etc.
What ought not to be, and what will not be, is that there should be men who do no work, and others who work too much or who are too poorly remunerated.
But we have attained the height of in- justice and absurdity, and in these days it is he who does not work who has the most important advantages assured to him by the individual monopoly of wealth, accumulated by hereditary transmission. This wealth, moreover, is very rarely due to the economy and privations of the actual possessor or of some industrious ancestor ; it is most fre- quently the time-honoured fruit of spoliation
Also, save for certain individual exceptions, the woman has less physical sensibility (the current opinion is the contrary, but it confuses sensibility with irrita- bility), 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 die out. The woman has less intelligence, especially in synthetic power, precisely because though there are no women of genius (Sergi in Atti delta societd romana di antropologia, 1894), or very nearly none, they, however, give birth to men of genius.
This is so true that one meets with a greater sensrbility and intelligence among women whose function and sense of motherhood do not exist or are less developed (women of genius have generally masculine features), and many of them attain their complete intellectual development just after the critical period when motherhood has passed.
tl
by military conquest, by unscrupulous specu- lation, or by the favouritism of sovereigns ; but it is in every case always independent of any exertion, of any work useful to society, on the part of the heir, who often dissipates his fortune in idleness, or in the vortex of a life as empty in reality as it is brilliant in appearance.
And when we have not to consider a fortune due to inheritance, we are faced with wealth due to fraud. Without speaking for the moment of the economic organisation, whose mechanism Karl Marx has revealed to us, which, even without fraud, normally allows the capitalist or the landlord to live on his revenues without working, it is incontestable that the fortunes which have been made or which have increased the most rapidly under our eyes, cannot be the fruits of honest work. The really honest workman, however inde- fatigable and economical he may be, if he
But if it is scientifically certain that woman represents an inferior degree of biological evolution, and that she is placed even by her physio-psychical characteristics between the child and the adult male, it does not follow from this that the socialist conclusions in what concerns the woman question are false.
Quite the contrary. Society ought to put woman, as a human being and as a creator of men — more worthy consequently of love and respect — in a better legal and moral condition than she is in at present — too often a beast of burden or object of luxury. Similarly when from the economic point of view special measures are claimed to-day in favour of women, consideration is only paid to their special physio-psychical conditions, whilst the present economic individualism wears them out in manufactories and rice plantations. Socialism, on the contrary, de- mands from them only professional, scientific or muscular work which is in keeping with sacred motherhood.
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succeeds in raising himself from a state of wage- earning to that of foreman or employer, can in a long life of privations accumulate at the most a few hundred pounds. Those men, however, who without industrial discoveries due to their own talent accumulate millions in a few years can only be unscrupulous business men, if we except a few strokes of good luck, and it is these parasites — bankers and public speculators — who live most grandly, who are decorated or placed in official posts as the reward of their honest transactions.
The immense majority who work, only receive a sustenance that barely suffices to keep them from dying of hunger ; they live in the back shops, the garrets, in the tumble- down lanes of great towns, in the hovels in the country that are not wanted as cow-sheds or stables for horses.
To this we must add the horrors of unem- ployment, the most painful and frequent of the three symptoms of this equality in misery which is spreading in the modern economic world, in Italy and elsewhere, in a more or less intense form.
I speak of the always increasing army of those out of work in agriculture and in trade and manufactures, of those thrown out of the class of small householders, and of those who are dispossessed of their little landed property by taxes, debts, or usury.
It is therefore not accurate to state that socialism asks for all citizens material and positive equality of work and possessions.
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The equality can only consist in an obliga- tion on the part of each individual to work for a livelihood if each is guaranteed condi- tions of existence worthy of a human being in return for service rendered to society.
Equality, according to socialism — as Benoit Malon said* — ought to be understood in a double sense : I. All men as such ought to be assured of the conditions of human existence; 2. All men ought to be equal at the starting point in the struggle for life, so that each may freely develop his own personality with equality of social conditions, whilst to-day a healthy and robust, but poor child, in com- petition with a feeble, but rich child, goes to the wall.
This is the radical, incommensurable trans- formation that socialism demands, but which it also discovers and announces as an evolu- tion— already begun in the world of to-day — necessary and inevitable in the world of the future.|
This transformation is. summed up in the conversion of private or individual ownership of the means of production, that is to say of the physical basis of human life (land, mines, houses, manufactories, machines, implements of work, means of transport), into collective or social ownership according to methods and processes with which I will deal further on.
From this point we will hold it to have
* B. Malon, Le Socialisme integral, 2 vol., Paris, 1892.
t Letourneau Pass6, present et avenir du travail, in Revue mensuelle de I'tcole d'anthropologie. Paris, icth June, 1894.
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been proved that the first objection of anti- socialistic reasoning is not valid because its premise is non-existent ; it supposes, in fact, that contemporary socialism lays claim to a chimerical, physical, and moral equality among all men, when scientific and positive socialism has never thought never even dreamed of it.
Socialism maintains, on the contrary, that this inequality — very much diminished in a better social organisation which will do'away with all the physical and moral imperfections which misery accumulates from generation to generation — will never, however, be able to disappear, for the reasons Darwinism has discovered in the mysterious mechanism of life, in the infinite succession of men and species.
In every social organisation, in whatsoever fashion one conceives it, there will always be some men tall and others short, feeble and strong, sanguine and nervous, more and less intelligent, some superior in intelligence, others in muscular force ; and it is well that it should be so — anyhow, it is inevitable.
It is well, because the variety and inequality of individual aptitudes produce naturally the division of work which Darwinism has rightly declared to be a law of individual physiology and of social econony.
All men ought to work to live, but each ought to give himself up to the work which best corresponds to his ability. We should thus avoid a hurtful waste of power, and work would cease from being repugnant and become
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agreeable and necessary as a condition of physical and moral health.
And when all have given to society the work which best corresponds to their innate and acquired abilities, each has a right to the same reward, because each has contributed equally to the totality of labour which sustains the life of the social aggregate, and jointly with it, that of each individual.
The peasant who digs the ground performs a work in appearance more modest, but quite as necessary and meritorious as that of the workman who makes a locomotive, of the engineer who perfects it, or of the scholar who struggles with the unknown in his study or laboratory.
It is only necessary that in a society all should work, just as in the individual organism all the cells, for instance, the nerve cells, the muscle cells, or bone cells, fulfil their different functions, more or less modest in appearance, but each equally necessary and useful biologically to the. life of the whole organism.
In the biological organism no living cell remains inactive, and it is only nourished by material exchanges in proportion to its work; in the social organism no individual ought to live without working, whatever may be the form of his work.
Thus the greatest number of artificial diffi- culties which opponents raise against socialism are swept away.
But who will black the boots under the
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socialist regime? asks M. Richter in his book so poor in ideas but which reaches the grotesque when he supposes that in the name of social equality the " great Chancellor " of the socialist society will be forced, before giving his attention to public affairs, to black his boots and mend his clothes ! Really, if the opponents of socialism had only argu- ments of this kind, discussion would be useless.
But all would wish to perform the least fatiguing and most pleasant work, says another with more apparent seriousness.
I would reply that this is equivalent to demanding to-day a decree thus conceived: " Henceforth all men shall be born painters or surgeons."
But it is precisely these anthropological varieties of temperament and character that will secure, without its being necessary to have recourse to a monkish regulation (another baseless objection to socialism), this distribu- tion of different intellectual and manual labours.
Propose to a peasant of moderate intelli- gence to devote himself to the study of anatomy or the penal code, or inversely tell the person whose brain is more developed than his muscles to dig the ground instead of observing with the microscope. They' will each prefer the work for which they feel they have the most ability.
When society is organised under a collec- tivist regime the change of trade or profession
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will not be as considerable as most imagine. When industries for personal luxuries are once suppressed — which are most often a defiance to the misery of the masses — the quantity and variety of labours will gradually, that is to say, naturally, adapt themselves to the socialistic phase of civilisation as they now correspond to the bourgeois phase.
Besides, under the socialistic regime every- one will have greater liberty to assert and show his personal aptitude, and it will not happen, as it does to-day, that from want of pecuniary means many peasants or members of the working class or small shop keepers endowed with natural talents, remain atrophied and are forced to be peasants, workmen, or employees when they could furnish society with a different and more fruitful work better adapted to their peculiar genius.
The essential point consists solely in this : In exchange for the work with which they supply society, the latter ought to assure to the peasant and artisan, just' as to the man who devotes himself to a liberal career, conditions of existence worthy of a human being.
Then will also disappear the unworthy spectacle which causes a dancer, for example, to gain by her steps in one evening as much as a scientist, a doctor, or a lawyer, in a year of work — though they are indeed more likely to impersonate misery in a black coat.
Certainly the arts will not be neglected in the socialistic regime, because socialism
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desires life to be agreeable to all, and this to-day is only the privilege of the few ; it will give, on the contrary, a marvellous im- petus to all the arts, and, if it abolishes private luxury, it will be to favour the splendour of public monuments.
More attention will be paid to the remuner- ation given to each for work done, and compensation for specially difficult or dan- gerous tasks will be given by increasing the value to the workman of each hour spent on them. 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. In fact, when all the world works, and when many unproductive works are suppressed, the sum total of daily work to divide among men will be much less heavy and easier to bear (in consequence of more abundant food, more comfortable lodging and recreations assured to each) than it is to-day for those who work and who are so badly treated. Also, the progress of the application of science to in- dustry will render the work of men less and less laborious.
Individuals will voluntarily give themselves up to work, although their salary or remunera- tion cannot be accumulated as private riches, because if a healthy, normal, well-nourished man avoids excessive or badly-paid work, he does not remain in idleness, for there is for him a physiological and psychological neces- sity to give himself up to a daily occupation in keeping with his aptitudes.
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The different kinds of sport are for the idle classes a substitute for productive work which a physiological necessity imposes on them to save them from the disagreeable conse- quences of absolute repose and from ennui.
The most serious problem will consist in apportioning to each the payment for work. It is known that collectivism adopts the formula, " to each according to his work," whilst communism adopts the other, " to each according to his need."
No one can give, in its practical details, the solution of this problem ; but this impossi- bility of foretelling the future in its smaller details authorises no one to tax socialism with being an unattainable Utopia. No one would have been able to prophesy, a priori, from its beginnings, the successive developments of any civilisation : I shall prove that in speak- ing of the methods of social renovation.
This we can confidently affirm, relying upon the most certain inductions of psychology and sociology.
One cannot deny, as' Marx himself has declared, that the above second formula — which according to some allows one to dis- tinguish anarchy from socialism — represents a more remote and more complex ideal. But one cannot deny that the formula of collec- tivism only represents one phase of social evolution, a period of individual discipline which must necessarily precede communism.*
* M. Zerboglie has very justly remarked that indivi- dualism, acting without pressure of external sanction, and
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We must not believe that socialism will realise every possible ideal of humanity, and that after it there will be nothing to desire and conquer ! Our descendants would be condemned to idleness and vagrancy if we had the capacity to exhaust every possible human ideal.
The individual or society which has no longer any ideal to pursue is dead or about to die. The formula of communism could then be a further ideal when collectivism has been completely realised by the historical process with which I shall deal further on.
We are now able to conclude that there is no contradiction between socialism and Darwinism on the subject of equality among all men. Socialism has never affirmed it, and it aims, in agreement with Darwinism, to pro- mote a better life for individuals and for society.
This permits us also to answer the objection too often repeated, that socialism stifles and suppresses human personality under the leaden mantle of collectivism by reducing individuals to a monastic function, by making of them so many human bees in the social hive.
It is exactly the contrary that is true. Is it not evident that it is in the present
by a simple internal impulse of right — this is the distant ideal of Herbert Spencer — would only be realised after a phase of collectivism in which individual activity, and instincts could discipline themselves into social solidarity whilst escaping from the essentially anarchic individualism of our time, in which every man, if he is sufficiently clever to 'skirt the penal code,' may do what he pleases without troubling himself about his fellow-men.
bourgeois organisation that thereare found this atrophy and loss of so many individualities which might develop to their own advantage and to the advantage of society at large ? To-day, in fact, apart from a few exceptions, everyone is valued for what he possesses, and not for what he is.
He who is born poor, obviously through no fault of his own, may be endowed by nature with artistic or scientific genius, but if he has no patrimony of his own which will give him the means of triumphing over his first struggles, and of completing his personal education, or if he has not, like the shepherd Giotto, the good fortune to meet the rich Cimabue — he must disappear without a name in the great prison of wage slavery, and society itself thus loses treasures of intellectual force.
He who is born rich, although he owes his fortune to no personal effort, even if he has little brains, will play a leading part in the theatre of life, and all servile persons will be prodigal of praises and flattery, and he will fancy, simply because he has money, that he is a different sort of person from what he really is.
When property has become collective, that is under the socialist regime, each man will have his means of existence assured, and daily work will only serve to bring to light the special aptitudes more or less original of each individual, and the best and most fruitful years of life 'will not be used up as they are
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now by the painful and despairing conquest of daily bread.
Socialism will assure to all a human life — real liberty to show and develop the physical and moral personalities born with them, infinitely varied and unequal. Socialism does not deny inequality, it only wishes to direct it towards a free and rich development of human life.
CHAPTER III.
THE STRUGGLE FOR LIFE AND ITS VICTIMS.
Socialism and Darwinism are found to be opposed, it is said, on a second point. Dar- winism proves that the immense majority- plants, animals, men — are destined to succumb because only a small minority triumph " in the struggle for life " ; socialism claims that all ought to triumph, and that no one ought to succumb.
One may first reply that even in the biological domain of the " struggle for existence," the disproportion between the number of individuals who are born and that of those who survive always lessens pro- gressively as one rises from vegetables to animals, and from animals to men.
This law of decreasing disproportion between the " called " and the " chosen " is shown even in the different species of the same natural order.
In fact, with vegetables the individual yields each year an infinite number of seeds, and an infinitesimal number of these survive. With animals the number of young from each individual diminishes, and the number of those that survive, on the contrary, increases. Finally, with the human species, the number of individuals to which each gives birth is very small, and the greater number survive.
But againln the case of vegetables, animals,
and man, it is the inferior and most simple species, the races and classes least varied in the scale of beings, which reproduce themselves most freely and whose generations succeed one another most rapidly in consequence of the lesser longevity of the individuals.
A fern produces millions of spores, and its life is very short — whilst a palm tree gives a few dozen seeds and lives a century.
A fish produces several thousand eggs— whilst the elephant and the chimpanzee have a few little ones that live a great number of years.
In the human species savage races are the most prolific, and have short life --whilst civilised races have a low birth-rate and a greater longevity.
From all this it follows that, even keeping to the domain of pure biology, the number of conquerors in the "struggle for existence" is always more considerable relatively to the number of births as one passes from vegetables to animals, from animals to men, and from inferior species or varieties to superior races or varieties,
The iron law of "the struggle for existence" rapidly reduces, then, the hecatomb of the conquered as the forms of life become more complex and perfect.
It would, therefore, be an error to invoke against socialism the Darwinian law of natural selection as it is manifested in primi- tive forms of life without keeping account of its continued attenuation as we pass from
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vegetables to animals, from animals to men, and among men themselves from the primitive to the most advanced races.
And as socialism represents a more advanced phase of progress in the life of humanity it is still less allowable to urge against it as an objection such a gross and inexact inter- pretation of the Darwinian law.
It is certain that the opponents of socialism have misused the Darwinian law, or rather have misused the " brutal " interpretation of it, to justify the modern individualistic com- petition which is too often a disguised form of cannibalism, and which has made the proverb homo homini lupus (man a wolf to man) a characteristic of our time, whereas Hobbes only laid it down in the " state of nature " era of humanity before the Social Contract.
But we cannot consider a principle to be false because it has been misused ; that often serves as a stimulus to specify more exactly its nature and terms, so that we can make a more exact practical application of it ; this will be the result of my demonstration of the perfect harmony that exists between Darwin- ism and socialism.
Already in the first edition of my work Socialismo e criminalita (pages 179, etc.), I maintained that the struggle for existence is a law inherent in humanity as in all living beings, although its forms are continually changing, and although it gets weaker.
This is still my opinion, and on this point I do not agree with certain socialists who have
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thought that they had completely conquered the objection raised against them in the name of Darwinism, by affirming that in human society the " struggle for existence " is a law which ought to lose its meaning and applic- ability when the social transformation which socialism aims at shall have been realised. *
It is a law which governs tyrannically all living beings, microbes as well as anthropoid apes, and should it cease to act and fall inert at the feet of man as if he were not an indis- soluble link in the great biological chain ?
I maintained, and I maintain still, that the struggle for existence is a law inseparable from life, and consequently from humanity itself ; but that, whilst remaining an immanent and continuous law, it is transformed by degrees in its extent, and is attenuated in its forms.
In primitive humanity the struggle for existence is scarcely to be distinguished from that which obtains among other animals ; it is the brutal struggle for daily food or for the female — hunger and love are, in fact, the two
* Labusquiere in Rivista internazionale del socialismo, Milan, 1880. No. 3. Lanessan, La lutte pour I' existence el I'association pour la lutte, Paris, 1881. Loria, Discorso su Carlo Darwin, Siena, 1882, p. 17, and following, and Darwin e I'economia politica in Riv. di filosofia scientifica, June, 1884. Colajanni, // socialismo, Catania, 1884, etc.
M. Colajanni recognised from this moment (note i, p. 58), that the basis of my thought was "more socialistic than is that of many other persons who imagine themselves to be socialists, and who are persecuted as such." 'My book, in fact,Socialismo e criminalitd, only made criticisms on the revolutionary method of the Italian socialism of that time, still stamped with nebulous romanticism. The import of my criticisms was exaggerated, not without
fundamental needs, and the two poles of life — and its means are almost solely muscular force. In a subsequent phase is added the struggle for political supremacy (in the class, in the tribe, in the village, in the town, in the state), and, more and more, muscular force is replaced by intellectual force.
In the historic period Grseco-Latin society struggles for civil equality (abolition of slavery) ; it triumphs, but does not stop because life is a struggle ; the society of the middle ages struggles for religious equality, gains it, but does not stop ; and at the end of the 1 8th century it struggles for political equality. Should it now stop and rest in its present state ? To-day society- struggles for economic equality, not for an absolutely material equality, but for this more positive equality of which I have spoken. And everything makes us foresee with mathematical certainty that this victory will be gained to give place to new struggles for new ideals among our descendants.
reason, by conservatives more or less progressive ; but already (1883) I was at the bottom a socialist, and I shall prove it in the second edition of Socialismo e criminalitd..
My conviction became more complete and deeper, gradu- ally and almost in spite of myself, by reading the popular exposition of scientific socialism, which M. Turati wrote in the Critica sociale, and M. Prampolini in the Giustizia; I was at length definitely admitted to socialism through the study of the works of Karl Marx, whose uncom- promising dogmatism is clothed in a form a little dry and hard, but whose general writings are irresistible, because they are in complete harmony with the whole trend of modern scientific thought.
The works of M. Loria, quite full of Marxian theories which a marvellous stream of scientific learning fertilises,
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The successive changes in the extent, or the ideals of the struggle for existence, are accompanied by a progressive mitigation of the methods of the struggle ; violent and muscular at first, they become more and more peaceful and intellectual, despite certain atavic reversions or certain psycho -patho- logical manifestations of violence on the part of individuals against society or of society against individuals.
My opinion has recently found a striking confirmation in the remarkable work of M. Novikov, who, however, has not taken the sexual struggle into account. I shall further develop my demonstration in the chapter devoted to the Moral Future of Humanity, in the second edition of Socialismo e criminalita.^
For the moment it is sufficient for me, in answer to the anti -socialistic objection, to have shown that not only the disproportion between the number of births and the number
and full of views of remarkable depth, completed my socialistic education. Since then I have believed it my duty to give to it my strict political adhesion ; besides, even in the political world I was always impregnated with socialistic ideas, and I remember that from the time of my election to the Chamber of Deputies in 1886, my controversies with the Republicans in the Epoca of Genoa and the Lega della democrazia of Rome sprang from my contention that the single fundamental question seemed to me to be the social question.
I was still in this sociological phase which is, perhaps, a necessary moment in scientific education, but which is only an arrest of development if it does not attain the practical and fruitful phase of socialism.
t Novikov, Les luttes entre socittes, leurs phases successives. Paris, 1893. Lerda, La lotta per la vita in Pensiero italiano, Milan, February and March, 1894.
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of those who survive is always diminishing, but also that the " struggle for existence " itself changes its extent, and is weakened in its processes with every successive phase of biological and social evolution.
Socialism can then affirm that conditions of human existence ought to be assured to all men — in exchange for work performed for the community — without thereby contradicting the Darwinian law of the survival of the victors in the struggle for existence, since this Darwinian law ought to be comprised in, and applied to (according to its different mani- festation), the law of human progress.
Socialism, understood in the scientific sense, does not deny and cannot deny that there are always among men some " losers " in the struggle for existence.
This question is more directly concerned with the connection that exists between socialism and crime, because those who claim that the struggle for existence is a law which does not apply to human society, affirm in consequence that crime (an abnormal and anti-social form of the struggle for life as work in its normal and social form) ought to dis- appear. They think likewise that they find a certain contradiction between socialism and the doctrines of criminal anthropology on the born criminal, doctrines which are themselves derived from Darwinism.0
* I regret to state here that M. Loria, usually so deep and penetrating, has allowed himself to be swayed by appearances. He has pointed out this so-called contra- diction in his Economic Basis oj Society. He has been
30
I will wait to treat this question more completely elsewhere. Here is a summary, my opinion as a socialist and as an anthro- pologist writer on criminology.
First of all, the positive criminal school is occupied with life as it is — and its merit is unquestionably to have applied to the study of criminal phenomena the methods of experi- mental science, to have shown the hypocritical absurdity of the modern penal systems, which are based on the conception of free-will and of the moral fault, and which are realised in the system of confinement in cells, one of the aberrations of the igth century as I have once called it: for that, the school wishes to sub- stitute the simple segregation of individuals who are not fit for social life in consequence of pathological conditions, congenital or acquired, permanent or transitory.
In the second place, to pretend that socialism will make all forms of crime disappear is an affirmation which proceeds from a generous sentiment, but which is not founded on rigorous scientific observation.
The school of scientific criminology demon- strates that crime is a natural and social phenomenon — like madness and suicide — determined by the abnormal organic and physical constitution of the delinquent, and
completely answered in the name of the school of positive criminal anthropology by M. Rinieri de Rocchi, // diritto penale e un'opera recente di Loria in the Scuola positiva nella giurisprudenza penale of the i5th February, 1894, and by M. Lombroso in Archivio di psichiatria e scienze penali, 1894, xiv.
by the influences of the physical and social environment. All anthropological factors, physical and social, always co-operate together to determine offences, the lightest as well as the most serious — as they do in all other human acts. What varies for every delinquent and every offence is the decisive intensity of each order of factors.*
For example, if it is a question of an assas- sination, committed through jealousy or some hallucination, the anthropological factor is the most important, although some attention cannot but be paid to the physical and social environment. But if it is a question of a crime against poverty, or even against persons, committed by a crowd in revolt, or from drunkenness, etc., it is the social environment that becomes the preponderant factor, although one cannot deny the influence of physical environment and of the anthropological factor.
The same reasoning can be repeated — in order to make a complete examination into the objection raised to socialism in the name
* Enrico Ferri, Criminal Sociology (English trans- lation), 1895. A recent work has just confirmed our inductions in a positive manner : Forsanari di Verce, Sulla criminalitd e le vicende economiche d' Italia dal 1873 <*l l89° (Turin), Library of Juridical Anthropology, 1894. The preface, written by M. Lombroso, ends with these words : " We do not wish by this to misappreciate the truth of the Socialist movement, which is destined to change the current of modern history in Europe, and which claims ad majorem gloriam of its conclusions that all crime depends on economic influence : we share this doctrine without wishing or being able to follow its mis- takes : however enthusiastic we may be, we will never renounce the tenth in its favour. We leave this useless servility to the classic and orthodox authors."
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of Darwinism — on the subject of common illnesses. Besides, crime is a department in human pathology.
All diseases, acute or chronic, infectious or non-infectious, severe or slight, are the pro- duct of the anthropological constitution of the individual and of the influence of the physical and social environment. The deter- mining intensity of personal conditions or of environment varies with different illnesses ; phthisis or heart disease, for example, depends principally on the individual organic consti- tution, although attention must be paid to the influence of the environment ; pellagra,* cholera, typhus, etc,, depend, on the contrary, chiefly on the physical and social conditions of the environment. Phthisis also makes ravages among persons in easy circumstances, that is, among persons well fed and well housed, whilst it is the poor, that is, the persons badly fed, who furnish the greatest number of victims to pellagra and cholera.
It is consequently evident that a socialist regime of collective property, which will assure to each the condition of human exis- tence, will greatly diminish, or perhaps cause to disappear — with the help of scientific dis- coveries and the progress of hygienic measures —the illnesses which are chiefly determined by the conditions of the environment, that is to say, by insufficient nourishment or by want
* A skin and nerve disease, known in Spain, Italy, and,elsewhere, where maize of inferior quality is largely consumed by the peasantry. — ED.
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of protection against the inclemency of the weather ; but we shall not see those illnesses disappear which are due to wounds, to insanity, to pulmonary affections.
We must say as much of crime. If misery and the shocking inequalities of economic conditions are suppressed, sharp and chronic hunger will serve no longer as a stimulus to crime ; better nourishment will bring about a physical and moral amelioration ; the abuses of power and riches will disappear, and we shall see produced a considerable reduction of crimes from want, chiefly caused by the social environment. But what will not disappear are outrages on chastity, through sexual path- ological inversion, murders committed by epileptics, robberies caused by psycho-patho- logical degeneracy, etc.
For the same reason popular instruction will be more spread, all the talented men will be able to develop themselves and to freely assert themselves ; but that will not cause idiocy and imbecility, owing to hereditary and pathological conditions, to disappear. Differ- ent causes, however, will be able to exert a preventive and palliative influence on congen- ital degeneracy (common diseases, crime, madness, nervous affections). There will be, for instance, a better economic and social organisation, advice of increasing efficacy given by experimental biology, and procrea- tion becoming less and less frequent in case of hereditary disease by voluntary abstention.
In conclusion, we will say that even in the
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social regime — although in infinitely less proportions — there will always be some vanquished in the struggle for existence, there will be the victims of feebleness, of disease, of insanity, of nervous disorder, of suicide. We can then assert that socialism does not deny the Darwinian law of the struggle for existence. It will, however, have this unquestionable advantage — that the epidemic and endemic forms of human degeneracy will be completely suppressed by the elimination of their principal cause, the physical and, consequently, the moral misery of the greatest number.
Then the struggle for existence, whilst still remaining the eternal impulsive force of social life, will assume forms continually less brutal and more humane — intellectual forms ; its ideal of physiological and psychical ameliora- tion will be constantly raised, owing to the vitalising effect of daily bread for body and mind being assured to each person.
