Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) Part 12

The true reply is wholly different. Scientific socialism represents a much more advanced phase of socialist thought; it is in perfect harmony with modern, experiential science, and it has completely abandoned the fantastic idea of prophesying, at the present time, what human society will be under the new collectivist organization.

What scientific socialism can affirm and does affirm with mathematical certainty, is that the current, the trajectory, of human evolution is in the general direction pointed out and foreseen by socialism, that is to say, in the direction of a continuously and progressively increasing preponderance of the interests and importance of the species over the interests and importance of the individual--and, therefore, in the direction of a continuous _socialization_ of the economic life, and with and in consequence of that, of the juridical, moral and political life.

As to the petty details of the new social edifice, we are unable to foresee them, precisely because the new social edifice will be, and is, a _natural_ and _spontaneous_ product of human evolution, a product which is already in process of formation, and the general outlines of which are already visible, and not an artificial construction of the imagination of some utopian or idealist.

The situation is the same in the social sciences and the natural sciences. In embryology the celebrated law of Haeckel tells us that the development of the _individual_ embryo reproduces in miniature the various forms of development of the animal _species_ which have preceded it in the zoological series. But the biologist, by studying a human embryo of a few days' or a few weeks' growth, can not tell whether it will be male or female, and still less whether it will be a strong or a weak individual, phlegmatic or nervous, intelligent or not.

He can only tell the general lines of the future evolution of that individual, and must leave it to time to show the exact character of all the particular details of its personality, which will be developed naturally and spontaneously, in conformity with the hereditary organic conditions and the conditions of the environment in which it will live.

This is what can be and what must be the reply of every socialist. This is the position taken by Bebel in the German _Reichstag_[63] in his reply to those who wish to know at the present time what all the details of the future State will be, and who skilfully profiting by the ingenuity of the socialist romancers, criticize their artificial fantasies which are true in their general outlines, but arbitrary in their details.

It would have been just the same thing if, before the French Revolution,--which, as it were, hatched out the bourgeois world, prepared and matured during the previous evolution,--the n.o.bility and the clergy, the cla.s.ses then in power, had asked the representatives of the Third Estate--bourgeois by birth, though some aristocrats or priests embraced the cause of the bourgeoisie against the privileges of their caste, as the Marquis de Mirabeau and the Abbe Sieyes--"But what sort of a world will this new world of yours be? Show us first its exact plan, and after that we will decide!"

The Third Estate, the bourgeoisie, would not have been able to answer this question, because it was impossible for them to foresee what the human society of the nineteenth century was to be. But this did not prevent the bourgeois revolution from taking place because it represented the next natural and inevitable phase of an eternal evolution. This is now the position of socialism with relation to the bourgeois world. And if this bourgeois world, born only about a century ago, is destined to have a much shorter historical cycle than the feudal (aristocratico-clerical) world, this is simply because the marvelous scientific progress of the nineteenth century has increased a hundred-fold the rapidity of life in time and has nearly annihilated s.p.a.ce, and, therefore, civilized humanity traverses now in ten years the same road that it took, in the Middle Ages, a century or two to travel.

The continuously accelerated velocity of human evolution is also one of the laws established and proved by modern social science.

It is the artificial constructions of sentimental socialism which have given birth to the idea--correct so far as they are concerned--that _socialism_ is synonymous with _tyranny_.

It is evident that if the new social organization is not the spontaneous form naturally produced by the human evolution, but rather an artificial construction that has issued complete in every detail from the brain of some social architect, the latter will be unable to avoid regulating the new social machinery by an infinite number of rules and by the superior authority which he will a.s.sign to a controlling intelligence, either individual or collective. It is easy to understand then, how such an organization gives rise in its opponents--who see in the individualist world only the advantages of liberty, and who forget the evils which so copiously flow from it--the impression of a system of monastic or military discipline.[64]

Another contemporary artificial product has contributed to confirm this impression--_State Socialism_. At bottom, it does not differ from sentimental or utopian socialism, and as Liebknecht said at the socialist congress of Berlin (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 democratic socialism--as is shown by the famous _rescripts_ of Emperor William convoking an international conference to solve (this is the infantile idea of the decree) the problems of labor, and the famous Encyclical on "The Condition of Labor" of the very able Pope, Leo XIII, who has handled the subject with great tact and cleverness.[65] But these imperial rescripts and these papal encyclicals--because it is impossible to leap over or suppress the phases of the social evolution--could only result abortively in our bourgeois, individualist and _laissez faire_ world. Certainly it would not have been displeasing to this bourgeois world to see the vigorous contemporary socialism strangled to death in the amorous embraces of official artificiality and of State Socialism, for it had become evident in Germany and elsewhere, that neither laws nor repressive measures of any kind could kill it.[66]