The law of the " struggle for life " must not make us forget another law of natural and social Darwinism. Certainly many socialists have given it an excessive and exclusive importance just as certain individualists have left it completely in oblivion. I mean the law of solidarity which unites all living beings of the same species — for example, the animals that live in a community in consequence of the abundance of a common food (herbivora), or even the animals of different species living in a state which naturalists call symbiosic union for life.
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It is not true to affirm that the struggle for life is the only supreme law in nature and society, just as it is false to claim that this law does not apply to human society. The real truth is that even in human society the struggle for life is an eternal law which weakens progressively in its forms and rises in its ideals ; but beside it we find a law whose action is progressively more efficacious in social evolution, the law of solidarity or of co-operation among living beings.
Even in societies of animals mutual help against natural forces or against living species is constantly manifested, and in all the more intense fashion when we come to the human species, even to savage tribes. It is found especially among tribes which, in consequence of favourable conditions of environment or in consequence of assured and abundant food, enter into the industrial and pacific stage. The military or warlike type which ^unhappily rules (in consequence of insecurity and insufficiency of food) among primitive mankind, and in the reactionary phases of civilisation, offers us less frequent examples. The industrial type tends constantly, more- over, as Spencer has shown, *to take the place of the warlike type.*
* See in this sense the celebrated writings of Kropot- kin, Mutual Aid among the Savages, in the Nineteenth Century, gih April, 1891, and Among the Barbarians, ibid., January, 1892 [published in Mutual Aid : a factor of evolution, 1902. — ED.], and also two recent articles signed "A Professor," appearing in the Revue socialiste of Paris, Ma"y and June, 1894, under the title Lutte ou accord pour la vie.
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Referring to human society alone, we may put it this way : whilst in the first stages of social evolution the law of the struggle for existence takes precedence of the law of solidarity, the more the division of labour and in consequence the connection between the individuals of the social organism grows, the more does the law of co-operation or solidarity acquire a force progressively more intense and extended, and that for the funda- mental reason which Marx has indicated and which constitutes his grand scientific dis- covery, because the conditions of existence, and primarily food, are or are not assured.
In the life of individuals, as in that of societies, when food, that is to say the physical basis of existence, is assured, the law of solidarity takes precedence of the law of the struggle for existence, and the inverse of this also holds good. Among savages, infanticide and parricide are acts not only permitted, but obligatory, and sanctified by religion, if the tribe lives on an island where food is scanty (for example in Polynesia), and they con- stitute immoral and criminal acts on conti- nents where food is more abundant and more sure.*
In the same way in our present society, the majority of individuals not being sure of their daily bread, the struggle for life, ,or " free competition," as individualists call it, takes more cruel and more brutal forms.
As soon as, with collective property, each
* Enrico Ferri, Omicidio nell' antropologia crimincile. Introduction, Turin, 1894.
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individual has his conditions of existence assured, the law of solidarity will be pre- ponderant.
When in a family things go well and daily bread is assured, harmony and reciprocal goodwill reign ; as soon as poverty makes its appearance, discord and struggle follow. Society, as a whole, presents us with this picture magnified. A better social organisa- tion will secure everywhere harmony and reciprocal kindness.
Such will be the triumph of socialism, and such is, once more, the most complete and fruitful interpretation that socialism gives of the inexorable natural laws discovered by Darwinism.
CHAPTER IV.
THE SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST.
The third and last division of Haeckel's argu- ment is correct if it is restricted to the purely biological and Darwinian domain, but his starting point is false if it is applied to the social domain and is used as an objection to socialism.
It is said: the struggle for existence secures the survival of the best or the best fitted ; it consequently determines an aristocratic pro- cess of individualist selection and not the democratic levelling of socialism.
Here again, let us begin by finding out exactly once more, of what consists this famous natural selection, the consequence of the struggle for existence.
The expression of which Haeckel makes use, and which is besides commonly employed, "survival of the best or the best adapted," ought to be corrected. We ought to suppress the adjective best. It is the residue of a teleology which saw in nature and history a finality to be attained by means of a continuous amelioration.
Darwinism, on the contrary, and still more the theory of universal evolution, has excluded all finality from modern scientific thought a'nd from the interpretation of natural phenomena; evolution consists both of involution and dis- solution. It can happen, and it does happen, that in comparing the two ends of the road
39
travelled over by humanity we state that there has really been progress, amelioration on the whole, not following a straight ascending line, however, but as Goethe has said, a spiral with rhythms of advance and retro- gression, of evolution and dissolution.
Every cycle of evolution in the individual as in the collective life carries in itself the germs of the corresponding cycle of dissolution, and the latter inversely by the decay of the already worn out form prepares in the eternal laboratorynewevolutionsandnew forms of life. It is thus that in the social human world every phase of civilisation carries within itself and always develops further the germs of its own dissolution whence is derived a new phase of civilisation — whose geographical seat will be more or less changed — in the eternal rhythm of living humanity. The ancient ecclesiastical civilisations of the East dissolve and give birth to the Graeco- Roman world to which succeeds the feudal and aristocratic civilisation of Central Europe ; this also being dissolved through its own excesses, like the preceding civilisations, is replaced by the bourgeois civilisation which has attained its culminating point in the Anglo-Saxon world. But this already feels the first shiverings of the fever of dissolution, whilst a socialist civilisation is being born and is developing itself, a civilisation which will flourish over a vaster domain than that of the other civilisations which have preceded it.*
* One of the most characteristic phases of social dis- solution is that of parasitism, cf Massart and Vander- velde, Parasitism, Organic and Social, London, 1895.
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It is not, therefore, correct to claim that natural selection determined by the struggle for existence secures the survival of the best ; really it secures the survival of the best adapted.
It is very different whether it is a question of natural or of social Darwinism.
The struggle for existence necessarily deter- mines the survival of the individuals best adapted to the society and the time in which they live.
In the natural, biological domain the free play of forces and of cosmic conditions secures a progressive elevation of living forms from the microbe up to man.
In human society, on the contrary, that is to say in the superorganic evolution of Mr. H. Spencer, the interference of other forces and of other conditions determines occasionally a selection which is retrograde but which always secures the survival of those best adapted to a given society and point of time, in keeping with the corrupted conditions — if they are such — of this same society and point of time.
The problem is one in "social selections." It is in starting from this idea wrongly in- terpreted that certain writers, socialists and non-socialists, arrive at refusing to Darwinian theories an applicability to human society.
One knows in fact that in the contemporary, civilised world natural selection is vitiated by military selection, by matrimonial selection, and principally by economic selection.*
* Broca, Les selections (§ Social selections) in Mdmoires d' anthropologie, Paris, 1877, in. 205 Lapouge, Les Selections sociales, in Revue d' anthrop. 1887, p. 519. Loria, Discorso su Carlo Darwin, Siena, 1882.
The temporary celibacy imposed on soldiers exercises a certainly deplorable influence on the human race ; it is the young men with the least good constitutions, who, relieved of military service, marry the earliest, whilst the most healthy individuals are constrained to temporary sterility, and in the large towns run the chances of syphilis, the effects of which are unfortunately permanent.
Marriage itself, corrupted as it is in our present civilisation by economic interests, exercises usually a sexual selection in the wrong way. Women degenerate in healiht but, possessing a large fortune, find a husband more easily than the more robust women of the people or the middle class without a marriage portion, and these are condemned to remain sterile in an enforced celibacy, or to give themselves up to a prostitution more or less gilded, j
It is incontestable that economic conditio'ns have an influence on all social relations. The monopoly of wealth assures to its possessors victory in the struggle for existence ; rich persons, even when they' are less robust, have a longer life than those who are ill fed ; the labour by day and by night under cruel conditions imposed on adult men, and the still more disastrous work imposed on women
Vadala, Darwinistno naturale e darwinisme sociale, Turin, 1883. Bordier, La vie des societes, Paris, 1887. Sergi, Le degenerazioni umane, Milan, 1889, p. 158. Bebel, Woman in the Past, Present, and Future, London 1885.
t Max Nordau, Conventional Lies of our Civilisation, London, 1895. '
and children by modern capitalism, make the biological conditions of the proletarian class daily worse. *
To that we must add that moral selection in the wrong way which causes capitalism to- day in the struggle waged with the proletariat to favour the survival of men of servile character, whilst it persecutes and tries to keep in the shade men of strong character and all those who do not seem disposed to bear the yoke of the present economic order, f
The lirst impression which we get from the statement of all these facts is, that the Darwinian law of natural selection is worth- less, and is not found to apply to human society.
I have maintained, and 1 maintain, on the contrary, first, that these social selections of backward tendency are not in contradiction to the Darwinian law, and more, that they serve as material for an argument in favour of socialism. Socialism in fact will alone be able to bring about a more beneficent working of this inexorable law of natural selection.
In fact the Darwinian law does not deter- mine the survival of the best, but only of the best adapted.
* On this question can be consulted, outside demo- graphic statistic, the abstracts worked out at Turin in 1879 by M. Pagliani, the present director general of the office of Hygiene to the Ministry of the Interior, on the different development of the human body, notably more backward and more feeble among the poor than among the rich. This fact shows itself less at the time of birth than in infancy and later, that is to say as soon as the influence of economic conditions makes its inexorable tyranny felt.
t Turati, Selezione servile in Critica Sociale, i, June, 1894. Sergi, Degenerazioni umane, Milan, 1889.
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It is evident that the degeneracy produced by social conditions, and notably by the present economic organisation, will still only contribute, and always increasingly, to the survival of those best adapted to this econo- mic organisation itself.
If the conquerors in the struggle for exist- ence are the worst and the most feeble, that does not mean that the Darwinian law does not apply ; it simply means that the society is vitiated and that those who survive are precisely those who are best adapted for this vitiated society.
In my studies in criminal psychology I have too often been obliged to state that in prisons and in the criminal world it is the fiercest or the most cunning criminals who enjoy a triumph ; it is the same in our modern economic individualism ; the victory belongs to him who has fewest scruples, the struggle for existence favours him who is the best adapted to a world where a man is valued for what he has (in whatever way he may have obtained it) and not for what he is.
The Darwinian law of natural selection works then even in human society. The error of those who deny this proposition arises because they confuse the present society and time — which bears in history the name of bourgeois, as the middle ages were called feudal — with the whole history of humanity ; and in consequence they db not see that the disastrous effects of retrogressive modern social selection are only a confirmation of the survival of the best adapted. Popular obser-
44
vation has summed up this fact in a proverb : " The cask gives the wine it contains "; and scientific observation finds its explanation in the necessary biological relations which exist between a given society and the individuals which are born, struggle and survive in it.
On the other side this statement constitutes a peremptory argument in favour of socialism. In freeing society of all the corruptions with which an unbridled economic individual- ism pollutes it, socialism will necessarily correct the effects of natural and social selection. In a society physically and morally healthy the best adapted, those who will consequently survive, will be healthy.
In the struggle for existence, victory will then belong to him who possesses the greatest and most fruitful physical and moral energies. The collectivist economic organisation, in assuring to each the conditions of existence, must necessarily ameliorate the human race physically and morally.
To that one may answer : let us admit that socialism and Darwinian selection can be reconciled, is it not evident that the survival of the best adapted will form an aristocratic individualist process which is contrary to the socialist levelling ?
I have already partly answered this objec- tion in observing that socialism will assure to all individuals — and not only to some privileged ones or to some heroes, as now— the freedom to assert and to develop their own personality. Then indeed the effect of the ggle for existence will be the survival of
45
the best, and that precisely because in a normal society it is to normal individuals that victory belongs. Social Darwinism, therefore, in continuing natural Darwinism will bring about a selection towards the best. To answer completely this affirmation of an unlimited aristocratic selection, I must recall another natural law which completes this rhythm of action and reaction whence results the equilibrium of life.
To the Darwinian law of natural inequalities must be joined another law which is insepar- able from it and which Jacoby following the works of Morel, Lucas, Galton, De Candole, Ribot, Spencer, Mme. Royer, Lombroso, etc., has brought into full daylight.
This same nature which makes of "choice" and of aristocratic elevation a condition of vital progress, then re-establishes equilibrium by a levelling and democratic law.
" Out of the immensity of humanity indi- viduals, families, and races spring up which tend to raise themselves above the common level. Painfully they climb abrupt heights, reach the summit of power, of wealth, of intelligence, of talent, and, once having attained,. are precipitated below and disappear in the abysses of madness and degeneracy. Death is the great leveller ; whilst annihilating all that rise, it democratises humanity.*
* Jacoby, Etudes sur la selection dans ses rapports avec I' herddit& chez I' homme, Paris, 1881, p. 606.
Lombroso, The Man of Genius, London, 1889, has developed and completed this law.
It is this law which all those forget too easily who,
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Everythings that tends to constitute a monopoly of natural forces comes into collision with this supreme law of nature which has given to all living beings the use and disposal of the natural agents — air and light, water and land.
Everything which is too much above or too much below the human average, an average which is raised with time, but which is of absolute value for each historic period — dies out and disappears.
The cretin, the man of genius, the pauper and the millionaire, the dwarf and the giant, are so many natural and social monstrosities, and nature strikes them inexorably with degeneracy or sterility, whether they be the product of organic life or the effect of the social organisation.
It is also an inevitable destiny for all families that possess any sort of monopoly — monopoly of power, wealth, or talent — to see their last offspring become mad or sterile or commit suicide, and finally be extinguished. Noble houses, dynasties of sovereigns, families of artists or learned men, descendants of mil- lionaires, all follow the common law which, once again, confirms the inductions, in this sense levelling, of science and socialism.
like Nietzsche in our days, attempt to modernise aristo- cratic individualism by views, sometimes deep and original, but often also fantastic and foolish.
It is this same law which Mr. Ritchie ignores (Dar- winism and Politics, London, 1891) in his Section 4 — "Does the doctrine of Heredity support aristocracy?" and M. Boucher in his treatise Darwinism et Social- isme, Paris, 1890.
CHAPTER V.
SOCIALISM AND RELIGIOUS BELIEFS.
None of the three contradictions between socialism and Darwinism which Haeckel formulated, and which so many authors have repeated after him, withstands a frank and more exact examination of the natural laws attached to the name of Charles Darwin.
I add that not only is Darwinism not contrary to socialism, but that it forms one of its fundamental scientific premises. As Virchow justly remarked, socialism is nothing else than the logical and vital outcome partly of Darwinism and partly of Spencerian evolution.
Darwin's theory, whether one likes it or not, in showing that man descends from animals, has struck a great blow at the belief in God as the creator of the universe and of man by a special fiat. It is for that reason, moreover, that the most implacable opposition, and the only one which subsists against his scientific induction was, and is, maintained in the name of religion.
It is true that Darwin did not declare him- self an Atheist, and Mr. Spencer was not one ; it is also true that, strictly speaking, Darwin's theory and Spencer's can be reconciled with a belief in God, because one can admit that God has created matter and force, and that
48
both have then evolved their successive forms following an initial creative impulse.
One cannot, however, deny that these theories, whilst rendering more and more inflexible and universal the idea of causality, lead necessarily to the negation of God, because one can always ask oneself : " and who has created God? " And if the answer is : " God has always existed," one can retort by affirming that the universe has always existed. Following the remark of M. Ardigo, human thought cannot conceive that the chain which binds effects to causes, can terminate at a purely conventional given point.*
God, as Laplace has said, is an hypothesis of which positive science has no need. He is, according to Herzen, at the most an X which contains in itself not the unknowable — as Spencer and Dubois Reymond claim — but all that humanity does not yet know. Also it is a variable X which decreases in proportion as the discoveries of science advance.
It is for this reason that science and religion are in inverse ratio one to the other ; the one diminishes and becomes feeble in the same measure as the other increases and is strengthened in its struggle with the unknown.
And if this is a consequence of Darwinism, its influence on the development of socialism is perfectly evident.
The disappearance of the faith in something beyond when the poor will become the elect
* Ardigo, La Formazione naturale, vol. n, in his Opere filologiche, and vol. 6, La Ragione, Padua, 1894.
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of the Lord, and when the miseries of this " valley of tears " will find^an eternal com- pensation in Paradise, gives more vigour to the desire of a little "terrestrial Paradise" down here for the unhappy and the less fortunate who are the most numerous.
Hartmann and Guyau* have shown that the evolution of religious beliefs can be thus summarised : all religions have within them- selves the promise of happiness, but primitive religions admit that the happiness wilP be realised during the life itself of the individual, and later religions, by an excess of reaction, transport it outside this'mortal world 'after death; in the last phase this realisation of happiness is again replaced' in human life, no longer in the short moment of individual existence, but in the continued evolution of the whole of humanity.
On this side again, socialism is joined to religious evolution and tends fto substitute itself for religion because it desires precisely that humanity should have in itself its own " terrestrial paradise " . without having to wait for it in a "something beyond," which, to say the least, is very problematical.
Also it has been very justly remarked that the socialist movement has numerous charac- teristics common, for instance, to primitive
* What is predominant, however, in religious beliefs is the hereditary or traditional sentimental factor ; that is what makes them always respectable, if they are pro- fessed in good faith, and often even sympathetic — and that precisely on account of the candid and delicate sensibility of the persons among whom religious faith is the most vital and sincere.
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Christianity, notably its ardent faith in the ideal which has finally deserted the arid field of bourgeoise scepticism, and certain learned men, not socialists, such as Messrs. Wallace,* Laveleye, and Roberty, etc., admit that socialism, by its humanitarian faith, can perfectly replace the faith in the " something beyond " of the old religions.
The most direct and efficacious relations are, however, those which exist between socialism and the belief in God.
It is true that Marxian socialism since the Congress held at Erfurt (1891) has rightly declared; that religious beliefs are a private affair, and that consequently, the socialist party will fight religious intolerance in all its forms, whether it be directed against Catholics or Jews, as I have indicated in an article against Antisemitism.j" But this superiority of view is, at the bottom, only a consequence of confidence in a final victory.
It is because socialism knows and foresees that religious beliefs, whether we consider them with M. SergiJ as pathological pheno- mena of human psychology or as useless phenomena of moral incrustation, must waste away before the extension of even elementary scientific culture ; it is for that reason that socialism does not feel the necessity of fighting specially these same religious beliefs which
* Dr. Wallace has now become a Socialist.— ED. t Nuova Rassegna, August, 1894. I Sergi, L'origine del fenomeni psichici e loro signifi- cazione biologica, Milan, 1885, p. 334 and the following.
are destined to disappear. It has taken this attitude even though it knows that the absence, or lessening, of the belief in God is one of the most powerful factors in its extension, because the priests of all religions have been, in all phases of history, the most powerful allies of the governing classes in keeping the masses bent under the yoke, thanks to religious fascination, as the tamer keeps wild beasts under his whip.
And that is so true that the most clear- sighted conservatives, even if they are atheists, regret that the religious sentiment — this very precious narcotic — should continue to dimin- ish among the masses, because they see in it, if their pharisaism does not allow them to say it openly, an instrument of political domination.*
Unhappily, or happily, the religious senti- ment cannot be re-established by a royal decree. If it disappear one cannot blame either Titus or Caius, and there is no need of a special propaganda against it, for that is in the air we breathe — saturated as it is with scientific, experimental inductions — and the sentiment no longer finds conditions favour- able to its development, as it found in the mystic ignorance of past centuries.
I have thus shown the direct influence of modern positive science, which has substituted
* As for the pretended influence of religion on personal morality, I have shown what little foundation there is for this opinion in my studies of criminal psychology, and more especially in Omicidio nell' antropologia criminate.
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the conception of natural causality for the conception of miracle and divinity, on the very rapid development and on the experi- mental foundation of contemporary socialism.
Democratic socialism does not view " Catholic socialism " with an evil eye, because it has nothing to fear from it.
Catholic socialism, in fact, contributes to the propaganda of socialist ideas, notably in the rural districts, where faith and religious observance have still much life in them, and it is not Catholic socialism that will gather the palm of victory ad majorem Dei gloriam. As I have shown, there is an increasing antagonism between science and religion, and the socialist varnish will not be able to pre- serve Catholicism. " Terrestrial " socialism, besides, possesses a much greater power of attraction.
When peasants are familiarised with the views of Catholic socialism, it will be very easy for democratic socialism to collect them under its own flag. They will, moreover, themselves effect their own conversion.
Socialism finds itself in an analogous position towards republicanism. Just as atheism is a private matter that concerns the individual conscience, so the republic is a private affair that interests portions of the bourgeoisie. Certainly when socialism is ready to triumph, atheism will have made immense progress, and the republic will have been established in many lands which to-day submit to a monarchical regime. But it is
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not socialism which develops atheism any more than it is socialism which will establish the republic. Atheism is a product of the theories of Darwin and Spencer in the present bourgeois civilisation, and the republic has been, and will be, in different countries the work of a part of the capitalist bourgeoisie, as was recently written in some conservative newspapers of Milan, when it was said, " the monarchy will no longer serve the interests of the country " — that is to say, of the class in power.
The evolution from absolute monarchy to constitutional monarchy and to republicanism, is an evident historical law; in the civilisation of to-day the only difference is in the elective or the hereditary character of the head of the State. In the different European countries the bourgeoisie itself will demand this passage from the monarchy to the republic in order to delay as long as possible the triumph of social- ism. In Italy, as in France, in England as in Spain, one sees only too many republicans or radicals whose attitude towards social questions is more bourgeois and conservative than that of intelligent conservatives. At Montecitorio, for example, M. R. Imbriani, has in religious and social matters more conservative opinions than M. di Rudini, M. Imbriani, whose personality is moreover very sympathetic, has never attacked a priest or a monk — he who attacks the whole universe, and very ofteji rightly, though without much success, in consequence of an error in his
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method — and he alone has opposed even with blows the laws proposed by M. L. Ferrari, deputy, who increased the succession tax on inheritances in the indirect line.**
Socialism has thus no more interest in preaching republicanism than it has in preaching atheism. To each his role, that is the law of division of labour. The struggle against atheism is the business of science ; the establishment of the republic has been, and will be, the action in the different countries of Europe of the bourgeoisie itself, conservative or radical. All that is history marching towards socialism, whilst individuals are unable to hinder or retard the succession of the phases of the moral, political and social evolution.
* English readers will readily supply from their own experience substitutes for the names of the Italian poli- ticians referred to here. — ED.
CHAPTER VI.
THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE SPECIES.
We can again show that scientific socialism proceeds directly from Darwinism by examining the different modes of conceiving the individual in relation to the species.
The eighteenth century finished with the exclusive glorification of the individual^ of the man — as an entity in himself. In the works of Rosseau this was only a beneficent excess of reaction from the political and sacerdotal tyranny of the Middle Ages.
This individualism has created, as a direct consequence, a political artificialism with which I shall occupy myself later in studying the relations of the theory of evolution and of socialism, and which is common to the govern- ors in the bourgeois regime and to individual- ist anarchists — because they both imagine that the social organisation can be changed in a day by the magical effect of a clause of a law or by a bomb more or less murderous.
Modern biology has radically changed this conception of the individual, and it has shown in the domain of biology as in that of sociol- ogy that the individual is himself only an aggregate of more simple living elements, and at the same time that the individual in him- self, the Selbstwesen of the Germans, does not exist in himself but only as far as he is a member of a society (Gliedwesen).
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Everything living forms an association, a collective whole. The moneron itself, the living cell, the irreducible expression of the biological individuality, is also an aggregate of different parts (nucleus, nucleolus, proto- plasm), and each of these in its turn is an aggregate of molecules, which are aggregates of atoms.
The atom does not exist alone as an indi- vidual ; the atom is invisible and impalpable, and does not live. And the complexity of the aggregate, the federation of parts, increases continually as we pass in the zoological series from the protozoa to man.
The unifying and equalising Jacobin artifi- cialism corresponds to the metaphysics of individualism just as the conception of national and international federalism corre- sponds to the positive character of scientific socialism.
The organism of a mammal is only a federation of tissues, organs, structure ; the organism of a society can only consist of a federation of townships, provinces, regions : the organism of humanity can only consist of a federation of nations.
If it is absurd to conceive of a mammal whose head, for instance, should move in the same manner as its extremities, and its extremities should all move together, there is no less absurdity in a political and adminis- trative organism in which the province in the extreme North, or the mountainous province, for instance, should have the same official
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machinery, the same body of laws, the same movements as the province in the extreme South, or the province composed of plains from the simple love of symmetrical uniformity, this pathological expression of unity.
If we leave on one side these considerations of political order in accordance with which we conclude, as I have done elsewhere;* that the only organisation possible for Italy, as for every other country, seems to me to be that of an administrative federalism in a political unity, we can consider as proved, that at the end of the igth century the indi- vidual, as a being in himself is dethroned in' biology as in sociology.
The individual exists but only in so far as he makes part of the social aggregate.
Robinson Crusoe, this perfect type of indi- vidualism, can only exist as a legend or a pathological case.
The species — that is to say the social aggregate — is the great, the living and eternal reality of life, as Darwinism has shown, and as all the positive sciences from astronomy to sociology have shown.
At the end of the i8th century Rousseau thought that the individual alone exists, and that society is an artificial product of the "social contract," and as he attributed (just as Aristotle had done for slavery) a permanent human character to the transitory manifesta- tions of the historical period of the decay of
* Criminal Sociology, London, 1895.
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the regime in which he was living, he added that society is the cause of all evils, and that individuals are born good and equal. At the end of the igih century, on the contrary, all the positive sciences are agreed in recognising that aggregation is a natural and inseparable fact of life, with vegetable as with animal species from the lowest " animal colonies " of zoophytes to the societies of mammals (herbivora) and to human society.*
All that the individual possesses of what is best, he owes to the social life, although every phase of the evolution be marked at its close by pathological conditions of social decay, essentially transitory moreover, which inevi- tably precede a new cycle of social renovation.
The individual, as such, if such could be, would satisfy only one of the two fundamental needs of existence — nourishment — that is to say, the egoistic preservation of his own organism, by means of this periodical and fundamental function which Aristotle desig- nates by the name of ctesi — the conquest of food.
* I cannot concern myself here with the recent eclectic attempt of M. Fouill£e which others have followed. M. Fouill6e wishes to oppose, or at least to add, to the naturalist conception of society that of consent or con- tract. Evidently, since no theory is absolutely false, there is even in the theory of contract a particle of truth, and the freedom to emigrate may be an example of it — as long as it is compatible with the economic interests of the class in power. But evidently this consenting which does not exist at the birth of each individual in such or such a society — and this being born forms the most decisive and tyrannical deed in life — is likewise very trifling in the development of his aptitudes and tendencies, dominated as these are by the iron law of the economic and political organisation of which he is an atom.
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But all individuals must live in society, because a second fundamental need of life is imposed on them, that of the reproduction of beings similar to themselves for the preserva- tion of the species. It is this life of relation and of reproduction (sexual and social) which gives birth to the moral or social sense, and which allows the individual not only to be, but to co-exist with his fellows.
We can say that these two fundamental instincts of life — bread and love — accomplish a function of social equilibrium in the life of animals, and notably of men.
It is love which causes, for the greatest number of men, the principal physiological and psychical expenditure of forces accumu- lated in a more or less large amount by the daily food which the daily toil has not absorbed or which parasitic laziness has left intact.
Much more is love the only pleasure which has really universal and levelling character. The people have called it " the Paradise of the poor " and religions have always invited them to enjoy it without limits — crescite et multipli- camini (be fruitful and multiply) because the erotic exhaustion which results from it, especially among males, diminishes or makes them forget the tortures of hunger and servile toil, and enervates in a lasting manner the energy of the individual ; and in this way it fulfils a useful function for the dominant class.
But with this effect of the sexual instinct another is inclissolubly linked — the increase of
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the population so that the desire to maintain a given social order clashes against the pressure of the people (described in our time as the proletariat), and social evolution pursues its inexorable and irresistible course.
The conclusion of our discussion is that whilst at the end of the i8th century it was thought that society was made for the indi- vidual— and it could then be inferred that millions of individuals might and ought to work and suffer for the exclusive advantage of a few other individuals ; at the end of the igth century the positive sciences have proved quite the contrary — that it is the individual who lives for the species, and that the latter alone is the eternal reality of life.
That is the point of departure of the sociological or social tendency of modern scientific thought as opposed to the exagger- ated individualism left as an heritage by the 1 8th century.
Biology shows also that we must not fall into the opposite extreme — as certain schools of Utopian socialism and of communism have done — and only see society and completely neglect the individual. Another biological law shows us, in fact, that the existence of the aggregate is the resultant of the life of all the individuals, just as the existence of an indi- vidual is the resultant of the life of the cells of which it is composed.
We have shown that the socialism which characterises the end of the igth, and which illumines the dawn of this century, is in perfect
6i
harmony with the whole current of modern thought. This harmony is even manifested in the fundamental question of the predominence given to the vital exigencies of collective or social solidarity over the dogmatic exaggera- tions of individualism. If this latter marks, at the end of the i8th century, a powerful and fruitful awakening in consequence of pathological manifestations of unbounded competition it inevitably leads to the liber- tarian explosions of anarchism which preaches individual action and which completely forgets human and social solidarity.
We thus arrive at the last point of contact and at the intimate union which exists bet ween Darwinism and socialism.
CHAPTER VII.
; FOR LIFE " AND THE " CLASS STRUGGLE."
Darwinism has proved that all the mechan- ism of animal evolution is reduced to the struggle for existence between individuals of one species, on the one hand, and between different species in the whole world of living beings, on the other.
In the same way all the mechanism of social evolution has been reduced by Marxian social- ism to the law of the struggle of the classes. This theory does not give us only the secret motive power and the sole positive explanation of the history of humanity, it give us also the ideal ancj, rigid norm which disciplines politi- cal socialism, and which saves it from the elastic, vaporous, inconclusive uncertainties of sentimental socialism.
The history of animal life has only found its positive explanation in the great Darwinian law of the struggle for existence; it alone permits us to determine the natural causes of birth, of evolution and of the disappearance of veget- able and animal species from palseontological times to our days. In the same manner the history of human life only finds its explanation in the great Marxian law of the struggle. of the classes. Thanks to it the annals of primitive humanity, barbarous and civilised, cease from being a capricious and superficial kaleidoscope
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of individual episodes, and form a grand and fateful drama, determined — consciously or unconsciously, in its most intimate details as in its catastrophes — by economic conditions, which form the physical and indispensable basis of life, and by the struggle of the classes to conquer and preserve the economic forces on which all the others necessarily depend — political, juridical, and moral.
I shall have an opportunity when studying the relations of sociology and socialism of speaking more at length of this great concep- tion which is the imperishable glory of Marx and which secures for him in sociology the place that Darwin occupies in biology and Spencer in natural philosophy.
For the moment it is sufficient for me to note a new point of contrast between Darwinism and socialism. The expression, " struggle of classes," so antipathetic at the first sound (and I confess that I felt this impression when I had not yet seized the scientific spirit of the Marxian theory) gives us, if we understand it exactly, the first law of human history and, therefore, it alone can give us the certain norm of the coming of the new phase of evolution which socialism foresees and which it endeavours to hasten.
Struggle of the classes — that is to say, that human society like all other living organisms is not a homogeneous whole, the sum of a number, more or less great, of individuals ; it is, on the contrary, a living organism which is the resultant of different parts and always
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more or less differentiated according as the degree of social evolution is raised.
Just as a protozoon is composed almost ex- clusively of albuminous gelatine whilst a mammal is composed of very diverse tissues ; so a chiefless tribe of primitive savages is composed of only a few families whose aggregation results simply from propinquity, whilst a civilised society of an historical or contemporary epoch is composed of social classes which differ one from the other, be it by the physio -psychical constitution of their components, or by the sum of their habits, their tendencies, their personal, family or social life.
These different classes can be arranged in a rigorous fashion. In ancient India they go from the Brahman to the Sudra ; in Europe of the middle ages from the Emperor and the Pope to the feudatory, the vassal and the artisan, and an individual cannot pass from one class to the other. Chance of birth alone determines his social condition. It may hap- pen that the legal etiquette will disappear, as it happened in Europe and America after the French Revolution, and exceptionally an in- dividual may find his way from one class to another, as molecules do by exosmosis and endosmosis or, according to the expression of M. Dumont, by a sort of social capillarity. But in all cases these different classes- exist as an assured reality, and they will resist every attempt at levelling by laws as long as the fundament reason for their difference remains.
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Karl Marx has proved the truth of this theory better than anyone else, by the mass of sociological observations which he has taken from the most diverse economic conditions.
The names, the circumstances, the pheno- mena of conflict can vary with each ofjthe phases of social evolution, but the tragic basis of history always appears in the anta- gonism between those who keep the monopoly of the means of production — and they are the minority — and those who are dispossessed of them — and these are the majority.
Warriors and shepherds, in primitive societies, as soon as the family, and then the individual appropriation of the land is substituted for primitive collectivism, patricians and plebeians —feudatories and vassals — nobles and common people — bourgeois and proletarians; these are all so many manifestations of the same fact ; the monopoly of wealth on the one side and productive work on the other.
Now, the great importance of the Marxian law — the class struggle — consists chiefly in this, that it indicates with great precision of what the vital point of the social question really consists and by what method we can succeed in solving it.
As long as the economic basis of political, legal, and moral life had not been demon- strated by positive evidence, the aspirations of most men towards a social amelioration were directed vaguely to the demand for, and the partial conquest of, some accessory means, such as freedom of worship, political suffrage, public instruction, etc., and certainly I have no wish
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to deny the great utility of these conquests.
But the sancta sanctorum always remained impenetrable to the eyes of the crowd, and as economic power continued to be the privilege of the few, all the conquests, all the concessions, were without real basis, separated as they were from the solid and fructifying foundation which can alone give life and durable force.
Now that socialism has shown, even before Marx, but never with so much scientific pre- cision, that individual appropriation, private ownership of land and of the means of pro- duction, is the vital point of the question, the problem is laid down in precise terms in the consciousness of contemporary humanity.
What method must be employed to abolish this monopoly of economic power and the mass of pains and evils, of hatred and iniquity, which is the result of it ?
The method of the "class struggle" setting out from this positive datum that each class tends to preserve and increase the advantages and privileges acquired, teaches the class deprived of economic power that in order to conquer it, the struggle (we will concern our- selves farther on with the mode of this struggle) must be a struggle of class against class and not of person against person.
Hatred, the death of such or such in- dividual belonging to the governing class, does not advance by one step the solution of the problem. It rather retards it because it provokes a reaction in public feeling against personal violence, and it violates the prin- ciple of respect for the human being which
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socialism proclaims aloud for the benefit of all and against all opponents. The solution of the problem does not become easier because the existing abnormal conditions which be- comes more and more acute — misery of the masses and enjoyment of the few — is not the result of the ill will of such or such an individual.
On this side again socialism is, in fact, in complete accord with positive science, which denies the free will of man and sees in human activity, individual and collective, a necessary effect, determined at the same time by conditions of race and environment.*
Crime, suicide, madness, misery, are not the fruit of free will, of the individual fault, as metaphysical spiritualism believes ; and it is no more a result of free will, a fault of the individual capitalist, if the workman is badly paid, if he is without work, if he is miserable.
All social phenomena are the necessary resultants of historic conditions and of en- vironment. In the modern world the facility and the greater frequency of intercourse between all parts of the earth have drawn still closer the dependence of every action —
* Separating myself from the two exclusive arguments that civilisation is a consequence of race or a product of the environment, I have always maintained — by my theory of the natural factors of criminality — that it is the resultant of the combined action of race and environment.
Amongst the recent works which maintain the argument of the exclusive or predominant influence of race must be mentioned Le Bon, The Psychology of Peoples, London, 1899. This work is, however, rather superficial. I refer for a more detailed examination of these two arguments to the fourth chapter of my book, Omicidio nell' antro- Pologia criminale, Turin, 1894.
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economic, political, legal, moral, artistic or scientific — on the most distant and most indirect conditions of earthly life.
The present organisation of private owner- ship without any limit to family inheritance and personal accumulation ; the continual and always more complete application of scientific discoveries to men's work in the transformation of matter, the telegraph and steam, the always extending migrations of men — cause the existence of a family of peasants, of workmen, of small tradesmen, to be united by invisible but tenacious threads to the life of the world, and the crop of coffee, of cotton, or of corn in the most distant countries has its effect on all parts of the civilised world, just as the decrease or increase of solar spots forms a co- efficient of periodical agricultural crises and directly influences the lot of millions of men.
This grand scientific conception of "the unity of physical forces " according to the expression of P. Secchi, or of universal solidarity, throws far from it the childish conception which makes free will and the individual the cause of human phenomena.
If a socialist proposed, even for a philan- thropic object, to equip a factory for giving work to the unemployed, and if he produced articles abandoned by fashion and general consumption, he would soon be brought to bankruptcy by an inevitable consequence of economic laws in spite of his philanthropic intentions.
Or if a socialist wished to give the work-
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people of his establishment wages two or three times higher than the current rate, he would evidently meet with the same fate, because he would meet with the same economic laws and he would be obliged to sell his goods at a loss or keep them unsold in his shops owing to his price for equal qualities being higher than the market rate.
He would be declared a bankrupt, and the world would bring him no other consolation than the epithet of worthy man, and, in this phase of " commercial morality,"* we know what this expression signifies.
Beyond the personal relations more or less cordial between capitalists and workers, their respective economic condition is inevitably determined by the present organisation, according to the law of surplus value which has allowed Marx to explain in an irrefutable manner how the capitalist can accumulate riches without working — because the workman produces in his day's work an equivalent of wealth greater than the wages received, and the surplus of the product forms the gratuitous profit of the capitalist, even if one deducts the salary for his technical and administrative management.
The land left to sun and rain does not produce by itself corn or wine. The minerals
* I make use of the expression "commercial morality" which M. Letourneau has employed in his book on L'tvolution de la morale, Paris, 1887. In his positive study of facts concerning morality, M. Letourneau has distinguished four phases — animal morality, savage morality, barbarian morality, commercial or bourgeois morality ; to these phases will succeed a phase of superior morality which Malon had called social morality.
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do not come forth by themselves from the bowels of the earth. A bag of crowns shut up in a strong box does not produce crowns as a cow does calves.
The production of wealth results only from a transformation of matter wrought by human labour. And it is only because the peasant cultivates the land, that the miner extracts minerals, that the workman sets machines in motion, that the chemist makes experiments in his laboratory, that the engineer invents machines, that the capitalist or the landlord, although the wealth inherited from his father has cost him no work and no effort if he is an absentee, can each year enjoy riches that others have produced for him in exchange for a miserable home, insufficient food, very often poisoned by vapours of rivers or marshes, by the gases of mines, and by the dust of factories — in a word for a wage which is always insufficient to secure them an existence worthy of a human being.
Even under a regime of fully developed small farming* — which has been called a form of practical socialism — the question always arises by what miracle the landlord, who does not work, sees corn, oil, and wine arrive in his house in sufficient quantities to enable him to live comfortably, whilst the farmer is forced
* [The system here indicated is the metayer which John Stuart Mill defined as that under which "the labourer or peasant makes his engagement directly with the land- owner, and pays, not a fixed rent, either in money or in kind, but a certain proportion of the produce, or rather of what remains of the produce after deducting what is considered necessary to keep up the stock." cf. Mill's Political Economy, bk. ii., chap. viii. — ED.]
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to work daily in order to wrest from the land that which enables him and his family to live miserably.
And small farming gives him at least the tranquilising assurance that he will reach the end of the year without experiencing all the terrors of the enforced slack season to which the workers not properly belonging to the country and the workers of the town are condemned.
But at the bottom the problem remains in its entirety, and there is always a man who lives in comfort without working, because ten others live miserably whilst working.*
Such is the working of private property and such are its effects without any intervention of the will of individuals.
Also, every attempt made against such or such individual is condemned to remain sterile : it is the basis of society that must be changed, it is individual property that must be abolished, not by a division which would lead to the most acute and paltry form of private property, because a year afterwards the persistence of the 'individualist aspect would lead us to the status quo ante, to the exclusive benefit of the most crafty and least scrupulous.
* Certain persons still imbued with political artificial- ism think that to solve the social question the system of small farming must be generalised. They imagine with- out putting it into words, a royal or presidential decree : Clause i. All men shall become farmers !
And they do not think that if small farming, which was the rule, is become the more and more rare excep- tion, it must be~the necessary effect of natural causes.
The cause of the change lies in the fact that small
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We must attain to the abolition ol private property and to the establishment of collec- tive and social property in the land and the means of production. This substitution cannot be the subject of a decree as people suppose us to intend ; but it is being accom- plished under our eyes each day, from hour to hour, directly or indirectly.
Directly — because civilisation shows us the continuous substitution of social possessions and functions for individual possessions and functions. Roads, the Post Office, railways, museums, the lighting of towns, drinking water, instruction, etc., which were only a few years ago private possessions and functions, have become social possessions and functions, and it would be absurd to imagine that this direct advance of socialism ought to stop short to-day instead of progressively empha- sising itself, since everything in modern life moves with accelerating speed.
Indirectly — because it is the point to which economic and bourgeois individualism tends. The bourgeoisie, which borrows its name from the inhabitants of the boroughs which the feudal castle and the churches protected—
farming represents the petty agricultural industry, and that it cannot struggle against the big agricultural indus- try well furnished with machines, just as handwork has not been able to resist the great manufacturing industries. It is true that there are still to-day handicrafts in a few villages, but these are rudimentary organs which only represent a former phase, and which have no decisive function in the economic world. They are like the rudi- mentary organs of the higher animals, according to the theory of Darwin — witnesses to epochs for ever passed.
The same Darwinian and economic law applies to small farming, itself evidently destined for the same end as handicrafts.
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symbols of the class then dominant — is the result of fruitful labour, conscious of what it was aiming at, and of historic conditions that have changed the economic trend of the world (the discovery of America, for instance). It made its revolution at the end of the i8th century and acquired power. In the history of the civilised world it has written a golden page by its national epics and by its marvel- lous applications of science to industry ; but to-day it is wandering over the descending curve of the parabola, and certain symptoms point out to us its coming dissolution. Without its disappearance, moreover, the establishment of a new social phase will not be possible.
Economic individualism, carried to its last consequences, necessarily causes the pro- gressive augmentation of property in the hands of an increasingly restricted number of persons. The millionaire is a new word which characterises the igth century, and it is the clear impression of this phenomenon — in which Henry George saw the historic law of individualism — which causes the rich to be- come more and more rich and the poor more and more poor.**
Now it is evident that the more restricted is the number of those who hold the land and the means of production, the easier is their expropriation — with or without indem- nity— for the advantage of a single proprietor who is, and who can only be, the community.
The land is the physical basis of the social organism. U is then absurd that it should
* Henry George, Progress and Poverty, London, 1887.
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belong to a few and not to the whole social body ; it would not be more absurd if the air we breathe were the monopoly of a few proprietors.
That is indeed the supreme aim of socialism, but we can evidently not attain it by aiming at this or that landlord, this or that capitalist. The method of the individualist struggle is destined to remain sterile, or at least it exacts an immense waste of forces to obtain only partial and provisional results.
Also, those politicians who carry on their business of daily or anecdotic protest, who only see a struggle of individuals, and whose work is without effect on the public or on assemblies who become accustomed to it, have on me the effect of fantastic hygienists, who would try to render a marsh habitable by killing the mosquitoes one by one with a revolver, instead of adopting the method and aim of rendering healthy the pestilential marsh.
No personal struggles, no personal violence, but a class struggle. The immense army of workers of all trades and all professions must be made conscious of these fundamental truths. We must show them that their class interests are in opposition to the interests of the class which holds the economic power, and it is by class conscious organisation that they will conquer this economic power by means of other public powers which contemporary civilisation has secured to free peoples. One can, however, foresee that in every country the dominant class before yielding will diminish
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or destroy even those public liberties which were without danger when they were in the hands of workmen not formed into a class party, but at the tail of other purely political parties which are as radical in secondary questions as they are profoundly conservative on the fundamental question of the economic organisation of property.
The class struggle is, therefore, a struggle of class against class, and a struggle, of course, by the methods of which I shall shortly speak when dealing with the four modes of social transformation : evolution — revolution — re- volt— personal violence. But it is a struggle of class in the Darwinian sense which renews in the history of man the grand drama of the struggle for life among the species instead of debasing ourselves to the savage and insig- nificant fight of one individual with another.
We can stop here. The examination of the relations between Darwinism and socialism might lead us much farther, but it would always eliminate the supposed contradiction there is between the two currents of modern, scientific thought, and it would affirm on the contrary the intimate, natural and indissoluble agreement there is between the two.
It is thus that the penetrating eye of Virchow found a confirmation in Leopold Jacoby.
"The same year when Darwin's book appeared (1859), and setting out from /juite a different direction, an identical impulse was given to~ a very important development of social science by a work which passed
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unperceived for a long time, and which bore for title : Criticism on Political Economy, by Karl Marx — it was the precursor of Capital.
"What Darwin's book on the Origin of Species is for the genesis and evolution of unconscious nature up to man, the work of Marx is for the genesis and evolution of the community of human beings, of States, and of the social forms of humanity."*
And that is why Germany, which has been the most fruitful field for the development of Darwinian theories, has been the same for the conscious, disciplined propaganda of socialist ideas. And that is precisely why at Berlin in the libraries of socialist propaganda the works of Charles Darwin occupy the place of honour beside those of Karl Marx.|
* L. Jacoby, L'Idea dell' evoluzione in Bibliotheca dell' economista, series III., vol. ix., part 2, p. 69.
t At the death of Darwin the Sozialdemokrat of 27 April, 1882, wrote : "The proletariat which is struggling for its emancipation will always honour the memory of Charles Darwin."
I know that in the last few years, perhaps in conse- quence of the relations between Darwinism and social- ism, the objections made to Darwin's theory by Ncegeli have been taken up again, and more recently by Weissmann on the hereditary transmissibility of acquired characteristics. But all that only concerns this or that detail of Darwinism, whilst the fundamental theory of organic transformism remains unshaken.
PART II. CHAPTER VIII.
EVOLUTION AND SOCIALISM.
The theory of universal evolution, which — apart from this or that detail more or less debatable — really characterises the vital trend of modern scientific thought, has also appeared to be in absolute contradiction to the theories and practical ideals of socialism.
Here the equivocation is evident.
If we mean by socialism this vague complexus of sentimental aspirations so many times crystallised in artificial Utopian creations of a new human world, which by a magical power was to substitute itself in one day for the world in which we live, then it is perfectly true that the 'scientific theory of evolution condemns the prejudices and illusions of political artificialism, always romantic whether reactionary or revolutionary.
But, unfortunately for our adversaries, con- temporary socialism is quite another thing from the socialism that preceded the work of Marx. Beyond the same sentiment of protest against present iniquities and of aspirations towards a better future there is nothing in common between the two socialisms, either in their logical structure or in their inductions,
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unless it be the clear vision, mathematically exact (and that indeed by virtue of the theories of evolution), of the final social organism — based on the collective ownership of land and the means of production.
That is what will result very clearly from the examination of the three principal contra- dictions which it has been thought could be raised between socialism and scientific evolution.
Henceforth it is impossible not to see the direct relation of Marxian socialism to scientific evolution, when it is understood that the former is only the logical and conse- quential application of the theory of evolution in the economic domain.
CHAPTER IX.
THE ORTHODOX ARGUMENT AND THE
SOCIALIST ARGUMENT IN THE LIGHT OF THE
THEORY OF EVOLUTION.
What does socialism in substance say? That the present economic world cannot be unchangeable and eternal, that it only represents a transitory phase of social evolution, and that a future phase, a world otherwise organised, ought to succeed it.
That this new organisation must be collec- tivist or socialist and no longer individualist, that is what is derived as a final and positive conclusion from the examination we have made of Darwinism and socialism.
I must now prove that this fundamental affirmation of socialism — leaving on one side all the details of future organisation of which I will speak further on — is in perfect harmony with the experimental theory of evolution.
On what point are orthodox political economy and socialism at complete variance ? Political economy has maintained, and maintains, that the laws of the production and distribution of wealth are natural laws, not in the sense that they are laws naturally determined by the conditions of the social organism (which would be correct), but that they are absolute laws, that is to say, that they are suitable to humanity for all time and all places, and consequently that they are unchangeable in their chief character- istics, though they may be susceptible to modifications in detail.
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Scientific socialism maintains, on the con- trary, that the laws established by classic, political economy, since Adam Smith, are laws suitable to the present historic period of the civilised world, that consequently they are laws essentially relative to the [time in which they have been analysed ; further, that just as they no longer correspond with the facts if one wishes to extend them to the historic past, and still more to pre-historic and ante-historic times, so they cannot have a claim to petrify the social future.
Of these two fundamental arguments, the orthodox argument and the socialist argument, which is the one that best accords with the scientific theory of universal evolution ?
The answer cannot be doubtful.
The theory of evolution of which Herbert Spencer is the real author, in applying to sociology the relativist tendency which the historic school had followed in the study of law and politics (already heterodox on more than one point), has shown that everything changes, that the present, in the astronomical, geological, biological, sociological order, is only the resultant of many thousand trans- formations, natural, necessary, incessant — that the present differs from the past, and that the future will certainly be different from the present.
Spencerism has done nothing but bring an enormous number of scientific proofs in all branches of human knowledge to these two abstract thoughts of Leibnitz and Hegel :
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"the present is the son of the past but it is the father of the future," and "nothing is, every- thing is becoming." Already geology since Lyell had made this demonstration, in sub- stituting for the traditional conception of cataclysms, the scientific conception of the gradual and daily transformation of the earth.
It is true that, in spite of his encylopaedic knowledge, Herbert Spencer has not thoroughly studied political economy, or that at least he has not given his proofs as in the natural sciences. That does not, however, hinder socialism from being, in its fundamental con- ception, only the logical application of the scientific theory of natural evolution to economic phenomena.
It is Karl Marx who, in 1859, in his Criticism on Political Economy, and previously, in 1847, in the celebrated Manifesto written in col- laboration with Engels, nearly ten years before the First Principles of Spencer was pub- lished, finally completed in Capital in the social domain the scientific revolution com- menced by Darwin and Spencer.
Ancient metaphysics ' conceives morality law, economics, as a collection of absolute and eternal laws as Plato understood them. It only takes into consideration the historic world, and has as an instrument of research only the logical imagination of the philo- sopher. The generations which preceded us have been imbued with this idea of absolute natural laws struggling in the dualism of matter andjnind. Positive science, on the contrary, starts from the grand synthesis of
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monism, that is to say, of the sole phenomenal reality, matter and force being recognised as inseparable and indestructible, developing themselves in a continued movement, assum- ing successively forms relative to time and place. It has radically changed the trend of modern thought and has directed it towards universal evolution.
Morality, law, politics are only super- structures, effects of the economic structure, they vary with it from one clime to another, from one century to another century.
This is the great discovery which Karl Marx has set forth in his Criticism on Political Economy. I will examine later what is this sole source of economic conditions, but now I am concerned with pointing out their continued variability from the prehistoric epoch to the historic epoch and in the different periods of the latter.
Rules of morals, religious beliefs, legal, civil, and penal institutions, political or- ganisation ; everything changes and every- thing is relative to the historic and material environment which one is considering.
To kill one's parents is the greatest of crimes in Europe and America ; it is, on the contrary, a duty which religion sanctifies in the island of Sumatra. Similarly, cannibalism is still permitted in Central Africa, and it was equally permitted in Europe and America in prehistoric times.
The family is at first (as with animals) only a sexual communism ; polyandry and a matriarchate established themselves where
a scanty food supply only allowed a small increase in the population ; we find polygamy and a patriarchate at the time and in the place where this fundamental economic reason does not rule tyrannically. With historic times appears the best and most advanced form, monogamy, although that still needs to be delivered from the absolutist conventionalism of the indissoluble bond and of the prostitution disguised and legalised (for economic reasons) which sullies it in our epoch.
Why claim that the constitution of property ought to remain eternally what it is now, un- changeable in the midst of this gigantic current of social institutions, and of moral rules subject to continued and profound evolutions and transformations? Property alone should be subjected to no change, and should remain petrified in its form of private monopoly of the land and of the means of production !
Such is the absurd claim of economic and legal orthodoxy. To the irresistible state- ments of the theory of evolution only this single concession has been made: the accessory rules may vary, the abuses may be diminished. The principle itself is not to be touched, and a few individuals may appropriate for them- selves the land and the means of production necessary for the life of the whole social organism, which thus remains for ever under the domination, more or less direct, of these holders of the physical basis of life.*
* The partisans and opponents of free will are in exactly the same position.
Ancient metaphysics granted to man (the unique
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It suffices to state precisely the two funda- mental theses — the theses of classic law and economics and the thesis of economic and juridical socialism — to decide thus without further discussion this first point of the controversy : in all cases the theory of evolution is in perfect, incontestable agree- ment with the inductions of socialism, and it is, on the contrary, in opposition to the affirmations of those who believe in economic and juridical fixity.
marvellous exception in the whole universe) absolute free will.
Modern physio-psychology refuses to man every kind of free will in the name of the laws of natural causation.
There are found in an intermediate position those who, tvhilst recognising that the free will of man is not abso- lute, maintain that we must at least admit a little free will because, otherwise, there is neither merit nor demerit, virtue, nor vice, etc.
I dealt with this question in my first work : Teoria dell' imputabilitd e negazione de libero arbitrio (Florence, 1878, out of print), and in chap. iii. of my Criminal Sociology.
I only mention it here to show that even in the eco- nomic social question, the struggle presents itself in the same conditions, and that one can, therefore, predict a similar, final solution.
The true Conservative inspired with metaphysical tradition keeps to the ancient moral or economic ideas in all their absolutism : he is at least logical.