All that a.r.s.enal of rules and regulations and provisions for inspection and superintendence has nothing in common with scientific socialism which foresees clearly that the executive guidance of the new social organization will be no more confused than is the present administration of the State, the provinces and the communes, and will, on the contrary, be much better adapted to subserve the interests of both society and the individual, since it will be a natural product and not a parasitic product of the new social organization. Just so, 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 of a mollusc, but it has not, for that reason, tyrannically stifled the autonomy of the other organs and anatomical machinery, or of the cells in their living confederation.

It is understood, then, that to refute socialism, something more is needed than the mere repet.i.tion of the current objections against that artificial and sentimental socialism which still continues to exist, I confess, in the nebulous ma.s.s of popular ideas. But every day it is losing ground before the intelligent partisans--workingmen, middle-cla.s.s or aristocrats--of scientific socialism which armed--thanks to the impulse received from the genius of Marx--with all the best-established inductions of modern science, is triumphing over the old objections which our adversaries, through force of mental custom, still repeat, but which have long been left behind by contemporary thought, together with the utopian socialism which provoked them.

The same reply must be made to the second part of the objection, with regard to the mode by which the advent of socialism will be accomplished.

One of the inevitable and logical consequences of utopian and artificial socialism is to think that the architectonic construction proposed by such or such a reformer, ought to be and can be put into practice in a single day by a decree.

In this sense it is quite true that the utopian illusion of empirical socialism is in opposition to the scientific law of evolution, and, _looked at in this way_, I combatted it in my book on _Socialismo e Criminalita_, because at that time (1883) the ideas of scientific or Marxian socialism were not yet generally disseminated in Italy.

A political party or a scientific theory are natural products which must pa.s.s through the vital phases of infancy and youth, before reaching complete development. It was, then, inevitable that, before becoming scientific or _positif_ (fact-founded), socialism, in Italy as in other countries, should pa.s.s through the infantile phases of clannish exclusiveness--the era when socialism was confined to organizations of _manual_ laborers--and of nebulous romanticism which, as it gives to the word _revolution_ a narrow and incomplete meaning, is always fed with false hope by the illusion that a social organism can be radically changed in a single day with four rifle-shots, just as a monarchical regime could thus be converted into a republican regime.

But it is infinitely easier to change the political envelope of a social organization,--because such a change has little effect on the economic foundation of the social life,--than to completely revolutionize this social life in its economic const.i.tution.

The processes of social transformation, as well as--under various names--those of every sort of transformation in living organisms are: evolution,--revolution,--rebellion,--individual violence.

A mineral or vegetable or animal species may pa.s.s through, during the cycle of its existence, these four processes.

As long as the structure and the volume of the centre of crystallization, the germ, or the embryo, increase gradually, we have a gradual and continuous process of _evolution_, which must be followed at a definite stage by a process of _revolution_, more or less prolonged, represented, for example, by the separation of the entire crystal from the mineral ma.s.s which surrounds it, or by certain revolutionary phases of vegetable or animal life, as, for example, the moment of s.e.xual reproduction; there may also be a period of _rebellion_, that is to say, of organized personal violence, a frequent and well-verified phenomenon among those species of animals who live in societies; there may also be isolated instances of _personal violence_, as in the struggles to obtain food or for possession of the females between animals of the same species.

These same processes also occur in the human world. By _evolution_ must be understood the transformation that takes place day by day, which is almost unnoticed, but continuous and inevitable; by _revolution_, the critical and decisive period, more or less prolonged, of an evolution that has reached its concluding phase; by _rebellion_, the partially collective violence which breaks out, upon the occasion of some particular circ.u.mstance, at a definite place and time; and by _individual violence_, the action of one individual against one or several others, which may be the effect of a fanatical pa.s.sion or of criminal instincts, or the manifestation of a lack of mental equilibrium,--and which identifies itself with the political or religious ideas most in vogue at the moment.

It must be remarked, in the first place, that while revolution and evolution are normal functions of social physiology, rebellion and individual violence are symptoms of social pathology.