The determinist, in the name of science, holds ideas diametrically opposed in the domain of psychology as in that of the economic or legal sciences.
The eclectic, in politics as in psychology, in political economy as in law, is at bottom a Conservative, but he thinks he evades difficulties because he makes some partial concessions and saves appearances. But if eclecticism is an attitude personally convenient, it is like hybridism, sterile, and neither life nor science owes it anything.
Thus socialists logically claim that the political parties are after all two in number : individualists (conservatives, progressives, radicals) and socialists.
CHAPTER X.
THE LAW OF APPARENT RETROGRESSION AND COLLECTIVE PROPERTY.
Let us admit, say our opponents, that in demanding a social transformation socialism is in apparent accord with the theory of evolution, yet it does not follow that its positive conclusions — notably the substitution of social property for individual property — are justified by this same theory. Much more, they add, we maintain that these conclusions are in absolute opposition to this very theory and that they are consequently, at least, Utopian and absurd.
Socialism and evolutionism would first be in opposition in that the return to collective property of the land would at the same time be a return to the primitive, savage stage of humanity, and socialism would indeed be a change, but a change the wrong way, that is to say against the current of social evolution which has brought us from the primitive collective ownership of the land to the present individual ownership, which is a characteristic of an advanced civilisation. Socialism would then be a return to barbarism.
This objection contains a portion of truth which cannot be denied : it justly notes that collective property would be a return, apparently, to the primitive social organisa- tion. But the conclusion which is drawn is absolutely false and unscientific because it takes no account of a law very generally neglected, but which is neither less true nor less certain than social evolution.
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There is a sociological law which a French doctor of repute has indicated in studying the relations of transformism and socialism.* I have shown the truth and the importance of this in my Criminal Sociology — before becom- ing a militant socialist — and I have again recently insisted upon it in my controversy with M. Morselli on divorce.|
This law of apparent retrogression shows that the reversion of social institutions to primitive forms and characteristics is a con- stant fact.
Before setting forth some evident illustra- tions of this law, I will recall the fact that M. Cognetti de Martiis, already in 1881, had had a vague glimpse of this sociological law. His work Forme primitive nelV evoluzione economica (Turin 1881) so remarkable for the abund- ance, the precision and the exactness of the facts set forth, gave a glimpse in fact of the possibility of the reappearance in the future economic evolutions of the primitive forms which marked its starting point.
I remember also often to have heard Carducci, in his lessons at the University of Bologna, affirm that ultimate progress of the forms and subject matter of literature is often only the reproduction of the forms and the subject-matter of primitive Graeco-Oriental literature ; similarly the modern scientific theory of monism, the very soul of universal evolution and the representative of the latest
* L. Dramard, Transformisme et socialisme, in the Revue socialiste, January and February, 1885.
t Divorzio e sociologia in the Scuola positiva nella giurisprudenza penale, Rome, 1893, No. 16.
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positive and definite discipline of human thought confronting external reality, suc- ceeding the brilliant wandering of meta- physics, is only a reversion to the ideas of Greek philosophers and of Lucretius, the great naturalistic poet.
The examples of this reversion to primitive forms are only too evident and too numerous even in the order of social institutions.
I have already spoken of religious evolution. According to Hartmann, in the primitive times of humanity happiness seemed realisable in the existence of the individual. It did not appear to be so later except in the life beyond the tomb, and now the tendency is to carry it back to humanity, but in the series of future generations.
It is the same in the political domain, and Spencer remarks* that the will of all — the sovereign element in primitive humanity-r- yields little by little to the will of one, then to those of a few (these are the different aris- tocracies, military, hereditary, professional, feudal), and it tends finally to become sovereign with the progress of democracy, universal suffrage, referendum, direct legislation by the people, etc.
The right to punish, a simple function of defence in primitive humanity, tendsito become such again. It has freed itself from every teleological pretension of distributive justice which the illusion of free will had superposed on the natural foundation of defence. Scientific researches into crime, as a natural
* Sociology III. chapter 5.
8*
and social phenomenon, have shown to-day how absurd and illegitimate was the preten- sion of the legislator and the judge to weigh and measure the " fault " of the delinquent in order that the punishment might be an exact counterpoise, instead of contenting themselves with excluding from civil society temporarily or perpetually those individuals who cannot adapt themselves to its necessities, as one does with lunatics or those afflicted with con- tagious diseases.
The same with marriage. The free right of dissolution which was recognised in primitive society has been gradually replaced by the absolute formulae of theology and spiritualism which imagine that " free will " can fix the destiny of a person by a monosyllable pro- nounced at a moment of such unstable psychical equilibrium as is the period of betrothal and marriage. Later, the reversion to the spontaneous and primitive form of consent is imposed and the matrimonial union with the custom continually more frequent and easy of divorce returns to its origin and gives to the family, that is to say to the social cell, a healthier constitution.
This same phenomenon is established in property. Spencer himself has been forced to recognise that there was a fatal tendency to a reversion to a primitive collectivism when the appropriation of the land, at first for the family then for industrial purposes as he has himself shown, has attained its culminating point, so that in certain countries (Torrens Act in Australia) the land has become a sort of
personal property transmissible, like the shares of a joint stock company. Here is what an individualist like Herbert Spencer writes as a conclusive argument: "At first sight it seems fairly inferable that the absolute ownership of land by private persons must be the ultimate state which industrialism brings about. But though industrialism has thus far tended to individualise possession of land, while indivi- dualising all other possession, it maybe doubted tvhether the final stage is at present reached. Ownership established by force does not stand on the same footing as ownership established by contract ; and though multiplied sales and purchases, treating the two ownerships in the same way, have tacitly assimilated them, the assimilation may eventually be denied. The analogy furnished by assumed rights of possession over human beings helps us to recognise this possibility. For while prisoners of war, taken by force and held as property in a vague way (being at first much on a footing with other members of a household), were reduced more definitely to the form of property when the buying and selling of slaves became general ; and while it might, centuries ago, have been thence inferred that the ownership of man by man was an ownership in course of being permanently established ;* yet we see that a later stage of civilisation, reversing this process, has destroyed ownership of man by
* It is known that Aristotle, taking for an absolute sociological law a law relative to his time, affirmed that slavery was a natural institution, and that men were distinguished by nature as free men and slaves.
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man. Similarly, at a stage still more ad- vanced, it may be that private ownership of land will disappear."*
Besides, this process of the socialisation of property, although partial and accessory, is so evident and continuous that it would be denying what is an actual fact to maintain that the economic and consequently the juridical tendency of the organisation of property is not in the direction of an ever greater augmentation of the interests and rights of the aggregate of individuals over those of the single individual : this prepon- deratering tendency of to-day will replace completely, by an inevitable process of evolu- tion, the ownership of land and the means of production.
The fundamental thesis of socialism is then, to repeat it once more, in perfect accord with
* Spencer, Principles of Sociology, vol. 2, part 5, chap. 15. This idea which Spencer had expressed in 1850 in his Social Statics is found again in his recent work, Justice, chapter xi., appendix B. It is true that he has made a step backwards. He thinks that the amount of the indemnity to be given to the present owners of the land would be so great that it would render almost impossible the nationalisation of the land, which, in 1881, Henry George considered as the only remedy, and which Glad- stone had the courage to propose as a solution of the Irish question. Spencer adds, " I adhere to the inference originally drawn, that the aggregate of men forming the community are the supreme owners of the land — an infer- ence harmonising with legal doctrine, and daily acted upon in legislation — a fuller consideration of the matter has led me to the conclusion that individual ownership, subject to State-suzerainty, should be maintained." The "fuller study" which Spencer has made in Justice (and in parenthesis this work constitutes with his Positive and Negative Benevolence [Parts V. and VI. of The Principles of Ethics, vol. ii. — ED.], a mournful document of senile involved reasoning from which even Mr. H. Spencer has not been able to escape ; in addition, his subjective dryness
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this sociological law of apparent retrogression , the natural causes of which M. Loria has admirably analysed : Primitive humanity borrows from surrounding nature the funda- mental and most simple lines of its thought and life ; then the progress of intelligence and complexity, increasing by a law of evolution, gives us an analytical development of the principal elements contained in the first germs of each institution ; this analytical develop- ment is often, once it is finished, antagonistic to each of the elements ; humanity itself, having reached a certain stage of evolution, recomposes in a final synthesis these different
forms a strange contrast to the marvellous wealth of posi- tive ideas in his first works) — is founded on two arguments, (i) the present landowners are not the direct descendants of the first conquerors : they have acquired their properties generally by free contract ; (2) Society would have a right to the ownership of the virgin soil, as it was before the clearing, the improvements, the buildings made by private owners : the indemnity which ought to be paid for these improvements would mount to an enormous figure.
We must answer that the first argument would hold good if socialism proposed to punish the present landowners, but the question is put otherwise : society recognises the dispossession of holders of land as of "public benefit," the individual right must bow to the social right, as happens, moreover, at present, whilst reserving the ques- tion of indemnity. In order to answer the second question we must not forget that the improvements are not the exclusive work of the personal activity of the landowners. There is first the enormous accumulation of labour and blood which numerous generations of workers, for the benefit of others, have left on the soil to put it in its present state of culture ; there is also this fact that society itself, social life, has been a large co-efficient of these improvements since the good state of the public roads, railways, the use of machines in agriculture, etc., have procured for landowners important increments, free of cost to them, in the value of their lands.
Why then, iLwe consider the amount and the form of
the indemnity, should this indemnity be total and absolute ?
But even to-day if a landowner in consequence of diverse
9,
elements and thus returns to its primitive point of departure.!
This return to the primitive form is not, however, a repetition pure and simple. So we call it the law of apparent retrogression and that takes away all value from the objection of the "return to primitive barbarism." It is not a repetition pure and simple, but the end of a cycle, of a great rhythm, as M. Asturaro recently said, which cannot but preserve the effects and conquests of the long prior evolution in what they possess of vitality and fruitfulness, and the final outcome is far superior, in its objective reality and its effect on the human mind, to the primitive embryo which it resembles.
The course of social evolution is not repre- sented by a closed circle, which, like the serpent of the ancient symbol, cuts off all hope of a better future ; but according to the image of Goethe, it is represented by a spiral which seems to come back on itself but which always advances and rises.
circumstances, of memories associated with his land, for example, values it at a sentimental price, would he not be forced to give it up without being able to exact payment of this sentimental price? It will be the same with the collective dispossession which, moreover, is facilitated by the progressive concentration of land in the hands of a few large landowners. It will suffice to secure to these landowners during their days a comfortable and tranquil life in order that the indemnity should answer to all the exigencies of the most rigorous equity.
t Loria, The Economic Basis of Society.
This law of apparent retrogression is sufficient to answer the greater number of the rather too superficial criticisms which M. Guyot makes on socialism in The Tyranny of Socialism, London, 1894.
CHAPTER XI.
SOCIAL EVOLUTION AND INDIVIDUAL LIBERTY.
The conclusion of the preceding chapter will be of use to us in examining the second contradiction which it is held exists between socialism and the theory of evolution. It is affirmed and repeated in every way that socialism forms a tyranny of a new kind which will destroy all the benefits of the liberty so painfully won in our century at the price of so many sacrifices and so many martyrs.
I have already shown in speaking of anthropological inequalities that socialism will on the contrary secure to all individuals the conditions of human existence, and the possibility of developing their own personality more freely and more completely.
It will suffice for me here to recall another law which the scientific theory of evolution has established, to prove (because I cannot in this monograph enter into the details) that it is wrong to suppose that the advent of social- ism will result in the suppression of the living and fructifying part of personal and political liberty.
It is a law of natural evolution remarkably illustrated by M. Ardigo,* that no subsequent phase of natural and social evolution destroys the vital and fructifying manifestations of preceding phases, but on the contrary, that it continues their existence in so far as they are vital and eliminate only the pathological manifestations.
* Ardig6, La formazione naturale, vol. H. of his opere filosofiche, Padua, 1887.
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In biological evolution the manifestations of vegetable life do not efface the first dawn of life which is already seen in the crystallisation of minerals, anymore than the manifestations of animal life efface those of vegetable life. The human form of life also leaves in existence the forms and links which precede it in the great series of living beings, but much more do the later developed forms live in proportion to whether they are the product of primitive forms, and co- exist with them.
Social evolution follows the same law, and this is precisely the interpretation which scientific evolutionism gives of the transition times. They do not eliminate the conquests of preceding civilisation, but, on the contrary, they preserve the vital part of them and fructify them for the new birth of a fresh civilisation.
This law which governs the grand develop- ment of social life, rules equally the destiny and the course of all social institutions.
One phase of social evolution in succeeding another eliminates, it is true, the non-vital parts, the pathological products of preceding institutions, but it preserves and develops the healthy and fructifying parts whilst it always raises higher the physical and moral diapason of humanity.
By this natural process the great river of humanity has come forth from the virgin forests of savage life, has developed majesti- cally in the periods of barbarism and of the present civilisation, superior in certain aspects to the preceding phases of social life, but in
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many others stained by the very products of its own degeneracy as I have mentioned con- cerning backward social selections.
For example, it is certain that the workmen of the contemporary period of bourgeois civilisation have generally a physical and moral existence superior to that of past centuries ; but it cannot, however, be denied that their condition as free wage earners is inferior in more than one point to the condition of the slaves of antiquity and of the serfs of the Middle Ages.
The slave of antiquity was, it is true, the absolute property of his master, of the free man, and he was condemned to an almost bestial life ; but it was to the interest of the master to secure to him at least his daily bread, for the slave was part of his patrimony like his oxen and horses.
Similarly, the serf of the soil, in the Middle Ages, enjoyed certain customary rights which attached him to the land and secured to him at least — except in case of scarcity — daily bread. The free wage earner of the modern world, on the contrary, is always condemned to labour not fit for a human being both by its length and its character. This is the justifica- tion for the claim for an eight hours' day, which can already reckon more than one victory, and which is destined to a certain triumph. As no permanent juridical relation connects him either with the capitalist land- lord, or with the land, his daily bread is not secured to him, because the employer has no longer any interest in feeding and maintaining
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the workers in his factory or his field. The death or the illness of the worker can, in fact, bring no diminution of his patrimony, and he can always have recourse to the inexhaus- tible crowd of proletarians which the slack season offers him in the market.
This is why — not because the present em- ployers are more wicked than those of the past, but because even the moral sentiments are a product of the economic condition — the landowner, or the steward of his estate, will hasten to call a veterinary surgeon if the ox in his stall is taken ill, so that he may avoid the loss of so much capital, while he shows no eagerness in having a doctor called if it is his drover's son who is attacked.
Certainly there may be (and there are exceptions more or less frequent) a landowner who is a contradiction to this rule, especially when he lives in daily contact with his workers. It cannot be denied further that the rich classes are sometimes troubled with the spirit of beneficence — even without the "charity fad,'1 and that they thus sooth the inward voice of moral uneasiness which troubles them, but the inexorable rule is still this : with the modern form of industry the worker has con- quered political freedom, the right of a vote, of association, etc. (which he is allowed to exercise as long as he does not unite to form a class party which holds an intelligent con- ception of the essential point of the social question) but he has lost the security of his daily bread and his home.
Socialism wishes to give this security to all
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individuals — and it proves the mathematical possibility of this by the substitution of the social ownership for the individual ownership of the means of production ; but that does not mean that socialism will cause the disappear- ance of all the useful and truly fructifying conquests of the present or the preceding phases of civilisation.
Here is a characteristic example: the inven- tion of industrial and agricultural machines. This marvellous application of science to the transformation of natural forces which ought to have only beneficial consequences, has entailed, and entails still, the misery and ruin of thousands and thousands of workers. The substitution of machines for human labour has inevitably condemned masses of the work- ing classes to the tortures of forced slack seasons and to the hard law of a minimum wage, scarcely sufficient to keep them from dying of hunger.
The first instinctive reaction of these un- fortunates has been, and, unhappily, still is, to destroy the machines, and see in them only a means of undeserved damnation.
But the destruction of the machines would really be only a pure and simple reversion to barbarism, and that is not the desire of socialism, which represents a higher plane of human civilisation.
And this is how socialism alone can solve this melancholy difficulty. Economic indi- vidualism cannot do this by employing always new machines, because therein is an evident and irresistible advantage for the capitalist.
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It is necessary — and there is no other solution — that the machines should become collective or social property. Then, evidently, they will have no other effect than to diminish the sum total of work and of muscular effort necessary to produce a given quantity of products. And thus each workman will see his daily portion of work diminish, and his existence will continually and increasingly rise to one worthy of a human creature.
This effect is already partially established when, for example, several small landowners found co-operative societies for the purchase of machines for thrashing corn. If workmen or peasants came to join the small landowners in a great brotherly co-operation (and this will only be possible when the land shall have become social property), and if the machines were municipal property, for example, like the fire engines, and if the community let them be used for field work, the machines would not have an unhappy repelling effect, and all men would see in them deliverers.
It is thus that socialism, because it repre- sents a higher phase of human evolution would only eliminate from the present phase the evil products of our unbridled economic individualism, which creates on the one side millionaires or those contractors who enrich themselves in a few years by possessing them- selves, according to forms more or less fore- seen by the penal code, of public funds, and which on the other side accumulates enormous masses of miserable men in the lowest parts of the great cities or in the houses of straw
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and mud, which reproduce in the Basilicate, the quarters of the Roman helots, or in the valley of the Po, the Australian aborigines' huts.*
No intelligent socialist has ever dreamt of refusing to recognise all that the bourgeoisie has done for human civilisation, or of tearing out the pages of gold that it has written in the history of the civilised world by its national epics, its marvellous applications of science to industry, and by the commercial and intellectual relations it has developed among the nations.
These are definitive" conquests of human progress, and socialism no more denies them than it wishes to destroy them. It accords a just tribute of gratitude to the noble pioneers who have realised them. The attitude of socialism with respect to the bourgeoisie might be compared with that of atheists who do not wish to refuse their admiration for, or to destroy a picture of Raphael or a statue of Michael Angelo, because these works of art represent and give the seal of eternity to religious legends.
But socialism sees in the present bourgeois civilisation, which has reached its decline, the painful symptoms of an irremediable dissolu- tion, and it claims that the social organism must be delivered from its infectious venom, and that can be done, not by freeing it from such or such a bankrupt, from such or such a
* My master, Pietro Ellero, has given in La Tirranide borghese an eloquent description of this social and political pathology as it concerns Italy.
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corrupt functionary, from such or such a dis- honest contractor — but by going to the root of the evil, to the uncontestable source of virulent infection. By radically transforming the regime — by the substitution of social owner- ship for private ownership — the healthy and vital forces of human society must be renewed, in order that it may rise to a higher phase of civilisation. Then the privileged will cer- tainly not be able to pass their lives in idleness, luxury, and debauchery, and they will have to resolve to lead a laborious and less pompous life : but the immense majority of men will rise to serene dignity, to security, to a happy fraternity, instead of living in the sufferings, the anguish, and the ill will of the present.
We can give an analogous answer to the hackneyed objection that socialism will sup- press all liberty — this objection repeated to satiety by all those who conceal under the colours of political liberty more or less con- scious tendencies to economic conservatism.
Is not this repugnance which many persons, even with good faith, feel towards socialism in the name of liberty, the manifestation of another law of human evolution which Herbert Spencer has thus formulated : " Every progress realised is an obstacle to further progress"?
It is indeed a natural, psychological .ten- dency, which one might call " fetich-ist," to refuse to consider the ideal attained, the pro- gress realised as a simple instrument and point of departure for other progress and other ideals, and to stop in "fetichist" adoration
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of a point reached which appears to have exhausted every other ideal, every other aspiration.
Just the same as the savage adores the fruit tree, from which he receives benefits, for itself and not for the fruits which it can give, and finishes by making a fetich of it, an idol not to be touched, and therefore sterile ; just as the miser who has learnt in our individualist world the value of money, finishes by worship- ping money in itself and for itself like a fetich or an idol, and keeps it hidden in a strong box where it is sterile, instead of using it as a means of procuring for himself fresh pleasures; in the same way the sincere liberal, the son of the French Revolution, has made of liberty an idol which has its end in itself, a sterile fetich, instead of using it as a means for new conquests and to realise new ideals.
We can understand that under a regime of political tyranny the first and most urgent ideal may have been the acquisition of liberty and political sovereignty, and we, the last comers, know how to be grateful for this acquisition to the martyrs and heroes who have insisted upon it at the price of their lives.
But liberty is not, and cannot be, an end in itself.
Who wants the liberty of public meeting or the liberty of thought if his stomach has not its daily bread, and if millions of individuals have their moral force paralysed in conse- quence of bodily and cerebral anaemia ?
What is the worth of a platonic participa- tion in political government, the right to vote,
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if the people are kept slaves to misery, to slack seasons, to sharp or chronic hunger ?
Liberty for liberty's sake — that is, progress attained opposing itself to progress to come — is a sort of political self pollution : it is impotence in face of the fresh necessities of life.
Socialism answers that it does not wish to suppress the liberty gloriously acquired by the bourgeois world in 1879 any more than the subsequent phase effaces the conquests of the preceding phases of social evolution, but it wishes that the workers after having acquired a consciousness of the interests and needs of their class should make use of this liberty to realise a more equitable and more humane social organisation.
However, it is only too incontestable that, given individual ownership, and therefore the monopoly of economic power, the liberty of him who is not a holder of this monopoly is only an impotent and platonic toy. And when the workers wish to use this liberty with a clear consciousness of their class interests, then the holders of political power are forced to deny the great liberal principles, " the principles of '89," by suppressing all public liberty, and they imagine themselves able thus to arrest the inevitable march of human evolution.
It is necessary to say as much of another accusation directed against socialists. " They deny their country," it is said, "in the name of internationalism."
That also is false.
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The movements of heroic nationalism which in our century have reconquered for Italy and Germany their unity and independence, have been really a great advance, and we are grateful to those who have given us a free country.
But our country cannot become an obstacle to the progress to come, to the fraternity of all the peoples, freed from national hatreds which are in reality either the residue of barbarism or a simple theatrical scenery to conceal the interests of capitalism which has known how to realise for itself the greatest internationalism.
It was true moral and social progress for us to go beyond the phase of communal wars in Italy and to feel we were all brothers of the same nation ; it will be the same for us when we shall have passed beyond the phase of "patriotic" rivalries, to feel we are all brothers of the same humanity.
It is, however, not difficult for us to pene- trate, thanks to the historical key of class interests, into the secret of the contradictions in which the classes in power move. When they form an international league — the banker of London, thanks to the telegraph, is master of the market at Pekin, New York, St. Petersburg — it is a great advantage for this dominant class to maintain the artificial divisions between the workmen of the whole world, or even only of old Europe, because the division of workmen alone renders possible the maintenance of the power of capitalists. And to attain this end, it is sufficient to
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exploit the primitive and savage basis of hatred for a foreigner.
But that does not mean that international socialism may not be, even from this point of view, a definite, moral scheme and an in- evitable phase of human evolution.
In the same way and in consequence of the same sociological law, it is not true to claim that in constituting collective ownership, socialism will do away with every kind of individual ownership.
We must repeat again that one phase of evolution cannot suppress all that has been realised in preceding phases : it only suppresses the manifestations which have ceased to be vital, because they are in contradiction with the new conditions of existence created by the new phases.
In substituting for individual property social ownership of the land and means of production, it is evident that the ownership of food necessary for the individual will not have been suppressed, nor that of clothing and objects of personal use which will con- tinue to be articles of individual or family consumption.
This form of individual property will then always exist even in a collective regime, because it is necessary and perfectly com- patible with the social ownership of the land, mines, factories, houses, machines, instruments of work and means of transport.
Does the collective'ownership of libraries — which we are seeing at work under our eyes — take away from individuals the personal
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use of rare or costly books which they could not procure in any other manner, and do not libraries considerably increase the use made of a book compared with what it could render if shut up in the private library of a useless bibliophile ? In the same way the collective ownership of the land and the means of pro- duction, in furnishing to each the use of machines, tools, and land, will only multiply their utility a hundredfold.
And it must not be said that when men no longer have the exclusive and transmissible ownership of wealth they will no longer be impelled to work because they will no longer be moved by personal or family interest.
We see for example that even in our present individualist world those residues of collective ownership of the land — to which Laveleye has so brilliantly called the atten- tion of sociologists — continue to be cultivated and yield a rent which is not inferior to that which the lands yield that are held in private ownership, although these agrarian commun- ists or collectivists have only the right of usage and of enjoyment."*
* M. Loria, in Economic Basis oj Society, London, 1894, Part i-t proves besides that in a society based on collective ownership egoism of course still remains the principal motive of human actions, but that it thus brings about a social harmony of which it is the worst enemy in an individualist regime.
Here is besides a very small but instructive example. The means of transport in the large towns have followed the ordinary process of progressive socialisation : first, everyone went on foot, as an exception only a few rich persons could have horses and carriages ; later the car- riages were put at the service of the public with a tariff (the fiacres, which have been used in Paris for more than
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If a few of these remains of collective ownership are disappearing, or if their ad- ministration is bad, that cannot be an argu- ment against socialism, because it is easy to understand that in the present economic organisation, based on absolute individualism, these organisms cannot find a medium which furnishes them with the conditions of a possible existence.!
It is like wishing a fish to live out of water
a century and which took their name from St. Fiacre because the first carriage was stationed under his image) ; then this tariff being very high brought about a further socialisation through omnibuses and tramways. One step more and the socialisation will be complete. Let the service of carriages, omnibuses, tramways, etc., become municipal and everyone will be able to use them freely as they now use the electric light. It will be the same with a national public service of railways.
But then — this is the individualist objection — everyone will want to go in a carriage or in a tramway, and the service having to satisfy all, will please none.
That is not exact. If the transformation were to be made suddenly, this consequence might take place in a transitory fashion. But already a partial or complete free transport exists in a certain measure — on railways for members of certain associations, on tramways for post- men and telegraphists.
It also seems to us that everyone will want to go in a tramway because now the impossibility of enjoying this mode of locomotion brings with it the desire of forbidden fruit. But when there is freedom to enjoy it (and one could if necessary limit the right to this) another egoisti- cal impulse will come into play, the physiological need of walking, especially for well-nourished persons, and after sedentary work.
And that is how individual egoism in this little example of collective ownership would act in harmony with social necessities.
t I occupied myself with this problem from the socialist point of view in my address to the Chamber of Deputies on i3th May, 1894. Propriety colletiva e lotta di classe (e polemica con M. R. Imbriani), Milan, 1894.
or a mammal in an atmosphere deprived of oxygen.
They are the same considerations that condemn to a certain death all those famous experiments of socialist, communist or anarchist communities which people have attempted to establish in different places as " experiments in socialism." People do not seem to have understood that such experiments must inevitably fail, obliged as they are to develop themselves in an individualist economic and moral environment which cannot supply them with the conditions of physiological development to be found, on the contrary, when the whole social organisa- tion has been collectively arranged, that is to say when society is socialised. *
At this moment the psychological indi- vidual tendencies and aptitudes will adapt themselves to their environment. It is natural that in an individualist environment of free competition in which each individual sees in the other, if not an enemy, at least a com- petitor, anti -social egoism must be the tendency which inevitably develops most, by necessity of the instinct of personal preser- vation, especially in the last phases of a civilisation which seems driven with full steam if it is compared with the pacific and slow individualism of past centuries.
* One can thus understand how unsubstantial is the current reasoning of the opponents of socialism which M. Mas6-Dari has gone over in // socialismo, Turin, 1890, § 9 : the failure of communistic or socialistic com- munities is a proof from actual fact of " the instability of a socialist arrangement."
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In a society where every one, in exchange for intellectual or manual work rendered to the society, will be assured of his daily bread, and thus will be protected from daily anxiety, it is evident that egoism will have far fewer stimulants and opportunities of showing itself than solidarity, sympathy, and altruism. Then this pitiless maxim will cease to be true — homo homini lupus — which, whether it is avowed or not, poisons so large a portion of our present life.
I cannot stay longer over these details, and I finish here the examination of this second alleged contradiction between socialism and evolution by recalling that the sociological law which declares that the subsequent phase does not efface the vital and fructifying mani- festations of preceding phases of evolution, gives us a more positive idea of the social organisation in the course of formation than our opponents imagine who always think they have to refute the romantic and senti- mental socialism of the first half of the last century.*
* That is for example what M. Yves Guyot does in Les Principes de '89, Paris, 1894, when he affirmed in the name of an individualistic psychology that "socialism is restrictive, and individualism expansive." This argu- ment is moreover partially true if it is reversed.
We shall find a good example in the question of an eight hours' day, on which I point out the remarkable monograph of M. Albertini, La Questions delle otto ore di lavoro, Turin, 1894.
The vulgar psychology, which is sufficient for M. Guyot, The Tyranny of Socialism, book iii., chap, i., is contented with superficial observations. It declares, for example, that if the workman works for 12 hours he will evidently produce a third more than if he works 8 hours, and that is a reason why industrial capitalism is opposed
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This shows how little substance there is in the objection which an illustrious Italian professor, M. Vanni, raised recently against socialism in the name of a learned but vague sociological eclecticism.
" Contemporary socialism does not identify itself with individualism because it puts at the basis of social organisation a principle which is not that of the autonomy of the individual, but its negation. If in spite of that it affirms individualist ideas which are in contradiction to its principles, that does not mean that it has changed its nature or ceased
to, and opposes, the minimum programme of the three eights — eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, and eight for meals and recreation.
A more scientific physio-psychological observation proves on the contrary as I said long ago that " man is a machine, but he does not work like a machine " in the sense that man is a living and not an inorganic machine.
One understands that a locomotive or a sewing machine does a third more work in twelve hours than in eight, but man is a living machine subject to the laws of physical mechanics, and also to those of biological mechanics. Intellectual work, like muscular work, has not a uniform continuity. In the individual limits of fatigue and exhaustion, it obeys the law which Quetelet expressed by his binomial curve, and which I believe to be one of the fundamental laws of living and non-living nature. At the beginning the force or the speed is very feeble, then a maximum of force or speed is attained, at length the end comes with a very feeble force or speed.
With manual as with intellectual work there is a maxi- mum after which the muscular and cerebral forces decline, and then the work is carried on slowly and without vigour until the end of the forced daily work. Add to that the beneficent suggestive influence of the reduction of hours, and it is easy to understand why the recent enquiries of the English manufacturers into the excellent results, even from the capitalist point of view, of the eight hours reform are irrefutable. The workers are less fatigued and the production has not diminished.
When these economic reforms and all those that rest on a positive physio-psychology are carried into effect under
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to be socialism ; it means simply that social- ism lives on contradictions."!
When socialism, in assuring to each the means of living, claims that it will permit the affirmation and development of all individu- alities, it does not fall into a contradiction of principles, but being the next phase of human civilisation, it cannot suppress or efface what there is in the preceding phases that is vital, that is to say, what is compatible with the new social form. And so socialistic inter- nationalism is not in contradiction with the existence of One's country because it recog- nises what is true in it, and only eliminates the pathological part, the chauvinism ; and in the same way socialism does not live on con- tradiction, but, on the contrary, it follows the fundamental laws of natural evolution if it develops and preserves the vital part of individualism, and if it only suppresses the pathological manifestations which bring to pass in the modern world, as Prampolini said, that 90 per cent, of the cells of the social organisation are condemned to anaemia, because 10 per cent, are sick of hyperaemia and hypertrophy.
a socialist regime, that is, without the friction and loss of force brought about by capitalist individualism, it is evident that they will have immense material and moral advantages despite the d priori objections of the present individualism which does not know how to observe, or which forgets the profound reflex effects of, a change of social environment on individual psychology.
t Icilio Vanni, " La Funzione pratica della filosofia del diritto considerata in se e in rapporto al socialismo contemporaneo." Bologna, 1894.
CHAPTER XII.
EVOLUTION, REVOLUTION, REVOLT, INDIVIDUAL VIOLENCE, SOCIALISM, AND ANARCHY.
The last and gravest of the contradictions which it is claimed are to be found between socialism and the scientific theory of evolution, is involved in the question how practical socialism will be realised. Some think that socialism ought to make known from now in all its details the precise and symmetrical framework of positive social organisation. " Give me a practical description of the new society and I will then decide if I should prefer it to the present society."
Others — and it is a consequence of this first false conception — imagine that socialism wishes to change in a day the face of the world, and that having gone to sleep in a complete bourgeois world, we shall waken next day in a complete socialist world.
How is it not seen, we then say, that all this clashes absolutely with the law of evolu- tion, whose two fundamental ideas — which characterise the new direction of positive thought, and which oppose to it the old meta- physics— are precisely the natural and gradual growth of all phenomena in all the domains of the life of Jhe universe from astronomy to sociology.
It is indisputable that these two objections
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were well founded when they were urged against what Engels called " Utopian socialism."
When socialism — before Karl Marx — was only the sentimental expression of a humani- tarianism, as generous as it was careless of the most elementary principles of scientific positivism, it was quite natural to find its partizans yielding to the impetuosity of their heart, either in their vehement protestations against social iniquities or their dreamy con- templation of a better world to which their imagination sought to give exact outlines from Plato's "Republic" to Bellamy's "Look- ing Backward."
It can readily be understood how easily these structures laid themselves open to criticism. This criticism was partly wrong, moreover, because it started from the mental habits proper to a modern environment, and which will change with the change of environ- ment ; but it was partly well founded, because the enormous complexity of social phenomena renders impossible every prophecy on the small details of a social organisation which will differ from ours more profoundly than our present society differs from that of the Middle Ages, because the bourgeois world, like the society which preceded it, has maintained individualism for a basis, whilst the socialist world will have its guiding idea fundamen- tally different.
These prophetic constructions of a new social order are for the rest the natural product of the political and social artificialism with
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which the most orthodox individualists are also imbued because they imagine, as Spencer has remarked, that human society is like dough, to which law can give one form rather than another without taking into account the qualities, tendencies, and aptitudes, organic and psychical, ethnological and historical, of different peoples.
vSentimental socialism has furnished some attempts at Utopian construction, but the modern world of politics has presented, and is presenting, still more of them with the absurd and chaotic jumble of its laws and codes which surround each man from his birth to his death (even before he is born and after he is dead) in an inextricable net of systems, rules, decrees, and regulations which stifle him like a silkworm in its cocoon.
And every day experience shows us that our legislators, imbued with this political and social artificialism, only copy the laws of the most diverse nations, just as the fashion comes from Paris or Berlin — instead of considering scientifically,- from the particular and living conditions of their country, its positive interests in order to adapt laws to them, laws which otherwise remain, as numerous examples testify, a dead letter because the reality of things does not permit them to take root and fructify.0
* A typical example is furnished us by the new Italian penal code in which is found, as I had written before its application, no disposition which shows that it was made to be adapted to the conditions of Italy. It might just as well be a code made for Greece or Norway ; and we have
In the matter of social artificial construc- tions socialists may say to Individualists : let him who is without sin cast the first stone.
The true answer is quite another. Scientific socialism represents a much more advanced phase of socialist ideas : it is in complete accord with positive modern science, and it has completely abandoned the fantastic ideas of prophesying from the present time what human society will be in the new collectivist organisation.
What scientific socialism can affirm, and what it does affirm, with mathematical cer- tainty, is that the current, the trajectory, of human evolution is in a general sense indi- cated and foreseen by socialism, that is to say, in the sense of a continuous, progressive preponderance of the interests and benefit of the species over those of the individual — and consequently in the sense of a continuous socialisation of economic life and through it of juridical, moral, and political life.
As to the small details of the new social edifice, we cannot foresee them precisely, be- cause the new social edifice will be, and is, a natural and spontaneous product of human evolution which is already in the process of
borrowed from the countries of the North the system of solitary confinement when already these countries have been able to recognise all the costly absurdity of, a plan made to brutalise people.
Experience has unfortunately confirmed my previsions, as the Commission of Judicial Statistics was obliged to acknowledge.
Ferri, La Bancarotta del nuovo codice penale in Scuola positiva, No. 9, 1894.
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formation, general lines of which are already drawn and which is not an artificial con- struction imagined by some utopist or metaphysician.
The position is the same both for social sciences and natural sciences.
In studying a human embryo of a few days, or a few weeks, the biologist cannot say (it is the celebrated law of Haeckel : the develop- ment of the individual embryo reproduces in miniature the ^diverse forms of development of the animal species which have preceded it in the zoological series) the biologist cannot say if it will be male or female, and still less if it will be a strong or feeble individual, of a sanguine or nervous temperament, intelligent or not.
He will only be able to give the general lines of the future evolution of this individual, and will leave to time the care of specifying naturally and spontaneously, and according to its organic, hereditary conditions and the conditions of the environment in which it will live, all the peculiarities of its personality.
This is what every socialist can and should answer. It is the position taken by Bebel in the German Reichstag,* in his answer to those who wish to know now in detail what the future State will be, and who, cleverly profiting by the ingenuity of socialist romance writers, criticise their artificial phantasies, true in their general lines, but arbitrary in their details.
* Bebel, Zukunftstaat und Sozialdemokratie, 1893.
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It would have been similar if, before the French Revolution — which brought about the birth of the bourgeois world prepared and ripened in a prior evolution — the nobility and the clergy, the classes then in power, had asked the representatives of the Third Estate — bourgeois by birth, aristocrats or priests having embraced the cause of the bourgeoisie against the privileges of their caste, like the Marquis de Mirabeau and the Abbe Sieves : — " But what will your new world be ? Present us first with an exact plan of it ; then we will decide."
The Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, could not have answered, because it could not have foreseen what human society would become in the nineteenth century : and that did not prevent the bourgeois revolution from taking place, because it represented the subsequent phase, natural and inevitable, of an eternal evolution. That is now the position of socialism in the face of the bourgeois world. And if this bourgeois world, only born a century ago, is to have an historical cycle much smaller than the feudal world (aristo- cratic and clerical), it is simply because the marvellous scientific progress of the nineteenth century has multiplied a hundredfold the rapidity of life in time and space, and because civilised humanity traverses now in ten years the same road that it took a century or two to travel in the Middle Ages.
The continually accelerated march of human evolution is, again, one of the laws established and confirmed by positive social science.
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It is the artificial constructions of senti- mental science which have given birth to this idea — correct as far as it concerns them — that socialism is synonymous with tyranny.
It is evident that if the new social organi- sation is not the spontaneous form of human evolution, but rather the artificial construction proceeding fully developed from the brain of a social architect, the latter would be obliged to discipline the new social mechanism by an infinite number of regulations, and by the superior authority which it will give to a directing spirit, individual or collective. It can then be understood how such an organi- sation gives our opponents, who only see in the individualist world the advantages of liberty, and who forget the evils which freely spring from it, the impressions of a convent, a regimentation, etc.*
Another artificial contemporary product — State socialism — has confirmed this impres- sion. At the bottom, it does not differ from sentimental or Utopian socialism, and as Liebknecht said at the Berlin Socialist Con- gress in 1892, " It would be a State capitalism which would join political slavery to economic exploitation." State socialism is a symptom of the irresistible power of scientific and demo- cratic socialism — as is shown by the famous rescripts of the Emperor William convoking an international conference to solve (that is the childish idea of the decree) the problems of
* It is this artificial socialism which Herbert Spencer attacks in his essay From Freedom to Bondage, re- published in the third volume of his Essays.
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labour, and by the famous encyclical letter on " The Condition of Labour " of the very clever Pope Leo, who knew how to run with the hare and hunt with the hounds. But these imperial rescripts, and these papal encyclicals — because we can neither skip nor suppress the phases of social evolution— can but fail in our bourgeois, individualist, liberalist world. Certainly it would not have displeased the bourgeois world to strangle this vigorous con- temporary socialism in the amorous embrace of official artificialism and State socialism ; for it had been perceived in Germany and elsewhere that neither laws nor exceptional repressions would be sufficient for this.*
All this arsenal of regulations and inspec- tions has nothing to do with scientific socialism, which foresees clearly that the administration of the new social organisation will not be more confused than the adminis- tration of the State, the provinces, and the parishes, is now, and will, on the contrary, correspond far better with social benefit and individual benefit, because it will be a natural and not a parasitic product of the new social
* It is against State Socialism that the majority of the individualist and anarchist objections of Spencer are directed in The Man -versus the State, London, 1885. In connection with this subject the celebrated controversy between Spencer and Laveleye will still be remembered : The State versus the Man, or Social Darwinism and Christianity, in the Contemporary Review, 1885.
Larfargue in an article on Herbert Spencer and Social- ism, published in The Times, and reproduced in the Ere Nouvelle, 1894, nas not mentioned this distincti<yn between scientific and State socialism, against which are directed the individualist criticisms of Spencer.
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organisation. Similarly the nervous system of a mammal is the regulating apparatus of its organism ; it is certainly more complex than that of the organism of a fish or a mollusc, but it has not because of that, tyrannically stifled the autonomy of the other organs and apparatus, or of the cells in their living confederation.
It is then understood, that in order to refute socialism, the current objections must not be repeated against an artificial and sentimental system which, I agree, may very well still continue to exist in the nebulous mass of popular ideas. But every day it loses ground with the intelligent partisans — proletarian, bourgeois or aristocratic — of scientific social- ism, who armed, thanks to the impulse of the genius of Marx, with all the most positive of the inductions of modern science, triumphs over the old objections which our opponents still repeat from mental habit but which have been left behind by contemporary knowledge at the same time as Utopian socialism which called them forth.
We must make the same answer to the second part of the objection relating to the mode in which the future of socialism will be realised.
It is an inevitable and logical consequence of Utopian and artificial socialism to think that the constructive policy proposed by one reformer or another ought, or can, be put in practice on this day or the next by a decree.
In this sense it is quite true that the Utopian illusion of empirical socialism is in opposition
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to the positive law of evolution, and as such I have attacked it in my work, Socialismo e Criminalita, because at that time (1883) the ideas of scientific socialism, or Marxian socialism had not yet spread in Italy.
A political party and a scientific theory are natural products which must pass through the vital phases of infancy and youth before attaining complete development. It was then inevitable that before being scientific or posi- tive, socialism in Italy, as in other countries, passed through the infantile phases of class exclusiveness (of manual workers alone), and of the nebulous romanticism which, giving to the word revolution a restricted and incomplete meaning, has always flattered itself with this illusion, that a social organism can be radi- cally changed from orie day to the next with four shots from a gun as a monarchial regime can be changed into a republican regime.
But it is. infinitely easier to change the political circumstances of a social organisa- tion— because these have a minor influence on the economic basis of social life — than to give a new direction to this social life in its economic constitution.
The processes of social transformation, as well as under different names those of every transformation in living beings, are : evolution — revolution — revolt — individual violence.
A mineral or vegetable or animal species can undergo in the cycle of its existence these four processes.
As long as the structure and the volume of the centre of crystallisation, the germ — the
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embryo — gradually increase, we have a steady and continued process of evolution, to which must succeed in due time a process of revolu- tion more or less prolonged, represented, for example, by the separation of the whole crystal from the mineral mass which surrounds it, or by certain revolutionary phases of vegetable or animal life, as, for example, the moment of sexual reproduction. There can equally take place in it a period of revolt, that is to say of associated personal violence as is often enough found with animal species that live in a society ; there can also be found in it isolated personal violence, as in the struggles for the conquest of food or for the female with animals of the same species.
These same processes are found in the human world. By evolution, we must understand the daily change almost imperceptible but con- tinuous and inevitable ; by revolution, the critical and decisive moment, more or less prolonged, of an evolution which has reached its climax ; by revolt, the partially collective violence which breaks forth on the occasion of such or such particular circumstance, at a given point or moment ; by individual violence the action of an individual against one or more other individuals. This may be the effect of the explosion of a fanatical passion or of criminal instincts, or the manifestation of a defect of mental equilibrium, connected with the ideas most in vogue at a given political or religious period.
We must first observe that whilst revolution and evolution arise from social physiology,
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revolt and individual violence arise from social pathology.
These are, however, only natural and spon- taneous processes, because, as Virchow has shown, pathology is but the consequence of physiology. Besides, pathological symptoms have, or ought to have, a great diagnostic value for the classes in power ; but the latter unfortunately at each historical epoch, in the moments of a political crisis as in those of a social crisis, do not know how to invent any other remedy than brutal repression, the guil- lotine or the prison, and imagine themselves to be able thus to cure the organic and constitu- tional malady that troubles the social body.*
But it is incontestable in all cases that the normal processes of social transformation and, in consequence, the most fruitful and the most sure, even if the slowest and least efficacious in appearance, are evolution and revolution, taking the latter in its exact and positive sense, as the last phase of an evolution, and not in the current and inexact sense of tumultuous and violent revolt, f
* At the moment when I was correcting the proofs of the Italian edition of this work, M. Crispi had just pro- posed "some exceptional laws for the public security" by which, seizing as a pretext some anarchist outrages, he wished to strike at, and suppress, socialism.
Repressive laws can suppress men but not an idea. Has the failure of the exceptional laws passed in Germany against the socialist party been forgotten?
The number of crimes may be increased, public liberty may be suppressed — but that is no remedy. Socialism will none the less continue its march.
t Lombroso and Laschi, Le Crime politique, etc., and the monograph of Elise*e Reclus, Evolution et Revolution.
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It is evident, in fact, that Europe and America are at the end of the igth century in a period of revolution prepared by the evolu- tion formed by the bourgeois organisation itself, and followed by Utopian as by scientific socialism. And we are even in the period of social life which Bagehot calls " the age of discussion,"* and we already observe what Zola has called in Germinal the creaking of the politico-social floor — all those symp- toms which Taine has described in the Ancien Regime in relating the history of the twenty years which preceded 1 789. Repressive measures not being able to serve any good against the internal revolution that these symptoms reveal, the only efficacious and fruitful ones are laws of social reform and prevention which, whilst making the present safe, render less painful, as Marx said, " the birth of the new society."
In this sense evolution and revolution con- stitute the most fruitful and sure of social metamorphoses. Human society, forming a natural and living organism, like all other organisms, cannot undergo sudden tranforma- tions as those imagine who think we must resort only, or by preference, to revolt and personal violence to realise a new social organisation. It is to me as though one could imagine that a child or a young man could in a day accomplish a biological evolution — even in the revolutionary period of puberty
^.Bagehot, Physics and Politics,
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— such as to immediately become adult.* It is easy to understand how the man with- out work, in the horrors of hunger, his brain exhausted from want of nourishment, can imagine that by stabbing a policeman, by throwing a bomb, by making a barricade, or by taking part in a rising, he is hastening the realisation of a social ideal in which iniquity will have disappeared.
And even without this case we can under- stand that the impulsive force of sentiment predominate with certain people, can drive them by a generous impatience to some real attempt — and not imaginary like those which the police of all times and countries submit to the repression of courts — to spread terror among those who feel political or economic power slipping from their hands.
But scientific socialism, notably in Germany under the direct influence of Marxism, has completely abandoned these old methods of revolutionary romanticism. Often used, they have always miscarried, and for that very reason the dominant classes fear them no
* It is this lack of even elementary notions of geology, of individual or collective biology, which causes many men of the people with lively minds not disciplined in scientific methods, to prefer to satisfy themselves with the vagueness of the anarchical ideal even when they repudiate the use of violent means.
I shall always recall as a typical example, a printer of Florence, gentle and intelligent, who, after having heard one of my lectures on Marxian socialism, confessed to me that he no longer clung so much to his anarchist ideas, though he had accepted up till then this programme : "to pass from monarchy to anarchy."
Such is unfortunately the intellectual consistency of many persons, who only call themselves anarchists because the first ideas of social criticism have been brought to them by some propagandist who fancies he is
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longer because they are only light blows localised against a fortress which has still a power of resistance more than sufficient to keep victorious, and by this victory to arrest evolution momentarily, thanks to the process of selection which eliminates the boldest and strongest adversaries.
Marxian socialism is revolutionary in the scientific sense of the word, and it is being developed henceforth into thorough social revolution. No one would, I think, deny that the end of the igth century marks the critical phase of the bourgeois evolution started with all steam up, even in Italy, on the track of individualist capitalism.
Marxian socialism has the frankness to say, by the mouth of its most authoritative repre- sentative, to the great suffering phalanx of the modern proletariat that there is no magic wand which transforms the world from one day to the next, as one changes the scenes in a theatre ; it says, on the contrary, repeating the prophetic cry of Marx, "Proletarians of all countries, unite " ; that the social revolution
preaching anarchy becauses he wishes to suppress "the medal of the deputy," and delights in the double meaning of the word "revolution."
Also, in my opinion, a more complete study of natural sciences in the elementary and secondary schools — instead of the classicism inoculated by Latin and Greek, which does not temper young people for life, but sterilises them in archaeological contemplation of togas and of the fasces of lictors — might be the most efficacious antidote — much better than repression — to the political individualist romanticism of the "dagger of Brutus," or of the "wisdom of Titus."
But unfortunately there are no reliable criteria in the public instruction of the bourgeois world, and that only confirms me in my affrmation : when anarchy descends from above, anarchist sentiment mounts from below.
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can only attaints aim if it is first brought within the minds of the workers themselves by a clear perception of their class interests, and by the force which their union will give them, and that they will not awaken one day into a full socialist regime because divided and inactive on 364 days of the year they revolt on the 365th, or have recourse to some act of personal violence.
That is what I call the psychology of the "first prize." Many workmen, in fact, imagine that, without doing anything to form themselves into a class conscious party, they will one day gain the first prize, the social revolution, as the manna, it is said, came from Heaven to the Hebrews.
Scientific socialism has noticed that the power of transformation diminishes as it passes from one- process to another, from evolution to revolution, from the latter to revolt, and from revolt to individual violence. And because it concerns the transformation of the whole of society in its economic basis, and consequently in its juridical, political, and moral organisation, the process of trans- formation is all the more efficacious and the better adapted as it is more social and less individual.
Individualist parties are centred upon personal considerations even in the daily struggle ; socialism, on the contrary, is collectivist even in that, because it knows that the present organisation does not depend on this or that individual, but on the whole of society. And this is why, from another point
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of view, charity, however generous it may be, being necessarily personal and partial, cannot be a remedy for the social (and therefore collective) question of the distribution of wealth.
In political questions which leave intact the economic-social basis, we can understand how, for instance, the exile of Napoleon III. or of the Emperor Dom Pedro can set up a republic. But this transformation does not touch the foundation of social life, and the Empire of Germany or the Monarchy of Italy are socially bourgeois, just like the French Republic or the Republic of North America, because in spite of the political differences they all belong to the same economic -social phase.
That is why the processes of evolution and revolution, the only ones completely social or collective, are the most efficacious, whilst partial revolt, and still more individual violence have only a very feeble power for social transformation; they are besides anti- social and anti -humane, because they revive primitive savage instincts and they deny in the person even of him whom they strike, the principle with which they believe themselves to be animated : the principle of respect for human life and solidarity. Of what use is it to hypnotise oneself with phrases, "propa- ganda by deeds " and " immediate action " ?
One knows that anarchists, individualists, " amorphists," and libertarians admit, as a means of social transformation, individual violence which extends from homicide to robbery, or to taking advantage, even among
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companions ; and it is then nothing more than a political colouring given to some criminal instincts which must not be confused with political fanaticism — a very different phenomenon — common to extreme and romantic parties of all times. The positive examination of each case in detail, with the aid of anthropology and psychology, can alone decide if the author of such or such violence is a born criminal, an insane criminal, or a criminal possessed by political fanaticism.
I have in fact always maintained, and I still maintain, that the "political criminal," whom certain persons wish to put in a special category, does not constitute a particular anthropological variety, but can be attached to some one of the anthropological categories of the criminals of ordinary law, and especially to one of these three : the born criminal from congenital tendency, the insane criminal, the criminal from fanatical passion.
The history of the past and of recent times offers us evident examples.
In the Middle Ages religious beliefs preoccupied the minds of all and coloured the criminal or mad excesses of many, or indeed really determined some cases of " sanctity " more or less hysterical.
At the end of our century (the igth) it is politico-social questions which preoccupy, and with what vehemence, the universal mind, which is exalted by this universal contagion that journalism creates with its great catch- words, and it is these questions which colour the criminal or insane excesses of many
unbalanced persons or which determine some cases of fanaticism amongst men honest at bottom but touched with hypersesthesia.
It is the politico-social questions, most extreme in their form, which have at each historic moment the most intense suggestive power. In Italy it was Mazzini-ism or Carbonarism sixty years ago ; socialism twenty years ago ; now it is anarchism.
It is easy to understand that there has been at each epoch, and following the ruling tendency, cases of personal violence. Felice Orsini, for example, is one of the martyrs of the Italian revolution.
In each case of individual violence, if one does not wish to keep to judgments necessarily erroneous and born under the stimulus of excitement, our conclusions should only be the result of a physio-psychical examination of its perpetrator, as for every other crime.
Felice Orsini was a political criminal from passion. Amongst the anarchists of our day who use bombs, or are assassins, can be found the born criminal, who simply covers his con- genital want of moral or social sense with a political varnish ; the insane criminal, or mattoid, whose defect of mental equilibrium connects itself with the political ideas of the moment ; one may also find the criminal from political passion truly convinced, and all but normal, with whom the criminal act is solely determined by the false idea (which socialism fights against) of the possibility of a social transformation by individual violence.0
* Hamon, Les Hommes et les theories de I'anarchie.
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However that may be, whether it is a ques- tion of a born or an insane criminal, or of a political criminal from passion, it is not less true that the personal violence adopted by individualistic anarchists is only the logical product of individualism pushed to extremes, and, therefore, the natural product of the pre- sent economic organisation, supported by the " frenzy of hunger," acute or chronic ; but it is also the most efficacious and the most anti -humane means of social transformation. f
But all anarchists are not individualists, " amorphists," or autonomists ; there are also communist anarchists.