These are, nevertheless, merely natural and spontaneous processes, since, as Virchow has shown, pathology is merely the sequel of normal physiology. Besides, the pathological symptoms have, or should have, a great diagnostical value for the cla.s.ses in power; but the latter, unfortunately, in every period of history, in times of political crisis, as in those of social crisis, have shown themselves unable to conceive of any other remedy than brutal repression--the guillotine or the prison--and they fancy that thus they can cure the organic and const.i.tutional disease which vexes the social body.[67]

But it is indisputable, at all events, that the normal processes of social transformation (and because they are normal, the most fruitful and the surest, although the slowest and the least effective in appearance) are evolution and revolution, using the latter term in its accurate and scientific sense, as the concluding phase of an evolution, and not in the current and incorrect sense of a stormy and violent revolt.[68]

It is evident, in fact, that Europe and America are, in these closing years of the nineteenth century, in a period of revolution, prepared by the evolution begotten by the bourgeois organization itself and promoted by utopian socialism as well as by scientific socialism. Likewise, we are in that period of social life which Bagehot calls "the age of discussion,"[69] and already we can see what Zola has called, in _Germinal_, the cracking of the politico-social crust, and, in fact, all those symptoms which Taine has described in his _l'Ancien Regime_, in relating the history of the twenty years which preceded 1789. As repressive methods are of no avail against domestic revolution, and only serve to expose the symptoms, there can be nothing efficacious and productive of good results, except laws of social reform and preparation which, while safe-guarding the present society, will render less painful, as Marx said, "the birth of the new society."

In this sense, evolution and revolution const.i.tute the most fruitful and surest processes of social metamorphosis. As human society forms a natural and living organism, like all other organisms, it can not endure sudden transformations, as those imagine who think that recourse must be had only or by preference to rebellion or personal violence to inaugurate a new social organization. This seems to me like imagining that a child or a youth could, in a single day, accomplish a biological evolution and become forthwith an adult.[70]

It is easy to understand how a man out of work, in the horrors of starvation, his brain giving way for want of nourishment, may fancy that by giving a policeman a blow with his fist, by throwing a bomb, by raising a barricade, or by taking part in a riot, he is hastening the realization of a social ideal, from which injustice will have vanished.

And, even apart from such cases, it is possible to understand how the power of impulsive feeling, the dominant factor in some natures, may, through a generous impatience, lead them to make some real attempt--and not imaginary like those which the police in all times and all countries prosecute in the courts--to spread terror among those who feel the political or economic power slipping from their hands.

But scientific socialism, especially in Germany, under the direct influence of Marxism, has completely abandoned those old methods of revolutionary romanticism. Though they have often been employed, they have always resulted abortively, and for that very reason the ruling cla.s.ses no longer dread them, since they are only light, localized a.s.saults on a fortress which still has more than sufficient resistant power to remain victorious and by this victory to r.e.t.a.r.d temporarily the evolution by removing from the scene the strongest and boldest adversaries of the _status quo_.

Marxian socialism is revolutionary in the scientific meaning of the word, and it is now developing into open social revolution--no one will attempt to deny, I think, that the close of the nineteenth century marks the critical phase of the bourgeois evolution rus.h.i.+ng under a full head of steam, even in Italy, along the road of individualist capitalism.

Marxian socialism has the candor to say, through the mouths of its most authoritative spokesmen, to the great suffering host of the modern proletariat, that it has no magic wand to transform the world in a single day, as one s.h.i.+fts the scenes in a theatre; it says on the contrary, repeating the prophetic exhortation of Marx, "_Proletarians of all countries, unite_," that the social revolution can not achieve its object, unless it first becomes a vivid fact in the minds of the workers themselves by virtue of the clear perception of their cla.s.s-interests and of the strength which their union will give them, and that they will not wake up some day under a full-fledged socialist regime, because divided and apathetic for 364 days out of the year they shall rebel on the 365th, or devote themselves to the perpetration of some deed of personal violence.

This is what I call the psychology of the "_gros lot_" (the capital prize in a lottery, etc.). Many workingmen imagine, in fact, that--without doing anything to form themselves into a cla.s.s-conscious party--they will win some day the capital prize, the social revolution, just as the manna is said to have come down from heaven to feed the Hebrews.

Scientific socialism has pointed out that the transforming power decreases as we descend the scale from one process to another, that of revolution being less than that of evolution, and that of rebellion being less than that of revolution, and individual violence having the least of all. And since it is a question of a complete transformation and, consequently, in its juridical, political and ethical organization, the process of transformation is more effective and better adapted to the purpose in proportion as its _social_ character predominates over its _individual_ character.