The latter repudiate personal violence as an ordinary means of social transformation (Mer- lino, for instance, has recently affirmed this in his pamphlet : Necessitd e base df un accordo, Prato, 1892) but even these communist anarchists separate themselves from Marxian socialism both by their ultimate ideal, and especially by their method of social trans- formation. They oppose Marxian socialism because it is according to law and parlia- mentary, and they maintain that the most efficacious and surest mode of social trans- formation is revolt.
Paris, 1893. Lombroso, Ultime scoperte ed applicazioni dell' antropologia criminale, Turin, 1893.
t At the moment when I was correcting the proofs of the Italian edition of this book, the excitement had not yet disappeared which the indefensible outrage directed against M. Crispi, at Rome, on June i6th, had caused, and especially the much more vivid excitement caused by the death of the President of the French Republic, Sadi Carnot, on June 24th.
I reproduce here, as a document, the declaration
These affirmations, which answer to the wave of the sentiments and ideas of too large a part of the working class and to the impa- tience provoked by their miserable condition, may meet with an ignorant momentary appro- bation, but their action can only be ephemeral. The explosion of a bomb may cause a momentary excitement, but it cannot advance by the fraction of an inch the evolution of intelligence towards socialism, whilst it causes a sentimental reaction, a reaction partly sincere but cleverly fomented and exploited as a pretext for repression.
To say to workmen without having pre- pared the material means, and especially without solidarity and moral consciousness, that they ought to rise against the classes in power, is rather to play the game of these very classes, because these are always
published by a section of the Socialist party of Italian workmen in the Secolo, of June zyth-aSth, and distri- buted at Milan, as a manifesto, in thousands of copies, and to which neither Conservative nor Progressive news- papers have referred, lest the confusion between socialism and anarchy may be ended.
Here is the declaration : —
"The Socialist Party to Italian Workmen. Down with assassins ! Humanity understands now that life is sacred, and does not tolerate brutal violations of this great princi- ple, which is morally the soul of socialism. — C.Prampolini.
"He who struggles for the right to live in exchange for his labour, reprobates every attempt on human life — whether it be the action of bourgeois exploitation in factories, bombs or daggers of ignorant revolutionaries.
"The Socialist Party, which has this principle for its motto, which expects everything from the strength of the class conscious organisation of the workers, execrates the crime consummated on the person of the President of the French Republic as a brutal act, as the negation of every principle of revolutionary logic.
"We must cause the knowledge of its proper rights to
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sure of material victory when evolution is not ripe and revolution is not ready.
Thus we have been able to state in the last Sicilian revolt, in spite of all interested untruths, that wherever socialism was most advanced and reasoned, there were neither acts of personal violence nor revolt — as for example, among the peasants of Piana dei Greci, of whom Nicola Barbato made intelli- gent socialists, whilst those convulsive move- ments took place outside the field of the socialist propaganda, as a revolt against the municipal exactions and camorre, or where the less intelligent socialist propaganda had been stifled by the frenzies caused by hunger and misery.
History shows that the countries where revolts have been most frequent are those where social progress is least advanced. Popular energies are exhausted and shattered in these feverish and convulsive excesses, and
penetrate into the .proletariat ; we must furnish it with the structure of organisation, and impel it to work as if it were a new organism ; we must conquer public powers by the means given us by modern civilisation.
"To revolt, to strike haphazard with a bomb at spec- tators in a theatre, to kill an individual, is the deed of barbarians or of ignorant people. The socialist party sees in these acts the violent manifestations of bourgeois sentiments.
"We are the enemies of all the acts of violence of bourgeois exploitation, of the guillotine, of a volley of musketry, of anarchist outrages. Long live socialism.11
Socialism represses all these sterile and repugnant forms of individual violence.
Carnot dead — after the first excitement which^in retali- ation was turned against innocent Italians in consequence of the reawakening of atavic instincts provoked by these outrages — the French republic elected another president, and nothing will be changed, as nothing was changed in Russia after the death of Alexander II. But the question
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alternate with periods of despondency and distrust — with which the Buddhist theory of electoral abstention, so convenient for conser- vative parties, corresponds. We never see there that continuity of conscious action, slower and less efficacious in appearance, but really the only kind of action that can bring to pass what appear to us to be the miracles of history.
So, Marxian socialism has proclaimed henceforth in all countries that the principal means of social transformation must be the conquest of public powers (in local admini- strations as well as in parliaments) as one of the results of the organisation of workmen in a class conscious party. The further the political organisation of the workers progresses in civilised countries, the more through an inevitable evolution shall the socialist organ- isation of society be seen to realise itself —
can be looked at from another point of view, which con- servatives, liberals, and radicals forget too completely.
The same day as 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 210.
However much the death of an honest man like Carnot may be deplored, it is not comparable with the sum of human suffering, of the misery and evils with which these 467 workers' families were afflicted, all equally innocent. And yet class interest — even unconsciously — filled with regrets, protestations, and demonstrations, the bourgeois newspapers (conservative, progressive, radical) of the whole world — and the telegrams, full of dignity, of the King of Italy were mingled with the oratory sent by my friend Cavalotti ; but this same class interest — uncon- sciously if you will — is most completely forgetful of the martyrs to wock in the mines of Karwinn and Cardiff.
It will be said, and said truly, that the murder of Carnot was the wilful work of a fanatic, whilst no one
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first by concessions partial but continually more important wrung from the capitalist class by the working class (the law of the eight hours' day, for example), then, by the complete transformation of individual property into social property.
As to the question of knowing if this com- plete transformation — which is now being prepared by a slow evolution, and is thus approaching the critical and decisive moment of social revolution— will be able to take place with or without the help of the other means of transformation — revolt and indi- vidual violence — there is no one who can prophesy.
Our sincere wish is that the social revolu- tion, when its evolution is ripe, will be effected peacefully, as so many other revolutions have been carried out without bloodshed : like the English Revolution which preceded by a
is the author of the death of these 467 miners. And certainly there is a difference.
But it mwst be noticed that if the death of these 467 miners is not directly the wilful work of anyone, it is indirectly a consequence of individual capitalism which, in order to augment its revenue, reduces expenses as much as possible, does not diminish the hours of work, does not take all the preventive measures indicated by science and imposed even sometimes by law, which is not thus respected — the justice of each country being as flexible in relation to the interests of the governing class as it is inflexible in relation to those of the working classes.
If the mines were held as collective property, it is certain that the holders would be less stingy in taking all technical preventive precautions (electric lighting for instance) which would diminish the frightful catastrophes that augment endlessly the anonymous crowd of martyrs to work, and do not even trouble the digestion of the shareholders of mining companies.
That is what the individualist regime gives us; all that will be changed by the socialist regime.
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century with the Bill of Rights the French Revolution ; like the Italian Revolution accomplished in Tuscany in 1859 ; like the Brazilian Revolution with the exile of the Emperor, Dom Pedro, in 1892.
It is certain that culture spread further among the people and their conscious organi- sation into a class party under the banner of socialism, only augment the probability of our wish, and dissipate the old conjectures of a reaction after the advent of socialism, for which there was good reason when socialism was still Utopian in its means of realisation instead of being, as it is now, a natural and spontaneous, and therefore inevitable and irrevocable, phase of human evolution.
Whence will this social revolution start ? I am firmly convinced that, if the Latin nations, because they are Southern, are more ready for a revolt, which may suffice when it is a ques- tion of purely political changes, the nations of the North, German, and Anglo-Saxon, are better prepared for the tranquil but inexorable discipline of the true revolution understood as a critical phase of a prior organic and partial evolution — the only efficacious process for a change really social.
It is in Germany and in England where the greater development of bourgeois industrial- ism inevitably accelerates its unpleasant consequences, and consequently accelerates the necessity of socialism, it is there that the great social metamorphosis will perhaps begin, the seeds of which are sown everywhere else, and from there it will propagate itself across the
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old Europe, as at the end of the i8th century the signal of the political and bourgeois revolution started from France.
However that may be, we have shown once more the great difference there is between socialism and anarchy, which our opponents and the servile press endeavour to confuse/* and in every case I have shown that Marxian socialism is in accord with positive" science, and continues it. That is just the reason why it has made the theory of evolution the basis of its inductions, and that it thus stamps the really living and definitive phase — con- sequently the only one in the intelligence of collective democracy — of this socialism which has remained till now floating in the clouds of sentiment, and which the infallible compass of scientific thought renewed by the works of Darwin and Spencer, has come to guide.
* I ought to recognise that one of the recent historians of socialism, M. Pabbe" Winterer — more loyal than many a Jesuit in a frock coat — distinguishes always for every country the socialist movement and the anarchist move- ment. Winterer, Le Socialisme Contemporain, Paris, 1894, 2nd edition.
PART III.
SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIALISM.
CHAPTER XIII.
STERILITY OF SOCIOLOGY.
One of the strangest facts in the history of scientific thought in the igth century is that though the profound scientific revolution caused by Darwinism and Spencerian evolution has renewed with fresh youth all parts of physical, biological and even psychological sciences, when it reached the domain of the social sciences it only ruffled super- ficially the water of the tranquil and orthodox lake of the social science par excellence — . political economy.
We had, it is true, on the initiative of Auguste Comte — whose name has been a little obscured by those of Darwin and Spencer but who was certainly one of the grandest and most vitalising spirits of our epoch — the creation of a new science, sociology, which ought to have been, together with the natural history of human societies, the glorious crown of the new scientific edifice built by the experimental method.
I do not deny that sociology in the domain of pure descriptive anatomy of the social organism-has introduced grand and fructifying novelties into contemporary science, even
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branching out in some special sociologies, of which criminal sociology , through the work of the Italian school, has become one of the most important results.
But when we approach the politico-social question, the new science of sociology is detected as if in a sort of hypnotic sleep and is suspended in a sterile colourless limbo, thus permitting sociologists to be in practical economics as in politics, conservatives or radicals according to their fancy, following their subjective tendencies.
And whilst Darwinian biology, by the scientific determination of the relations of the individual and the species, and evolutionist sociology itself, in describing in human society the organs and functions of a real organism, both treated the individual as a cell in the animal organism, Herbert Spencer affirmed aloud his English individualism even up to the most absolute theoretic anarchy.
A stagnation in the scientific production of sociology was inevitable after the first original observations of descriptive social anatomy and of the natural history of human societies. Sociology thus represented an arrest of development in experimental scientific thought because those who cultivated it, wittingly or unknown to themselves, drew back from the logical and radical conclusions which the modern scientific revolution must bring into the social domain — the most important if science wishes to exist for the sake of life instead of contenting itself with the sterile formula, science for the sake of science,
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The secret of this strange phenomenon is not only in this fact as Malagodi said* that it is still in the period of scientific analysis and not yet in that of synthesis, but especially herein, that the logical consequences of Dar- winism and scientific evolutionism, applied to the study of human society, lead inexorably to socialism, as I have demonstrated in the preceding pages.
* Malagodi, II Socialismo e la scienza in Critica sociale, August ist, 1892.
CHAPTER XIV.
MARX COMPLETES THE WORK OF DARWIN AND SPENCER — CONSERVATIVES AND SOCIALISTS.
It is to Karl Marx that the honour falls of having given a scientific expression to these logical applications of scientific experiment in the domain of social economy. Undoubt- edly the exposition of these truths is surrounded in his case with a multitude of technical details and of formulae apparently dogmatic ; but cannot we say as much of the First Principles of Spencer, and are not his luminous passages on evolution surrounded by a mist of abstractions on time, space, the unknowable, etc. ? Up to the last few years a conspiracy of silence has been formed round the masterly work of Marx ; but now his name stands with those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer to complete this scientific revolution which stirs in the thrilling of a new intellectual spring the civilising thought of the second half of the igth century.
The ideas by which the genius of Karl Marx completed, in the domain of social economy, the revolution wrought by science are three in number.
One is the discovery of the law of surplus value. It gives us a positive explanation of the accumulation of private property without labour ; this law having a more particularly technical character we will not insist upon it
here, having given a general idea of it in the preceding pages.
The two other Marxian theories have more relation to our observations on scientific socialism because they really give us the sure and infallible key of social life.
I allude to the idea expressed by Marx from 1859 in his Criticism on Political Economy, that the economic phenomenon is the basis and condition of all other human or social mani- festations, and that consequently morals, law, politics, are only phenomena derived from the economic factor according to the conditions of every people in every phase of history and in all climates.
This idea, which corresponds with the great biological law that rules that the function is determined by the organ, and which gives out that each individual is the resultant of the conditions innate and acquired of its physio- logical organism living in a given environ- ment so that one can give a biological import to the famous dictum : " Tell me what you eat and I will tell you* what you are," — this idea of a genius which displays before our eyes the grand drama of history, no longer as the arbitrary succession of great men on the boards of the social theatre, but rather as the resultant of the economic conditions of each people, this grand idea, after a partial application by Thorold Rogers,* has been so brilliantly illustrated by Achille Loriaf that I think it useless to add anything to it.
* Th. Rogers, The Economic Interpretation of History. t Loria, The Economic Basis of Society, London, 1894.
One idea, however, appears to me still necessary to complete this Marxian theory as I had indicated in the first edition of my book Criminal Sociology.
We must in fact free this impregnable theory from a species of exclusive dogmatism, which it has assumed in Marx and still more in M. Loria.
It is very true that every phenomenon, like every institution — moral, juridical, or political — is only the reverberation of the phenomenon and of the economic conditions at each moment of the physical and historical environment. But in consequence of the law of natural causation, which ensures that every effect is always the resultant of numerous intermingled causes and not of one single cause, and that every effect becomes in its turn a cause of other phenomena, it is necessary to fill out this too rigid form of a true idea.
Just as all the psychical manifestations of the individual are the resultant of organic conditions (temperament) and of the environ- ment in which he lives, so all the social manifestations — moral, juridical, political — of a people are the resultant of its organic con- To the general idea of Karl Marx, M. Loria adds a theory on "the occupation of free land," which is the fundamental cause and the technical explanation of the different economic social organisations, a theory which he has amply proved in his Analisi delta Proprietd Capitalistica, Turin, 1892. Strange to say, in this last work M. Loria gives in the first volume the laws of social economy according to his theory, and in the second volume he enumerates the facts which support them— thus following a method diametrically opposed to that of experimental science, which first makes the statement of the facts and deduces from them the laws.
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ditions (race) and of the environment in so far as they determine a given economic organisa- tion which is the physical basis of life.
In their turn the psychical, individual conditions have an influence, although with less power, becoming a cause in their turn of the organic conditions and of the issue of the struggle for life. In the same way moral, juridical, political institutions, from effects become causes (there is not in fact in positive science any substantial difference between cause and effect except that the effect is the constant consequent of a given phenomenon and that the cause is its constant antecedent) and react in their turn, although with less efficacy, on economic conditions.
An individual who has made a study of hygiene can influence, for instance, the imper- fections of his digestive apparatus but always within the very restricted limits of his organic potentiality. A scientific discovery, an elec- toral law, can influence industry or the con- ditions of work, but always within the limits of the fundamental economic organisation. This is the reason that moral, juridical, and political institutions have a greater influence on the relations between the different cate- gories of the class that withholds the economic power (capitalists, manufacturers, landed proprietors) than on the relations between the capitalist proprietors on the one side and the workers on the other.
It is sufficient for me here to recall this Marxian law and to send to M. Loria's sugges- tive book the reader who wishes to see how
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this law explains in a positive manner all the phenomena, the least as well as the greatest of social life. This law is truly the most positive, the most fruitful, the most brilliant sociological theory, that has ever been dis- covered. It gives, as I have already indicated, a positive, physiological, experimental ex- planation of social history in its grandest actions and of the most insignificant episodes of personal history, in complete accord with the whole trend, which has been called materialist, of modern scientific thought.
There have been given in the history of mankind, leaving apart the two anti -scientific explanations of free will and Divine Provi- dence, two explanations, one-sided, and in consequence incomplete, although positive and scientific. I mean the physical determinism of Montesquieu, Buckle, and Metschnikoff, and the anthropological determinism of ethnologists who see in the organic and psychical charac- teristics of races the historic reason for events.
Karl Marx resumes and completes these two theories by his economic determinism.
The economic conditions — which are the resultant of the energies and ethnological apti- tudes acting in a given physical environment — are the determinative basis of all moral, juridical, and political manifestations of human, individual, and social life.
This is the theory which we owe to the genius of Marx, positive and scientific, if any ever was, which dreads no objection, founded as it is on the most exact researches of geology as of biology, of psychology as of sociology.
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It is, thanks to this theory, that philosophers in law and sociologists, can determine the true nature and the functions of the State which, not being anything else than "society juridically and politically organised," is only the secular arm of which the class holding the economic power — and consequently the political, judicial, and administrative power — makes use to preserve as long as possible its own privileges.
The other sociological theory by which Karl Marx has really dissipated the clouds which obscured till now the heaven of socialist aspirations, and which has furnished to scientific socialism the political compass for steering itself with complete assurance in the contentions of the life of every day, is the great historic law of the class struggle*
Granted that the economic conditions of social groups as well as those of individuals are the fundamental determinant of all moral, juridical, and political manifestations, it is evident that each social group, each individual will be led to act according to his economic benefit, because that is the physical basis of life and the condition of all other develop- ments. In the political order each social class will be driven to make laws, to establish institutions, to consecrate customs and beliefs
* As a proof of this conspiracy of silence on the theories of Karl Marx, it is sufficient for me to recall that the historians of socialism only speak in general of the technical theory of surplus value and leave on one side the two other laws : the determination of social phenomena and institutions by economic conditions and the struggle of the classes.
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which respond to its benefit directly or indirectly.
These laws, these institutions, these beliefs transmitted by heredity or tradition finish by concealing their economic origin, and philo- sophers, jurists, and even the unlearned, defend them as having their worth in themselves, without seeing their real source ; but the latter is none the less the only positive explanation of these laws, these institutions, and these beliefs. And therein is the strength of the view of the genius of Marx.*
As in the modern world, there are no more than two classes with accessory varieties, on the one side the workers, to whatever category they may belong, and on the other the owners of property who do not work, the socialist theory of Marx leads us to this evident con- clusion : since political parties are only the echo and the speaking trumpet of class interests, whatever varieties there may be, political parties can only be substantially two in number — the socialist workers' party and
* The Italian Chamber of Deputies has recently given us a striking example. Qune, 1894.) Of the different financial measures proposed by the government to remedy the financial deficit, the Chamber approved : the increase on the tax on salt ; the increase of twenty francs per ton in the tax on corn ; but the increase of twopence in the land tax was rejected. [Similar examples might be quoted from the fiscal measures which our own govern- ment adopted to find money for the South African War. — ED.] Here the direct influence of class interests is evident. The contributions of the poor are augmented in attacking salt and corn, the great landed proprietors are given a gratuitous bounty by the increase of the duty on corn, and a small increase of the land tax is refused.
This is the triumph of the agrarians, who are recruited from the Right as from the Left, over capital invested
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the individualist party of the class that monopolises the land and the other means of production.
The difference of economic monopoly may, it is true, determine a certain diversity of political colour, and I have always maintained that the great land proprietors represent the conservative tendencies of political immobil- ism, whilst the capitalist holders of personal property, or manufacturers, often represent the progressive party, carried by its very nature to little innovations of form ; whilst, finally, those who only possess intellectual capital — the liberal and other professions — can go as far as political radicalism.
On the vital question — that is to say, on the economic question of property — conserva- tives, progressives, and radicals are all indi- vidualists. On this point they are all flesh and marrow of the same social class, and in spite of certain sentimental sympathies are the opponents of the working class and of
in personal property which is struck by the increase of a 20 per cent, deduction.
This increase was voted by the agrarians and fought against by the progressive party, and rejected even by the extreme Left. The latter voted against it for a political reason — so as not to vote for a government proposition — but really consciously or unconsciously for an economic reason. It was a struggle between landlords and capitalists on a question of the distribution of riches.
It would seem as if the socialist deputies ought to have voted for the increase of the tax on income, but know- ing that this question does not interest the working class on whom the taxes ultimately fall, in consequence of the laws of the incidence of taxation, they took no part in the vote.
That is a* striking example of the direct or indirect effect, conscious or unconscious, of the unerring buoy- ancy of the struggle of the classes.
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those who, although born on the other shore, have embraced its political programme, which necessarily corresponds with the primordial economic necessity — that is to say, the sociali- sation of the land and of the means of pro- duction, with all the innumerable and radical transformations, moral, juridical, and political, which it will necessarily determine in the social world. That is why contemporary political life can only degenerate into the most sterile decadence and into the most sordid corruption when it confines itself to the superficial battles of the individualist parties who only differ in colour and formal etiquette, but whose ideas are often so analogous that we frequently see radicals and progressives less up to date than many conservatives.
Political life will have no fresh birth except through the development of the socialist party, because when the historical figures of the patriots and the personal reasons for differ- ence between the representatives of the various political shades have disappeared from the political arena, the formation of a single individualist party will become necessary, as I declared at the sitting of the Italian Chamber on the 2oth December, 1893.
The historic duel will then be fought and the class struggle will then unfold on the political arena all its beneficent influence, not in the paltry sense of pugilism and outrages, malice and personal violence, but in the grand meaning of the social drama. With all my soul I desire that this conflict may be solved for the sake of the progress of civilisation
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without bloody convulsions, but historical fatality has initiated it, and it is given neither to us nor to others to avoid or retard it.
As a result of all we have just said these ideas of political socialism, because they are scientific, dispose to personal tolerance at the same time as to theoretical disagreement. That is also a conclusion of scientific psychology in the philosophical domain. Whatever may be our personal sympathies for such or such representative of the radical fraction of the individualist party (as also for every honest and sincere representative of no matter what scientific, religious, or political opinion) we ought to recognise that there is not by the side of socialism any party organically con- nected with it. We must be on one side or the other — individualist or socialist. There is no intermediate situation, and I am more and more persuaded that the only useful tactic- for the formation of a socialist party that will live, is precisely this theoretical independence and the refusal of every "alliance" with the partiti affini who only constitute for socialism a "false placenta" for a foetus unlikely to live.
The conservative and the socialist are natural products of individual character and of social environment. One is born a con- servative or an innovator, as one is born a painter or surgeon. So socialists have no scorn nor any malice against the sincere representatives of no matter what fraction of the conservative party whilst fighting to the death their ideas. If such or such socialist shows himself intolerant, if he is insulting, it
is because he is the victim of a passing emotion or of an ill-balanced temperament. He can consequently be easily excused.
What provokes a smile of pity is to see certain conservatives, "young in years but old in thought " — for conservatism with the young can only be the effect of egoistic calculation or the sign of physical anaemia — to see them wear an air of self -sufficiency or of pity for socialists, whom they consider at the best as " led astray," without perceiving that what is normal is for old people to be conservatives, but that young conservatives can only be egoists who fear to lose the lazy ease in which they were born or the advantages of the established method of "raking in the spoils." If their brains are not poor, at least their hearts are. The socialist, who has everything to lose and nothing to gain in loudly affirming his point of view, can oppose all the superiority of a disinterested altruism, especially when, born in the aristocratic or bourgeois class, he has renounced the brilliant pleasures of a lazy life to defend the cause of the feeble and the oppressed.
But, they say, these bourgeois socialists act in this way for. the love of popularity. A strange egoism in every case which prefers to the bourgeois individualism of honours and rapid gains, "the socialist idealism" of popu- lar sympathy, even when this sympathy could be gained by other means which would com- promise a man less with the class in power !
Let us hope, finally, that when the
bourgeoisie must abandon economic and political power in order that both may be exercised for the advantage of all in the new society, and that when, as Berennini recently said, conquerors and conquered become really brothers without distinction of class in the common security of a life worthy of a human being, let us hope that in abandoning power the bourgeoisie may do so with the dignity and respectability that the aristocracy showed when it was despoiled as a class by the triumphant bourgeoisie at the moment of the French Revolution.
It is the truth brought by socialism, and its complete accord with the most certain induc- tions of positive science, which explains to us not only its immense progress which might be only the purely negative effect of a material and moral uneasiness become acute in a period of social crisis, but which especially explains- this unity of disciplineand conscious solidarity which offers by the world-wide demonstrations of the first of May, a moral phenomenon of a grandeur of which human history gives no other example — if we except the movement of primitive Christianity, which had moreover a much more restricted field of action than contemporary socialism.
Beyondsome hysterical or ignorant efforts for a return of bourgeois scepticism to mysticism, as a safeguard against the moral and material crisis of the present time (which recalls to us the wanton woman who became sanctimo- nious irf her old age)* the partisans and
* We can, however, mention certain very sympathetic
opponents of socialism will be forced hence- forth to recognise that, like Christianity at the dissolution of the Roman world, socialism forms the only power which restores the hope of a better future for our old human society, and this in the name of a faith no longer inspired by the ignorant aspirations of senti- ment, but the result of rational confidence in positive science.
manifestations of this mysticism which I shall call social mysticism. We can cite the works of Tolstoi, who envelopes his socialism in the doctrine of "non-resistance to evil by violence " drawn from the Sermon on the Mount.
Tolstoi is thus an eloquent anti-militarist, and I am pleased to see quoted in his book Salvation is within you, a passage from one of my lectures against war.
But he keeps outside contemporary positive science and his work loses thus in its import.
153 APPENDIX I.
A LETTER TO AN ITALIAN JOURNAL IN REPLY TO A LETTER BY MR. HERBERT SPENCER WHICH
IT HAD PUBLISHED. SIR,
I have read in your journal a letter of Mr. H. Spencer, who, on some indirect information which has been sent him on my book, "Socialism and Positive Science," is "astonished at the audacity with which use has been made of his name in defending socialism."
Permit me to assure you that no socialist has ever dreamed of making Mr. Spencer, who is certainly the greatest of living philosophers, pass as a partisan of socialism. And it is very strange that anyone should have been able to make him believe that there exists in Italy enough ignorance among writers, as well as among readers, to misuse in such a grotesque fashion the name of Herbert Spencer, whom all the world knows to be an extreme individualist.
But the personal opinion of H. Spencer is a different matter from the logical consequence of the scientific theories on unive'rsal evolution which he has developed farther and better than any other man, but of which he has not the official monopoly nor the power to prohibit their free expansion by the labour of other thinkers.
As for myself, in the preface to my book, I observed that Spencer and Darwin had stopped half-way in the logical consequences of their doctrines. But I have shown that these doctrines themselves constituted the scientific foundation of the socialism of Marx, the only man who, whilst raising himself above the preceding sentimental socialism, has scientifically disciplined and systematised the statements of social facts, political conclusions, and the changing method of tactics, whilst remaining revo- lutionary in his aim.