The individualist parties are individualists even in the daily struggle; socialism, on the contrary, is collectivist even in that, because it knows that the present organization does not depend upon the will of such or such an individual, but upon society as a whole. And this is also one reason why charity, however generous it be, being necessarily personal and partial, can not be a remedy for the social, and thereby collective, question of the distribution of wealth.

In political questions, which leave the economico-social foundation untouched, it is possible to understand how, for instance, the exile of Napoleon III. or of the Emperor Don Pedro could inaugurate a republic.

But this transformation does not extend to the foundation of the social life, and the German Empire or the Italian Monarchy are, socially, bourgeois just the same as the French Republic or the North American Republic, because notwithstanding the _political_ differences between them, they all belong to the same _economico-social_ phase.

This is why the processes of evolution and revolution--the only wholly social or collective processes--are the most efficacious, while partial rebellion and, still more, individual violence have only a very feeble power of social transformation; they are, moreover, anti-social and anti-human, because they re-awaken the primitive savage instincts, and because they deny, in the very _person_ whom they strike down, the principle with which they believe themselves animated--the principle of respect for human life and of solidarity.

What is the use of hypnotizing oneself with phrases about "the propaganda of the deed" and "immediate action?"

It is known that anarchists, individualists, "amorphists" and "libertarians" admit as a means of social transformation _individual violence_ which extends from homicide to theft or _estampage_, even among "companions;" and this is then merely a political coloring given to criminal instincts which must not be confounded with political fanaticism, which is a very different phenomenon, common to the extreme and romantic parties of all times. A scientific examination of each case by itself, with the aid of anthropology and psychology, alone can decide whether the perpetrator of such or such a deed of violence is a congenital criminal, a criminal through insanity, or a criminal through stress of political fanaticism.

I have, in fact, always maintained, and I still maintain, that the "political criminal," whom some wish to cla.s.s in a special category, does not const.i.tute a peculiar anthropological variety, but that he can be placed under one or another of the anthropological categories of criminals of ordinary law, and particularly one of these three: the _born_ criminal having a congenital tendency to crime, the _insane_-criminal, the criminal by stress of fanatical _pa.s.sion_.

The history of the past and of these latter times afford us obvious ill.u.s.trations of these several categories.

In the Middle Ages religious beliefs filled the minds of all and colored the criminal or insane excesses of many of the unbalanced. A similar insanity was the efficient cause of the more or less hysterical "sanct.i.ty" of some of the saints. At the close of our century it is the politico-social questions which absorb (and with what overwhelming interest!) the universal consciousness--which is stimulated by that universal contagion created by journalism with its great sensationalism--and these are the questions which color the criminal or insane excesses of many of the unbalanced, or which are the determining causes of instances of fanaticism occurring in men who are thoroughly honorable, but afflicted with excessive sensibility.

It is the most extreme form of these politico-social questions which, in each historical period, possesses the most intense suggestive power.

In Italy sixty years ago it was _Mazzinnianisme_ or _Carbonarisme_; twenty years ago, it was _socialism_; now it is _anarchism_.

It is very easy to understand how there occurred in each period, in accordance with their respective dominant tendencies, deeds of personal violence.... Felice Orsini, for example, is one of the martyrs of the Italian Revolution.

In each case of individual violence, unless one is content with the necessarily erroneous judgments begotten by emotion to reach a correct decision it is necessary to make a physio-psychical examination of the perpetrator, just as it is in the case of any other crime.

Felice Orsini was a political criminal through _pa.s.sion_. Among the anarchist bomb-throwers or a.s.sa.s.sins of our day may be found the born criminal--who simply colors his congenital lack of the moral or social sense with a political varnish--; the insane-criminal or mattoid whose mental deficiency becomes blended with the political ideas of the period; and also the criminal through political _pa.s.sion_, acting from sincere conviction and mentally almost normal, in whom the criminal action is determined (or caused) solely by the false idea (which socialism combats) of the possibility of effecting a _social_ transformation by means of _individual_ violence.[71]

But no matter whether the particular crime is that of a congenital criminal or of a madman or of a political criminal through pa.s.sion, it is none the less true that personal violence, as adopted by the anarchist individualists, is simply the logical product of individualism carried to extremes and, therefore, the natural product of the existing economic organization--though its production is also favored by the "delirium of hunger," acute or chronic; but it is also the least efficacious and the most anti-human means of social transformation.[72]

But all anarchists are not individualists, _amorphists_ or autonomists; there are also anarchist-communists.