As for Darwinism, not being able to repeat here the arguments which are already contained in my book, and which will be developed in the second edition, it is sufficient for me to recall — as it is thought fit to have recourse to arguments so little conclusive as an appeal to personal authority — that, among many others, the cele- brated Virchow foresaw with great acuteness that Darwinism led directly to socialism, and that the cele- brated Wallace, a Darwinian, if there is one, is a member of the English Land Nationalisation Society, which stands for one of the fundamental conclusions of socialism.
And on the other side, what is the famous " class struggle," which Marx revealed as the positive key of human history, if not the Darwinian law of the "struggle
for life," transferred from individuals to aggregates of individuals?
Besides, every individual, every class or social group, struggles for its existence. And just as the bourgeoisie has struggled against the clergy and the aristocracy and has triumphed in the French Revolution, so to-day the international proletariat struggles, not by violence, as we are always being accused of doing, but by propaganda and association, for its economic and moral existence, which at present is ill secured and so grievously oppressed.
As for the theory of evolution, how can one not notice that it gives the most striking contradiction to the classi- cal theories of a political economy which sees in the bases of the present economic organisation eternal and immutable laws?
Socialism, on the contrary, maintains that economic institutions, juridical and political institutions, are only the historical product of an epoch, and that, consequently, they are variable, since they are in continuous evolution through which the present differs from the past just as the future will be different from the present.
Herbert Spencer believes that universal evolution rules all orders of phenomena with the exception of the organi- sation of property, which he declares is destined to exist eternally in its individualistic form. Socialists, on the contrary, believe that the organisation of property will itself also undergo a radical transformation, and, taking into consideration past transformations, assert that eco- nomic evolution is represented and will be represented more and more — after the excesses of individual concen- tration— in an increasing and complete socialisation of the means of production, which constitute the physical basis of social and collective life, and which ought not to, and, therefore, cannot, remain in the hands of a few individuals.
Between these two doctrines it is not difficult to decide which is most in accord with the scientific theory of physical and social evolution.
At any rate, and with all the respect due to our intel- lectual father, Herbert Spencer, but also with all the pride to which my studies and my scientific conscience give me a right, it is sufficient for me to have repelled the anathema which Herbert Spencer, without having read my book, and on information indirect and not very straight- forward, has thought he could fling in such a dogmatic tone against a scientific thesis which I have not solely affirmed with an ipse dixit (which has served its time), but which I have studied and maintained with arguments which have till now vainly awaited a scientific contradic- tion.
ENRICO FERRI. Rome, June, 1895.
155 APPENDIX II.
NOTE.— This appendix has been pruned of some of the matter which is either of interest only to those who follow closely ths proceedings of the Italian School of Positive Criminology or who have read Baron Garofalo's book. Every part of the appendix which amplifies and enforces the argument of the book is retained. — ED.
SOCIALIST SUPERSTITION AND INDIVIDUALIST SHORT-SIGHTEDNESS.
Among the numerous publications which have appeared in Italy for or against socialism since my Socialismo e scienza positiva, which showed the agreement of social- ism with the fundamental lines of contemporary scientific thought — the book of Baron Garofalo was expected with lively interest.* It was looked for on account of the well- known name of the author and of the open and radical disagreement which, with his book, would be disclosed among the founders of the positivist criminal school, formerly so united and bound together in the propaganda and defence of the new science — anthropology and criminal sociology — created by M. Lombroso.
It is true that the scientific union of the founders of the new Italian criminalist school formed an agreement, but they were never in unison.
M. Lombroso carried into the study of crime as a natural and social phenomenon the original impulse and the striking and fruitful assistance of anthropological and biological studies. I brought the theoretical system- atisation of the problem of human responsibility, and my psychological and sociological researches have permitted me to classify the natural causes of crime and the anthro- pological categories of criminals. I have shown the preponderating r61e of social prevention — very different from police prevention — of criminality, and have proved the infinitesimal influence of 'repression, which is always violent and posthumous. t
M. Garofalo — being quite in agreement with us in the diagnosis of criminal pathology — brought, however, a current of his own ideas, almost spiritualistic and less heterodox, such as, for example, the idea that the anomaly of the criminal is only a "moral anomaly" ; that religion has a preventive influence on criminality ; that severe re- pression is in all cases the efficacious remedy for it ; that misery not only is not the single and exclusive cause of crime (which I have always sustained and which I still sustain), but that it has no determinative influence on the
* La Superstition socialiste. French translation by M. Dietrich. Bibliotheque de philosophie contetnjoraine, Paris, Alcan, 1895.
t E. Ferri, Socinlogia Criminal?, 1880, translated into French by the author from the third Italian edition, Paris, Rousseau, editor 1893. The most impor- tant part of this work has been translated and published in the Criminology Series, edited by Dr. Douglas Morrison.
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offence ; that popular instruction, instead of being a preventive means, is, on the contrary, a goad, etc.
These ideas in evident disagreement with the inductions of criminal biology, psychology and sociology, as I have proved elsewhere, did not, however, hinder the agreement of the positivists of the new school. In fact these per- sonal and old-fashioned conceptions of M. Garofalo passed almost unperceived. His action was specially marked by the importance and greater development which he gave to the purely juridical inductions of the new school which he systematised in a plan of penal reforms and reforms of procedure possible even to-day, to eliminate the most acute absurdities which the positivist doctrine and his experience as a magistrate, although a little one-sided, had caused him to notice in penal justice. He was the jurist of the new school, M. Lombroso was its anthro- pologist, and I its sociologist.
But whilst with M. Lombroso and myself the progres- sive and heterodox tendency was more and more accen- tuated, even to socialism, one could already foresee that with M. Garofalo the orthodox and reactionary tendencies would become more vivid until he had abandoned the common ground on which we had fought together and on which we might still fight.
After the recital of this personal episode we must now examine the contents of this "Socialist superstition" to see in the schism of positive criminologists which of them follows best the discipline of experimental science and traces most rigorously the trajectory of human evolution.
We must see which of the two is more scientific, he who, carrying the experimental method beyond the re- searches limited by criminal anthropology into the field of the whole of social science, accepts all the logical con- sequences of scientific observations and gives his open adherence to Marxian socialism ; or he who, a positivist and an innovator in a special branch of the science, remains a conservative in other branches to which he refuses to apply the positive method and which he no longer studies with a critical spirit, being content with the easy and superficial repetition of the data of common place and routine.
The perusal of this book gives immediate evidence from the first to the last page of a marked contrast between M. Garofalo, the heterodox criminologist, always- ready for an acute criticism of classic criminology, always a rebel to the commonplaces used by juridical tradition, and M. Garofalo the anti-socialist, the orthodox socio- logist, the man of routine, who finds everything good in the present world, including the unproductive and insolent luxury of sportsmen ; who curses the French Revolution in order to make an idyllic description of
the ancient regime, forgetting, however, the deer park; and who without adducing any original observation limits himself to a repetition of the most superficial declama- tions of M. Guyot, or some other journalist, and that in a language violent and sometimes puerile. He who was before distinguished for the tone of his publications, which were always calm and sedate, makes us now think that, less convinced of being right than he would have us believe, he clamours and makes a great noise.
For example, on page 17, in a style which is neither aristocratic nor bourgeois, he writes that "M. Bebel had the effrontery to make in the open Reichstag an apology for the Commune," and he forgets that the Commune of Paris must not be judged historically only according to the contradictory impressions left by the artificial and exaggerated narrations of the bourgeois press of that time. Malon and Marx have shown from documents whose statements cannot be disputed, and on unassail- able historical grounds, what is the impartial judgment which ought to be passed on the Commune in spite of the excesses which — as M. Alfred Maury said to me at Pere-Lachaise one day in 1879 — were far surpassed by the ferocity of a savage repression.
In the same way on pages 20 and 22, he speaks, I do not know why, of the "scorn" of the Marxian socialists for sentimental socialism, which no one has ever thought of scorning, although we recognise that it is very little in agreement with the positive discipline of social science.
And on page 154 he thinks he is carrying on a scientific discussion by writing : "Truly, when we see that 'men professing such doctrines find a means of making them- selves heard, we are obliged to recognise that there is no limit to human imbecility."
Ah ! my dear Baron Garofalo, how this language reminds me of that of certain classical criminologists — do you remember it? — who though they could fight the positivist school with a language too like this, which con- ceals under the banal phrase the absolute want of ideas with which to oppose the detested, but victorious heresy.
With regard to my statement that the whole of contem- porary science is dominated by the idea and the fact of the social aggregate — and therefore of socialism — against the glorification which the i8th century made of the individual, and, therefore, of individualism, M. Garofalo answers me that "the story of Robinson Crusoe has been borrowed from a very true history," adding that "one could cite many cases of anchorites and hermits who had no need of the company of their fellow-creatures" (p. 82).
He thinks he has thus shown that I was mistaken when I affirmed that the species is the only eternal reality
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of life, and that the individual — himself a biological aggregate — does not live alone and by himself alone, but only in so far as he makes part of an aggregate to which he owes all the creative conditions of his material, moral and intellectual existence.
Verily, if M. Garofalo had made use of these argu- ments to combat the absurdities of penal metaphysics and to sustain the heresies of the positivist school, the latter would not cite him amongst its most eloquent and suggestive initiators. So that the man being the same, we must conclude that it is only to the feebleness of the cause to-day defended by him that he owes the platitude of such arguments.
And his critical vigour does not increase when, taking on himself the refrain that the collectivist society will be like a convent, he says : "Shall we all be workmen? But what ! We shall all be beggars. Our daily activity will have no other aim than to procure us a 'ticket' for a kind of economic kitchen. Let one imagine the intrigues and frauds with a view to obtaining these tickets, which from the first day would play the part of money after a little work or without any work. Let one imagine the Privileges, the exemptions, the waste, the certificates of feigned illness, the family tickets, the double tickets, and all imaginable tickets !" (page 87).
It is true that M. Garofalo's book was written on his own acknowledgment for the good bourgeoisie and not for men of science, but it has been translated and published in a celebrated "Library of Contemporary Philosophy." Is it possible to believe that a man of talent, such as M. Garofalo, really thinks that the whole of socialism con- sists in the "tickets" for a "kind of economic kitchen"?
This manner of arguing is too much like the sermons of country priests for me to think there is any use in answering it. I will only say that these discourses of my friend, Baron Garofalo, recall to me the objections which criminologists raised against us ten years ago, when they said that criminal anthropology was only a measuring of skulls, and that the penal justice of the future would have as a criterion of responsibility the length of the criminal's nose !
And yet M. Garofalo, instead of these commonplaces which are enough to send us to sleep, might have dis- cussed seriously the fundamental thesis of socialism, which, by the social ownership of the land and the 'means of production, tends to assure every individual the con- ditions of a more humane existence and of a complete and truly free development of his physical and moral personality. For only then, the daily food for body and soul being secure, every man can, as Goethe said, "become what he is," instead of wearing himself out, wasted away in the spasmodic and exhausting conquest
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of daily bread, too often at the expense of personal dignity or intellectual aptitudes, in an evident squander- ing of human forces to the great disadvantage of society as a whole, and with the appearance of individual liberty, but really with the submission of the large majority to the class of the possessors of economic monopoly.
But M. Garofalo has abstained altogether from these discussions, where one can on both sides adduce scientific arguments. Even when he tried to discuss seriously, he did not go beyond the repetition of the most superficial commonplaces.
Thus, for example (page^ga), against the socialists who maintain that the variations of the social environment will determine necessarily a change in the individual aptitudes and activities, he cries : "But the world cannot change if men do not first begin to change themselves under the influence of these two ideal factors : honour and duty."
That is to say, a man must not throw himself into the water if he has not first learnt to swim whilst keeping on the land.
Nothing, on the contrary, is more conformable to the positive inductions of biology and sociology than the socialist idea, according to which the changes of the environment determine the correlative changes, physio- logical and psychical in individuals. Is not the whole essence of Darwinism in the variability, organic and functional, of individuals and species under the modify- ing influence of the environment confirmed and trans- mitted by natural selection? And neo-Darwinism itself, is it not wholly devoted to the ever-increasing importance given to the changes of the environment in order to explain the variations of living creatures?
And in the sociological order, following the repeated and not suspected proofs of Spencer, in the passage from the warlike type to the industrial type of human societies — which St. Simon had already pointed out — just as this human nature which anti-socialists put before us as something immutable and fixed like the created species of ancient biology, changes in adapting itself to the change of type, so in the gradual passage to a collectivist organisation, human nature will adapt itself necessarily to the modified social conditions.
Certainly human nature will not change in its funda- mental tendencies. For example, men, like animals, will always shun pain and seek pleasure, since the former is a diminution and the latter an increase of life ; but this will not hinder the fact that the application and direction of these biological tendencies can and must change with the changes of the environment. So that I have been able to show elsewhere that individual egoism will certainly always exist, but it will act in a profoundly different
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fashion in a society directed towards a true human solidarity, from the way in which it acts in the indi- vidualistic and morally anarchical world of to-day, where every man through so-called free competition is forced to follow his anti-social egoism — that is to say, to be in opposition to, and not in agreement with, the necessities and tendencies of the other members of society.
But the repetition of the most worn-out commonplaces certainly reaches its summit when, through inattention on the part of the author, M. Garofalo writes these marvellous lines : —
"Many young people of aristocratic families apparently do not work. It is, however, more accurate to say that they do not perform any productive work for themselves, but they work just the same ( ! !), and it is for the benefit of others.
"In fact, these 'lazy' gentlemen are really given up to sport — the chase, navigation, riding, fencing — or to travels, or to dilettantism in the arts, and their activity, unproductive for themselves, furnishes profitable occupa- tions for an immense number of persons " (page 183).
One day studying the prisoners, one of them said to me : "People cry out a good deal against criminals because they do not work ; but if we did not exist, an immense number of persons — gaolers, policemen, judges, advocates — would be without profitable occupation."*
After having noted these specimens of scientific inatten- tion, and before approaching the examination of the rare arguments scientifically developed by M. Garofalo, it is useful, in order to be able to pass a general judgment on his book, to show at what point he has forgotten the most elementary rules of the positive method.
And it will be useful also to add some examples of errors of fact bearing either on science in general or on the doctrines combated by him.
* And in the French translation M. Garofalo still maintains his miraculous affirmation, even against the objections of M. Nitti, an eclectic and an oppor- tunist, but a talented economist, who with regard to this declared "that Rastiat himself had never said anything like it."
Here is the answer of M. Garofalo: "Let us suppose that the great lordly parks are used by companies of hunting men. Will the grooms and valets be as well fed and lodged in the service of the company ns they are to-day in that of the rich lords?" But first one might suppose that "great parks "would be cultivated with a view to useful production instead of being abandoned to companies of huntsmen.
And secondly, is not the parasitism of servants, whose number increases in epochs of decadence, a phenomenon of social pathology when such a number ofprrsons are devoted to the personal cares "of the grent lord instead of working at the production of useful objects?" If the reasoning of M. Garofalo were sound, it would follow that society would have more interest in hiving more " lordly parks" and vnlets than cultivated fields and agricul- tural or industrial workers,
On page 41, spooking of tho scientific work of Marx with a disdain that cannot be taken seriously, because it too much resembles that of the theologians for Darwin or that of the jurists for Lombroso, he gives this curious reasoning : "Starting from the supposition that all private property is unjust, it is not logic which is wanting in the doctrine of Marx. But if we recognise, on the contrary, that every individual has the right to own something, there results immediately the inevitable consequence of the fruit of capital, and, therefore, of the augmentation of it."
Ah ! Monsieur de la Palisse, you who before dying were alive, how your joyous image comes to my mind through an invincible association of ideas.
Certainly, if we admitted, a priori, the right of indi- vidual ownership of the land and of the means of production, it is useless to set ourselves to discuss it.
But the misfortune is that the whole of the scientific work of Marx and of the socialists has exactly for its object to give positive proofs of the true genesis of capitalist property — surplus value not paid for to the worker — and to put an end to the old fables of " the first occupier," of the " accumulated savings," which are exceptions more and more rare.
Besides, the negation of private property is not " the supposition," but the logical and inexorable consequence of premises of fact and historical statements made not only by 'Marx but by a numerous company of sociologists who, leaving on one side the mental reticences and reserves of orthodox conventionalism, have become thereby socialists.
As to the posthumous work of Marx, of which M. Garofalo speaks in his preface to the French translation, it is easy to answer the affirmation of M. Loria that the third volume of the Capital of Marx is the suicide of the theory of surplus value, and that, consequently, Marx and socialism are quite dead and buried in their own rubbish. First of all, the opinion of M. Loria is not indisputable, even on the technical question of the few economic facts of which the theory of surplus value would not give an explanation, for there are other economists who do not think with M. Loria with regard to the third volume of Capital. And in the second place, passing upon one side the fact that M. Loria himself, after all the tumult led by the Italian bourgeois press about his judgment upon the posthumous work of Marx, publicly declared that in spite of all he thinks socialism repre- sents the scientific truth in political economy, we can remind our opponents that the work of Marx, the basis of scientific socialism, is by no means exclusively in the technical theory of surplus value, but that it is also in the unshaken sociological theories of " the struggle of the classes" and of "historic materialism."
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Not less strange for a scientist is the artificial reason- ing which permits M. Garofalo to maintain in Chapter II. that socialists have no logic, because if the passage to collectivism is determined by the progressive accumula- tion of wealth in a small number of hands, " they ought then to favour this accumulation." As if the social evolution were not itself a natural evolution, and, there- fore superior to the freewill of individuals and parties.
But therein precisely consists the force of the scientific socialism of Marx and Engels. It has transported into the field of political economy the idea and the positive sense of an historic and natural evolution, and confines itself to stating an order of succession in social forms just as Darwinian biology only states an order of succession in organic forms.
But contemporary socialism, just because it is in com- plete agreement with scientific and positive thought, has no more of the illusions of those who imagine that to- morrow— with a dictator " of prodigious intelligence and remarkable eloquence," charged with organising collec- tivism by way of decrees and rules— one could leap the intermediate phases. Besides, has not individualism, absolute and unbounded, been already transformed into a limited individualism and a partial collectivism by the legal limitations of the jus abutendi and by the continued transformation into social function or public ownership of services (lighting, drinking water, transport) or pro- perties (roads, bridges, canals) which formerly were private services and properties. These intermediate phases cannot be suppressed by decree, but they develop and exhaust themselves naturally and daily under the pressure of economic and social conditions ; but by natural, and therefore inexorable, process, they always approach nearer to the ulterior phase of the absolute collectivism of the means of production, which the socialists have not invented, but which they only assert and whose course they foresee positively, which they can accelerate by giving to the proletarians, formed into a c'ass party, a clearer consciousness of their historic rdle.
To his psychological errors M. Garofalo has added such a grave biological error that it allows me to suppose that in his anti-socialist fury he has been struck with a passing scientific loss of memory.
On page 231 he writes : "For socialists the inequality of economic conditions, which does not always permit the most deserving to be sufficiently esteemed and re- warded, is the great social injustice that it is necessary
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to suppress. For us, on the contrary, this inequality which is a natural effect of social development and which cannot be suppressed has, however, its good side, because it is a means of moral and intellectual progress."
I abandon the taking up of this gratuitous prophecy that the exaggeration of natural social inequalities caused by the inequalities could not be at all suppressed ; for I occupied myself with that in my book, Socialism and Positive Science.
I only wish to echo here the assertion that social in- equalities, principally economic, are a "means of moral and intellectual progress," for it receives the most clear contradiction from the most positive data of the most orthodox biology and sociology.
This assertion of M. Garofalo is completed in fact by this other on page 237, that " hereditary property is actually the sole guarantee of a good education, the only force which still subsists in the world for the selection of individuals, who are not absolutely the strongest from the physical or intellectual point of view, but who are fit by their mental structure to appreciate and preserve the conquests of civilisation.
Now it is sufficient to remember the conclusion to which such learned men as Lucas, Galton, Morel, Ribot, Jacoby, etc., have arrived on "natural selection in its relations to heredity in man," to know on the contrary that it is a biological fact and historically undeniable that every monopoly of wealth or power is an inevitable source of physical and mental degeneracy.
The hereditary transmission of an economic or politi- cal privilege consumes, in fact, or wastes away in the descendants every vital energy, and, adding to that the in- evitable abuse of power possessed gratuitously, condemns all aristocracies of blood, or gold, or power, to a succes- sion of physical weakness, psychical degeneracy — even to extinction through sterility.'
This is without reckoning, on the other side, that the monopoly of wealth in a few families has, as an in- separable consequence, misery in many others, and that in this way again it leads to another series of evils and degeneracy.
There you have progressive selection and the aptitude for preserving the conquests of civilisation !
These errors of fact in biological and psychological science are not the only ones.
In fact, on" page 14, M. Garofalo begins by affirming that the "true tendency of the party called the Working-
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men's Party is to get possession of power, not in the interest of all, but to expropriate the. governing class and substitute themselves for it. They make no mystery, moreover, about it." This assertion is found again tan page 210, etc.
Now, it is sufficient to have read the programmes of the socialist party from the Manifesto of Marx and Engels to the propaganda publications, to know, on the contrary, that contemporary socialism wishes, and declares that it wishes, to arrive at the general suppression of every division of the social classes by putting an end to the division of the social inheritance of production, and, therefore, proclaims that it is resolved to realise the well- being of all, and not only — as a few short-sighted people continue to believe — the well-being of a fourth estate, which will only have to continue the egoistical example of the third estate.
Starting from this fundamental datum of socialism that every individual, except a child, a sick man, an invalid, ought to work in order to live, whatever may be the useful work that he accomplishes, this inevitable conse- quence follows, that in a society ordered on this prin- ciple every class antagonism will become impossible, for this antagonism only exists when the society includes a large majority who work for a miserable livelihood, and a small minority who live well without working at all.
This initial error naturally dominates the whole scheme of the book. It is thus, for example, that Chapter III. is devoted to proving that the "social revolution prepared by the new socialists will be the destruction of all moral order in society because it is lacking in an ideal which can be a luminous standard for it " (page 159).
Let us leave on one side, my dear Baron, the famous "moral order" of the society which decorates the gloved and eminent thieves of great and little Panamas, of banks and railroads, and which condemns to imprison- ment the children and women who steal dry wood or grass from the fields which formerly belonged to the community !
But to say that socialism is wanting in an ideal, when even its opponents recognise it to possess the immense superiority and power of opposing to the earthly scepti- cism of the present world an ardent faith in a better social justice for all, and of presenting thereby such a resemblance to primitive and regenerating Christianity (very different from its fatty degeneracy called Catholi- cism)— to say this is for a scientist to put himself into blind rebellion against the most evident reality of daily fact.
But the fundamental equivocation from which so many thinkers — M. Garofalo included among them — cannot free
themselves, and to which I yielded myself before pene- trating, thanks to the Marxian theory of historical materialism — or more exactly economic determinism — into the true spirit of socialist sociology, is that people judge the inductions of socialism upon biological, psy- chological and sociological data of present society without thinking of the necessary changes which will be brought about by a different economic, and, therefore, moral and political, environment.
In M. Garofalo's book is found this begging the question which refuses to believe in the future in the name of the present which is declared to be immutable — just as if in the first geological epochs it was concluded that from the flora and fauna of that time it was impos- sible to have a flora and fauna as different as are cryptogams from conifers and molluscs from mammals.
This confirms once more the observation I made above, that to deny socialism is to deny implicitly this law of universal and eternal evolution, which, however, determines the tendency of contemporary scientific thought.
On page 16, M. Garofalo prophesies that with the triumph of socialism "we shall see reappear the reign of physical force, irrational and brutal, and that we should assist, as happens every day in the lowest depths of the populace, at the triumph of the most violent men. And he repeats it (pages 208-210) ; but he forgets that in the socialist premiss of a better ordered social environment this brutality, which is the product of the present misery and want of education, would necessarily gradually diminish, and finally disappear.
Now, the possibility of this amelioration of the social environment which socialism affirms, is a thesis which we can discuss ; but that a writer, in order to deny this possibility, should urge against the future the effects of a present which it is wished to eliminate, this is where the insidious equivocation conceals itself, the discovery of which is sufficient to remove any foundation from the different reasonings that may be derived from it.
To the socialistic arguing of M. Jules Guesde, that "in a nation that was mistress of its means of production, every worker would endeavour to obtain the maximum product in the minimum of time possible, because the augmentation of production and the reduction of the time of work would be translated into increased enjoyments for all workers," M. Garofalo replies, on page 49, that " the fruit of the work having to be divided equally among all the workers of a nation, let us suppose twenty millions, the-increase of production due to the greater activity of one workman would only form an infinitesi- mal quantity of the sum total of which the good work- man would only have for his share the 2o-millionth part.
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Now, here is again the same equivocation. M. Garofalo supposes that the increase of activity and of production is only realised with a single worker, and that this increase alone has to be distributed among the whole of the workers, forgetting to think —
(I.) That in the hypothesis it is not one single worker, but all the workers of the nation that will augment their activity, and thus increase the production.
(II.) That in the state of present servitude the work- man works without spirits, without hope, and, therefore, without feeling bound to him who rewards him so badly for his work ; the contrary will happen when all the citizens are only co-operators, all equally interested in the administration of the social inheritance.
And it is still, thanks to the same equivocation, that he can affirm, on page 213, that in a socialist re'gime "the fine arts will not be able to exist. It is very well to say that they would henceforth be for the profit of the public. Of what public? Of the great mass of people deprived of artistic education?" As if when misery is once eliminated, and work becomes less exhausting for the working classes, the ease and economic security which would result from it would not develop among them also aesthetic pleasure, twhich they feel and gratify now as it is possible to them in the manifestations of popular art, or, indeed, as is seen to-day in Paris and Vienna in the "Socialist Theatre," and at Brussels in the free musical matinees, instituted by socialists, and frequented by an always increasing number of workers. It is the same with scientific instruction, as is proved by the " university extension movement " in England and Belgium. And all that in spite of the present absence of artistic education, but thanks to the existence among the workers of these countries of an economic condition less miserable than that of the agricultural or even industrial proletariat in countries like Italy.
In my book, Socialismo et Criminalita, published in 1883, and which my opponents, including M. Garofalo (p. 128 and following), now try to compare with the opinions which I have maintained in my more recent book, Socialisme et science positive, 1 developed two arguments :
(1) That the social arrangement could not have been changed suddenly, as sentimental socialism then main- tained in Italy, because the law of evolution is a sovereign ruler in the human world as in the organic and inorganic world.
(2) That, from analogy, crime could not disappear absolutely from humanity, as the Italian sentimentalists of that time vaguely insinuated.
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Now, first of all, there would be nothing contradictory if, after having partially accepted socialism, which I did already in 1883, the progressive evolution of my mind, after having studied the scientific systematizing of Marx and his collaborators, had led me to recognise (without any personal advantage) the whole truth of socialism. But, above all, precisely because scientific socialism (since Marx, Engels, Melon, de Paepe, Dramard, Lanessan, Guesde, Shaeffle, George, Bebel, Loria, Colajanni, Turati, De Greef, Lafargue, Jaures, Renard, Denis, Pleckanov, Vandervelde, Letourneau, L. Jacoby, Labriola, Kautsky, etc.) is different from sentimental socialism which I alone had in view in 1883, it is for this very reason that I still maintain to-day these two prin- cipal arguments, and I thus find myself in complete agreement with international scientific socialism.
Marxism, in fact, recognises that it is only by evolu- tion— gradual, but day by day more accelerated and fuller — that the substitution of the socialist regime for the individualist rdgime can be realised ; because the social revolution, in the sense which I shall presently name, will only be possible after the moral revolution has been realised among the proletarians of the civilised world, from the natural result of their actual and common economic conditions.
And as for the absolute disappearance of all crimin- ality I maintain still my argument of 1883. In Socialisme et science positive (§ 3) I have written that in a socialist regime there will be — although in infinitely less proper-' tions — some conquered in the struggle for existence, and that if the chronic and epidemic forms of nervous affec- tion, of crime, of madness, of suicide, are destined to disappear, the acute and sporadic forms will not com- pletely disappear.
It is then natural that in a socialist regime, with the disappearance of misery, the principal source of popular degeneracy is exhausted in epidemic and chronic forms of illness, crimeSj madness, suicide ; that is indeed what one sees now — in less proportions but with a positive confirmation of the general induction — since illnesses, crimes, madness, suicide increase during times of scarcity and crises, whilst they lessen in the years of less miser- able economic conditions.
That is not saying enough ; even in the bourgeoisie and aristocracy, who only see every day that the feverish competition and the spasmodic struggle for the conquest and preservation of their inheritance condemn to the nervous diseases, to crime, to suicide, a suffering crowd of men of no defined position, of knights or marquises who in a collectivist re'gime — once having eliminated the
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fever of private wealth and the uncertainty of daily bread for the stomach and the brain — would have on the con- trary a life less unbalanced and would be saved from final fall through degeneracy.*
Only, whereas formerly socialists following rather the impulse of humanitarian sentiment than the rigour of scientific reasoning, were led to this absolute affirmation that in a collectivist regime there would be no more offences ; I maintained on the contrary in 1883, and I still maintain, that the epidemic and chronic forms of criminality — a product of degeneracy through misery and the feverish struggle for riches — will disappear, but that the forms rendered acute by some personal pathological influence, by momentary delirium, by wounds, etc., (M. Garofalo cannot have forgotten that there are offences of people injured by wounds as well as madnesses) will not disappear.
Similarly when a marshy country is once healthy, endemic forms of fevers disappear, but the cases of consumption or other acute illnesses do not completely cease, although these become more rare with improved hygiene.
There then is established the relation between collec- tive property and nervous illnesses or degeneracy in general, not only in the working and most numerous classes, but also in the bourgeois and aristocratic class.
It now remains for me to give a rapid answer to his rare observations on the relations which exist between contemporary socialism and the broad lines of scientific and positive thought, observations which should have been the principal objective of the book.
Let us leave on one side the arguments which I had developed on this subject whilst observing that there is an intimate connection between economic and social variation (Marx), and the theories of biological variation (Darwin) and of universal variation (Spencer). M. Garofalo has thought it prudent to occupy himself solely
* M. Garofalo in the French translation adds some pages (291) to answer these observations. But first he repeats, without saying so, my argument that nervous affections exist also among the bourgeoisie and the aristocracy without remarking that it is still the effect of private property which con- demns the majority to degeneracy through misery and the minority to degeneracy from abuse of life or from feverish competition in life.'
In the second place he says that it is not misery which engenders de- generacy, which produces misery, repeating the verses of Horace that death and disease knock "with equal foot" at the door of the garret and of the palace. The verses of Horace are contradicted by demographic statistics which prove a shorter longevity among the poor. And as to degeneracy being a source of misery, that is true also, but it is the exception for a few individuals.
The degeneracy of the masses is only produced by their misery and it is really superfluous to give proofs of it.
with the "struggle for existence" and with the relations that exist between "evolution and revolution."
As for the first, five pages (96-100) are sufficient for him to affirm, without supporting his affirmation by any positive demonstration which is not merely an expression of the same idea couched in different words, that the Darwinian law of the struggle for existence has not undergone, and will not undergo, any transformation beyond that which will change the violent struggle of competition (the struggle of skill and intelligence), and that this law is irreconcilable with socialism, for it necessarily exacts the sacrifice of the conquered, whilst socialism would assure to all men material existence so that they would not have to trouble about it.
But my friend, Baron Garofalo, passes by in complete silence the fundamental argument that socialists oppose to the individualist interpretation which has been given up till now of the struggle for life, and which still influences some socialists so much as to make them think the struggle for life is not true and that Darwinism is irreconcilable with socialism.*
Socialists, in fact, think that the laws of life are the following, concurrent and inseparable in their action : the struggle for existence and solidarity in the struggle against natural forces. If the first law has an individual- istic spirit, the second has one essentially socialistic.
Now, in order not to repeat what I have written else- where, it is sufficient for me to state here this positive fact, that every human evolution is realised by an ever increasing predominance of the law of solidarity' over the law of the struggle for existence.
The forms of the struggle change and become attenu- ated, as I have stated, since 1883, and M. Garofalo accepts this point of view when he recognises that the muscular struggle tends always to become the intel- lectual struggle. But he has only formal evolution in view, he takes no account of its progressively attenuated functional relation in face of the other parallel law of solidarity in the struggle.
Here intervenes this constant principle of sociology that the social forms and forces always co-exist, but with
* Professor Labriola has recently repeated, without proving it, this assertion that socialism is not reconcilable with Darwinism. Sur le Mani- feste de Marx it Ength in the Devenir social, June, 1895.
It is however very strange that there are some socialists who think that, under the pretext of a so-called irreconcilability between Darwinism and socialism the simple solution of the difficulty is to anathematise Darwinism.
I believe, onjhe contrary, that it is more important to examine Dar- winism from the point of view, not of its individualistic and false inter- pretations, but in its positive spirit of biological variation, which is evidently founded on universal variation at the same time that it is the base of economic and social variation.
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a successive predominance that changes from epoch to epoch and from place to place.
Just as with the individual, egoism and altruism co- exist, and will always co-exist — for egoism is the personal basis of existence — but with a progression continually restrictive and transformative of egoism as opposed to altruism, passing from the ferocious egoism of savage humanity to the less brutal egoism of the present epoch and to the more fraternal egoism of the society to come, just as in the social organism, for example, the warlike type and the industrial type always co-exist, but with a progressive predominance of the latter over the former.
Just the same again the different types of constitution of the family always co-exist, but with a different pre- dominance at different epochs ; just as to-day in every civilised society, although the monogamic type (to-day by joint action and legal fiction, later by free consent) predominates much over other family types, yet one always finds in all countries both sexual community (masculine and feminine prostitution), and the union of one wife with several husbands (one legal and the others extra legal), and also the union of one husband with several wives (one legal and the others extra legal).
It is the same with many other institutions of which Spencerian sociology had only given the descriptive evo- lution, and of which the Marxian theory of economic determinism has given us the generic evolution, by explaining that customs, religious and juridical institu- tions, social types, family forms, etc., are only the reflection of the economic structure, which differs accord- ing to place (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 for every social group the resultant of the energies of race developing themselves in such and such physical environment, as I have said elsewhere.
The same rule holds good for the two co-existing laws of the struggle for existence and solidarity in the struggle, of which the first predominates (such as primitive morals, war, slavery, etc.) where the economic conditions are the most difficult, whilst the second predominates where the economic security of the greater number increases. But the latter, whilst completely developing in a socialist regime and by assuring material life to every man who works, will not exclude the intellectual forms of the struggle for existence, which M. Tchisch said ought to be interpreted in the sense not only of a struggle for life, but also of a struggle for the increase of life*
* Tchisch La /«»' fondamentale de la. vie, Dorpat, 1895, p. 19.
In fact, when the material life of each man is once secured along with the duty of work for all those asso- ciated together, a man will always be struggling for the greatest development of his physical and moral person- ality. And it is only in the socialist re'gime that the predominance of the law of solidarity being decisive, the struggle for existence will change its form and scope, whilst persisting in an eternal struggle towards a better life in the joint development of the individual and the aggregate.*
But M. Garofalo occupies himself more with the practical (?) relations between socialism and the law of evolution than with this apparently theoretical problem. And substantially taking up for his purpose the objection so many times made to Marxism and to its tactics, he thus formulates his prosecutor's speech :
" The new socialists who on the one side pretend to speak in the name of sociological science, on the other side declare themselves politically as revolutionaries. Now it is evident that science has nothing more to do here. Although they are careful to say that by 'revolu- tion' they do not mean a riot or a revolt, a thing which the dictionary, moreover, explains, this always remains : that they will not await the spontaneous organisation of society in the new economic arrangement caught sight of by them in a future more or less distant ; otherwise, who among them would survive to prove to the incredu- lous the truth of their predictions."
" We are, therefore, concerned with a revolution' artificially hastened, that is to say, in other terms, with the use of force to transform society according to their desire " (page 30).
" The socialists of the school of Marx do not expect the transformation of a slow evolution, but a revolution of the people, of which they even fix the period" (p. 53).
" It is indispensable that socialists should decide from now to be :
"Either theoretical evolutionists who AWAIT PATIENTLY
FOR THE TIME TO BE RIPE,
" Or, on the contrary, revolutionary democrats, and then it is useless to speak of evolution, accumulation, spontaneous concentration, etc. MAKE THE REVOLUTION
THEN IF YOU HAVE THE POWER " (p. 151).
On the subject of the social question the attitudes in
* Recently M. Pioger, La vie tociale, etc., Paris, 1894, showed that "the idea of increasing solidarity is the ultimate and most general result of all that constitute*- scientific knowledge."
Now, since socialism is based principally on the idea of solidarity, whilst individualism is based essentially on antagonism more or less marked, the agreement of socialism with contemporary scientific thought is put once again in full evidence.
tj*
the scientific domain or in the political domain are the following : —
(1) That of the conservatives such as M. Garofalo, those falling into the easy terror of automorphism — so well pointed out by Mr. Spencer — which makes them judge the world, not following the conditions objectively established, but following the subjective impression, con- sidering that they are very comfortable in the present regime — these maintain that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, and oppose everywhere, with a very logical egoism, every change which is not limited to one on the surface.
(2) That of the reformers, who, like all eclectics, of whom infinitus est numerus, give thus, as the Italian proverb says, one blow to the cask and another to the hoop, and do not deny — oh no ! — the inconveniences and absurdities even of the present ; but, in order not to compromise themselves too far, hasten to say that they must confine themselves to retouches, superficial reforms, that is to say, to those symptomatic cases which are as easy as they are inconclusive in personal as in social medicine.
(3) Finally, there are the revolutionaries who call themselves thus just because they think and say that the efficacious remedy is not in superficial reforms but in a radical reorganisation, beginning at the basis itself of private property, and which will be so profound that it will justly form a social revolution.
It is in this sense that Galileo made a scientific revolu- tion, for he did not confine himself to the reforms of the astronomical system admitted in his time, but he radi- cally changed the fundamental lines. And it is in the same sense that Jacquart made an industrial revolution because he did not confine himself to reforming the hand-loom which had existed for centuries, but he radically changed its structure and productive power.
Thus, when socialism is called revolutionary, it is understood that we are speaking of the programme to be realised, and of the final end to be attained, and not as M. Garofalo, in spite of the dictionary, continues to believe — of the method or tactics with which to attain this end of the social revolution.
And it is just here that the profound difference is shown between the methods of sentimental socialism and of scientific socialism (henceforth the only socialism in the civilised world), which has received through Marx, Engels, and their followers, the systematic organisation necessitated by the method of evolution. And that is why and how I have been able to show that contem- porary socialism is in complete agreement with the positive doctrine of evolution.
Socialism, in fact, calls itself revolutionist, but not in
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the sense which M. Garofalo prefers of "patiently wait- ing until the times are ripe," and till society "organises itself spontaneously in the new economic arrangement," as if science should consist in the Hindu contemplation of the navel, and in academic Platonism — which it has done for too long — instead of asking of real and daily life the reasons for its existence and the application of its inductions.
There is the question of method and tactics which distinguishes Utopian socialism from scientific socialism ; the former imagined it could change the economic organ- isation of the world from the top to the bottom by the improvised miracle of a popular insurrection ; the latter, however, declares that the law of evolution is sovereign and consequently that the social revolution can only be the last phase of a previous evolution which will consist — through scientific research and propaganda — in the realisation of the cry of Marx : Proletarians of all countries, unite I
There then is the easy enigma explained, which brings it about that socialism, revolutionary in its programme, follows the laws of evolution in its method of realisa- tion, and therefore is so full of life, just as it is substan- tially different from the mystical and violent anarchism that class prejudices and the exigences of a corrupt journalism claim to be only a consequence of socialism, whereas it is its practical negation.
During several years, whilst defending the positivist school of criminology, I had personal experience of the inevitable phases which a scientific truth must traverse before conquering its " freedom of the city " — the con- spiracy of silence ; the attempt to stifle the new idea under ridicule ; then, in consequence of the resistance to these artifices of misoneism, the new ideas are falsified, either by ignorance or to make it easier to combat them ; at last it is partially admitted, and this is the beginning of its final triumph.
So that, knowing these phases of the natural evolution of every new idea, now that, for the second time, instead of reposing on my first scientific victories, I have wished to fight for a second and more burning heresy, the victory appears to me more certain, since my opponents and my ancient companions in arms renew again the same artifices of miseonist opposition of which I have already ascertained the impotence in a more restricted field of battle, but where the fight was not less lively nor less difficult.
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And — a new soldier enlisted for a great and noble human ideal — I am already assisting in the spectacle of partial and inevitable concessions, torn from those who desire not to compromise, very terrible in appearance, but vain and untenable in relation to the great cry of pain and hope which rises from the depths of the human hive in the shudderings of hearts and the labours of science.
ENRICO FERRI.
Garden City Tress Limited^ Letchivorth, Herts.
THE SOCIALIST LIBRARY
PROSPECTUS.
PR some time it has been felt that there is a deplorable lack in this country of a Socialist literature more exhaustive and sys- tematic than pamphlets or newspaper articles. In every other country where the Socialist movement is vigorous, such a literature exists, and owing to it Socialism has taken a firmer hold upon the intellectual classes, and, amongst Socialists themselves, its theories and aims are better understood than they are here. Comparing the output of Socialist literature in Germany and France with Great Britain, one must be struck with the ephemeral nature of the great bulk of the matter which we publish, and the almost complete absence of any attempts to deal exhaustively with Socialism in its many bearings in economics, history, sociology and ethics. This failure is all the more to be regretted, because just as the special development of British industrialism afforded the basis for much of the constructive work of foreign Socialists half a century ago, so the growth of British democratic institutions and the characteristics of British political methods have a special and direct bearing upon Socialist theories and tactics.
It is also disquieting to think that, on the one hand, the intellectual life of our country is becoming more and more attached in its interests and sympathies to reaction, and that, on the other, so many who lift up their voices against backward tendencies ei ther look behind with regretful regard upon policies which are exhausted and can no longer guide us, or frankly confess that they are disconsolate without hope.
To the promoters of this LIBRARY, Socialism appears to be not only the ideal which has to be grasped before the benumbing pessimism which lies upon the minds of would-be reformers can be removed, but also the one idea which is guiding such progressive legislation and ad- ministration to-day as are likely to be of permanent value. But those experimenting with it are only groping ; are working with an instrument they do not understand ; are applying an idea they have not grasped ; and it is therefore believed that as a practical con- tribution to political principles and methods, the LIBRARY may be of some value.
The LIBRARY, however, with more assurance of definite success, will aim atproviding studies in Socialism, or from Socialistic standpoints, which will be stimulating to the Socialist movement, and which may do something to knit together the different sections of Socialist opinion and activity in this country. It will contain translations of the best works of foreign Socialists, as well as contributions from our own writers.
It follows that the volumes will not be selected because they advocate any particular school of Socialist thought, but because they are believed to be worthy expositions of the school to which they belong. APRIL, 1905.
LIST OF VOLUMES. I. — SOCIALISM AND POSITIVE SCIENCE, by PRO- FESSOR ENRICO FERRI. is. and is. 6d.
5th Edition. II. — SOCIALISM AND SOCIETY. By J. Ramsay
MacDonald, M.P. is. and is. 6d. 6th
Edition. III. — STUDIES IN SOCIALISM. By J. Jaures.
is. and is. 6d. 2nd Edition. IV. — WHITE CAPITAL AND COLOURED' LABOUR.
By Sydney Olivier, K.C.M.G. is. and
is. 6d. V. — COLLECTIVISM AND INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION.
By E. Vandervelde. is. and is. 6d. VI. — SOCIALISM AND THE DRINK QUESTION. .
By Philip Snowden, M.P. is. and is. 6d. I. EXTRA — THE REVOLUTION IN THE BALTIC
PROVINCES OF RUSSIA, is. and is. 6d. SOCIALISM AND RELIGION. Rev. A. L. Lilley.
(In preparation.) • SOCIALISM AND DEMOCRACY. By J. Ramsay
MacDonald, M.P. (In preparation.) SOCIALISM AND FOREIGN AFFAIRS. By H. N.
Brailsford. (In preparation.)
These will be followed by volumes on :
SOCIALISM AND THE RURAL POPULATION. SOCIALISM AND THE POSITION OF WOMEN. TRANSLATIONS FROM THE LEADING FOREIGN SOCIALIST WRITERS.
Independent Labour Party.
PUBLICATION DEPARTMENT.
The Socialist Library.
Volume (.-SOCIALISM AND POSITIVE SCIENCE, BY ENRICO FKRRI, PROFESSOR OF PENAL LAW IN THE UNI- VERSITY OF ROME. TRANSLATED BY EDITH C. HARVEY. Paper, is. net ; Cloth, is. 6d. net.
Fifth Edition.
" No more representative type of militant and systematic Socialism could have been chosen. The series which this Volume inaugurates promises to be both inter- esting and instructive, and will doubtless find atten- tive readers in. other than Socialist Circles." — Sydney Ball in the ECONOMIC JOURNAL.
Volume II.— SOCIALISM AND SOCIETY, BY J. RAMSAY MACDONALD, M.P. Paper, is. net ; Cloth, is. 6d. net.
Sixth Edition.
DUNDEE ADVERTISER. — " The aim of Socialism is treated in a clear, concise, and scholarly manner."
DAILY NEWS.—" This admirable little work." SCOTSMAN. — " Thoughtful and instructive."
DAILY CHRONICLE. — " Well-written, logical, and read- able, and we commend it to the study of all social reformers."
Volume III.— STUDIES IN SOCIALISM, BY JEAN JAURES. TRANSLATED BY MILDRED MINTURN. Paper, is. net ; Cloth, is. 6d. net. Second Edition.
REVIEW OF REVIEWS. — "Well worth reading by English Socialists and others who wish to keep in touch with the movement on the Continent."
ATHENJEUM. — " The last essay in the book is remark- able for poetic beauty. Mr. MacDonald's introduc- tion contains an interesting personal pronouncement upon the future of the Labour Party in this country."
Volume IV.-WHITE CAPITAL AND COLOURED LABOUR,
BY SYDNEY OLIVIER, K.C.M.G. Paper, is. net ; Cloth, is. 6d. net.
MANCHESTER GUARDIAN. — " An important contribution to the sociology of race relations. Everyone who thinks about Imperialism should read the book."
THE STANDARD. — " It is the object of the book to en- lighten the white man concerning the real nature of the black. The case is treated with conspicuous moderation."
Volume V.— COLLECTIVISM AND INDUSTRIAL EVOLUTION,
BY EMILE VANDERVELDE. Paper, is. net; Cloth, - is. 6d. net.
DAILY NEWS. — " The author is an entirely sane and business-like Collectivist, and his broad sketch of the concentration of capital and of the practical means of securing economic enfranchisement of the people may be commended to all readers."
MANCHESTER GUARDIAN. — " One of the cleverest, most logical, and most representative accounts of modern European Socialism."
Volume VI. — SOCIALISM AND THE DRINK QUESTION,
BY PHILIP SNOWDEN, M.P. Paper, is. net; Cloth, is. 6d. net.
ABERDEEN DAILY JOURNAL. — " Seldom have we come across a book on the drink problem which states the issues so clearly, gives such a comprehensive and intelligible view of relevant facts and suggested remedies, and discusses with so sincere an effort after truth the various causes of alcoholic excess."
Extra Volume I. — THE REVOLUTION IN THE BALTIC PROVINCES OF RUSSIA, TRANSLATED BY E. O. F. AMES. SIXTEEN ILLUSTRATIONS. Paper, is. net; Cloth, is. 6d. net.
A remarkable and realistic account of the Revolution in the Baltic Provinces, and the oppressive measures taken by the Russian Government to stamp out the Socialist and Revolutionary movement in the district.
J. Ramsay MacDonald. M.P.
WOMEN IN THE PRINTING TRADES. A SOCIOLOGICAL STUDY. With a Preface by Professor F. Y. Edge- worth, Editor Economic Journal. Demy 8vo. Cloth, with Diagrams, 2s. 6d. net.
SOCIALISM, is. net.
LABOUR AND THE EMPIRE, is. net.
THE NEW UNEMPLOYED BILL OF THE LABOUR PARTY. One penny ; post free, ijd.
J. Keir Hardie, M.P.
FROM SERFDOM TO SOCIALISM, is. net.
THE I.L.P. — ALL ABOUT IT. One penny ; by post, i|d.
THE INDIAN BUDGET. One penny ; by post igd.
CAN A MAN BE A CHRISTIAN ON A POUND A WEEK? One penny ; by post, i^d.
THE CITIZENSHIP OF WOMEN: A PLEA FOR WOMEN'S SUFFRAGE. One penny ; by post, i£d.
Philip Snowden, M.P.
THE SOCIALIST'S BUDGET, is. net.
THE NEW WORKMEN'S COMPENSATION ACT MADE PLAIN. One penny ; post free, i$d.
THE INDIVIDUAL UNDER SOCIALISM. One penny ; post free, i£d.
THE CHRIST THAT is TO BE. One penny; post free, iid.
A STRAIGHT TALK TO RATEPAYERS : FACTS FOR CITIZENS ABOUT RISING RATES, MUNICIPAL DEBT, MUNICIPAL TRADING. One penny ; post free, i£d.
SOCIALISM AND TEETOTALISM. One penny ; by post, i£d.
How TO GET AN OLD AGE PENSION. One penny ; by post, ijd.
BACK TO THE LAND. One penny ; post free, ijd.
I.L.P. YEAR-BOOK, 1909. Threepence; post free, 4^d.
I.L.P. PAMPHLETS.
Each 16 to 32 pages, price id. ; post free, i$d.
Socialism.
THE I. L. P.— ALL ABOUT IT. J. Keir Hardie, M.P.
SOCIALISM. By Rev. R. J. Campbell.
SOCIALISM. By T. D. Benson.
SOCIALISM AND SERVICE. By T. D. Benson.
FREE TRADE, TARIFF REFORM, AND SOCIALISM. By
T. D. Benson.
SOCIALISM AND THE BUDGET. By H. Russell Smart. SOCIALISM AND AGRICULTURE. By Richard Higgs. HENRY GEORGE, SOCIALISM, AND THE SINGLE TAX.
By T. Russell Williams.
WILL SOCIALISM DESTROY THE HOME? H. G. Wells. SOCIALISM AND THE HOME. Mrs. K. B. Glasier. SOCIALISM AND TEETOTALISM. By Philip Snowden,
M.P.
Unemployment.
THE NEW UNEMPLOYED BILL OF THE LABOUR PARTY. By J. Ramsay MacDonald, M.P.
THE PROBLEM OF THE UNEMPLOYED. By G. N. Barnes, M.P.
THE RIGHT TO WORK. By H. Russell Smart.
AFFORESTATION : THE UNEMPLOYED AND THE LAND. By T. Summerbell, M.P.
Women's Questions.
THE CITIZENSHIP OF WOMEN. By J. Keir Hardie,
M.P.
WOMEN AND SOCIALISM. By Isabella O. Ford. WTOMAN — THE COMMUNIST. By T. D. Benson. WOMAN'S FRANCHISE. By E. C. Wolstenholme
Elmy.
Municipal Questions.
A STRAIGHT TALK TO' RATEPAYERS. By Philip
Snowden, M.P.
MUNICIPAL BREAD SUPPLY. By T. H. Griffin. MUNICIPAL MILK SUPPLY. A. W. Short. BRADFORD AND ITS CHILDREN : How THEY ARE FED.
By Councillor J. H. Palin.
M iscellaneous.
THE NATIONALISATION OF RAILWAYS. By G. J.
Wardle, M.P.
THE INDIAN BUDGET. By J. Keir Hardie, M.P. How MILLIONAIRES ARE MADE. By J. Bruce Glasier. INFANT MORTALITY. By Margaret McMillan. MINING ROYALTIES. By T. I. Mardy Jones, F.R.E.S. SECULAR^ EDUCATION, THE ONLY WAY. By Harry
Snell. THB HANGING CZAR. By Count Tolstoy.
The Socialist Review.
A MONTHLY REVIEW OF MODERN THOUGHT.
Discusses the theories and policy of Socialism, describes sociological and industrial changes of interest to Socialists, examines modern tendencies in legislation and commerce, and generally expresses that many- sided movement in thought and experience which is at the present moment giving such an impetus to Socialism. Of all booksellers, 6d. Foreign Sub- scription for one year, ys. 6d. post free.
Threepenny Booklets.
THE LABOUR PILGRIM'S PROGRESS. By H. T. Muggeridge.
" One of the most telling brochures to be found in the whole range of Socialist propagandist literature. The allegory is so quaint, so touching, so true.'* — Labour Leader.
THE NEW CRUSADE : POEMS. By Arthur G. Sparrow. FIGHTERS FOR FREEDOM. By W. Stewart. ST. GUIDO. By R. Jefferies.
Tales from the Derbyshire Hills.
BY KATHERINE BRUCE GLASIER. is. 6d. net.
" Ten short stories, of varying lengths, portray very vividly the romance and charm of the Peak country. The writer knows her subject, and writes from her heart. The stories are readable and carefully written. They centre, mostly, round the Dale-folk, and convey, with sympathy and truth, the happiness and pathos of their lives." — Literary World.
The Labour Leader,
The Official Organ of the Independent Labour Party. Should be read regularly by everyone interested in the Labour and Socialist movement. Of all news- agents. Weekly, one penny. Subscription rates : one year 88. 6d. ; half-year 3s. 3d.; 13 weeks Is. 8d.
INDEPENDENT LABOUR PARTY,
Publication Department, 23, Bride Lane, Fleet St., E.G.
PLEASE DO NOT REMOVE CARDS OR SLIPS FROM THIS POCKET
UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LIBRARY
Ferri, Enrico
Socialism and positive F55 science. 5th ed. 1909
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