Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) Part 13

The latter repudiates deeds of _personal violence_, as ordinary means of social transformation (Merlino, for example has recently stated this in his pamphlet: _Necessita e base di un accordo_, Prato, 1892), but even these anarchist-communists cut themselves off from Marxian socialism, both by their ultimate _ideal_ and more especially by their _method_ of social transformation. They combat Marxian socialism because it is _law-abiding_ and _parliamentary_, and they contend that the most efficacious and the surest mode of social transformation is _rebellion_.

These a.s.sertions which respond to the vagueness of the sentiments and ideas of too large a portion of the working-cla.s.s and to the impatience provoked by their wretched condition, may meet with a temporary, unintelligent approval, but their effect can be only ephemeral. The explosion of a bomb may indeed give birth to a momentary emotion, but it can not advance by the hundredth part of an inch the evolution in men's minds toward socialism, while it causes a reaction in feeling, a reaction in part sincere, but skilfully fomented and exploited as a pretext for repression.

To say to the laborers that, without having made ready the requisite material means, but especially without solidarity and without an intelligent conception of the goal and without a high moral purpose, they ought to rise against the cla.s.ses in power, is really to play into the hands of those very cla.s.ses, since the latter are sure of the material victory when the evolution is not ripe and the revolution is not ready.[73]

And so it has been possible to show in the case of the late Sicilian rebellion, in spite of all the lies of those interested in hiding the truth, that in those districts where socialism was most advanced and best understood there were no deeds of personal violence, no revolts, as, for example, among the peasants of Piana dei Greci, of whom Nicola Barbato had made intelligent socialists; while those convulsive movements occurred outside of the field of the socialist propaganda as a rebellion against the exactions of the local governments and of the _camorre_,[74] or in those districts where the socialist propaganda was less intelligent and was stifled by the fierce pa.s.sions caused by hunger and misery.[75]

History demonstrates that the countries where revolts have been the most frequent are those in which social progress is the least advanced. The popular energies exhaust and destroy themselves in these feverish, convulsive excesses, which alternate with periods of discouragement and despair--which are the fitting environment of the Buddhist theory of _electoral abstention_--a very convenient theory for the conservative parties. In such countries we never see that continuity of premeditated action, slower and less effective in appearance, but in reality the only kind of action that can accomplish those things which appear to us as the miracles of history.

Therefore Marxian socialism in all countries has proclaimed that from this time forth the princ.i.p.al means of social transformation must be _the conquest of the public powers_ (in local administrations as well as in national Parliaments) as one of the results of the organization of the laborers into a cla.s.s-conscious party. The further the political organization of the laborers, in civilized countries, shall progress, the more one will see realized, by a resistless evolution, the socialist organization of society, at first by partial concessions, but ever growing more important, wrested from the capitalist cla.s.s by the working-cla.s.s (the law restricting the working-day to Eight Hours, for example), and then by the complete transformation of individual owners.h.i.+p into social owners.h.i.+p.

As to the question whether this complete transformation, which is at present being prepared for by a process of gradual evolution which is nearing the critical and decisive period of the social revolution, can be accomplished without the aid of other means of transformation--such as rebellion and individual violence--this is a question which no one can answer in advance. Marxian socialists are not prophets.

Our sincere wish is that the social revolution, when its evolution shall be ripe, may be effected peacefully, as so many other revolutions have been, without blood-shed--like the English Revolution, which preceded by a century, with its _Bill of Rights_, the French Revolution; like the Italian Revolution in Tuscany in 1859; like the Brazilian Revolution, with the exile of the Emperor Dom Pedro, in 1892.

It is certain that socialism by spreading education and culture among the people, by organizing the workers into a cla.s.s-conscious party under its banner, is only increasing the probability of the fulfilment of our hope, and is dissipating the old forebodings of a _reaction_ after the advent of socialism, which were indeed justified when socialism was still utopian in its means of realization instead of being, as it now is, a natural and spontaneous, and therefore inevitable and irrevocable, phase of the evolution of humanity.

Where will this social revolution start? I am firmly convinced that if the Latin peoples, being Southerners, are more ready for revolt, which may suffice for purely political transformations, the peoples of the North, the Germans and Anglo-Saxons are better prepared for the tranquil and orderly but inexorable process of the true revolution, understood as the critical phase of an organic, incomplete, preparatory evolution, which is the only effective process for a truly social transformation.

It is in Germany and England, where the greater development of bourgeois industrialism inevitably aggravates its detrimental consequences, and thereby magnifies the necessity for socialism, that the great social metamorphosis will perhaps being--though indeed it has begun everywhere--and from there it will spread across old Europe, just as at the close of the last century the signal for the political and bourgeois revolution was raised by France.

However this may be, we have just demonstrated once more the profound difference there is between socialism and anarchism--which our opponents and the servile press endeavor to confound[76] and, at all events, I have demonstrated that Marxian socialism is in harmony with modern science and is its logical continuation. That is exactly the reason why it has made the theory of evolution the basis of its inductions and why it thus marks the truly living and final phase--and, therefore, the only phase recognized by the intelligence of the collectivist democracy--of socialism which had theretofore remained floating in the nebulosities of sentiment and why it has taken as its guide the unerring compa.s.s of scientific thought, rejuvenated by the works of Darwin and Spencer.

FOOTNOTES:

[62] We have a typical example of this in the new Italian penal code, which, as I said before its enforcement, shows no signs of special adaptation to Italian conditions.

It might just as well be a code made for Greece or Norway, and it has borrowed from the countries of the north the system of confinement in cells, which even then in the north was recognized in all its costly absurdity as a system devised for the brutalization of men.

[63] BEBEL, _Zukunftstaat und Sozialdemokratie_, 1893.

[64] It is this artificial socialism which Herbert Spencer attacks.

[65] See "Socialism: a Reply to the Pope's Encyclical," by Robert Blatchford. The International Publis.h.i.+ng Co., New York.--Tr.

[66] To this State socialism apply most of the individualist and anarchist objections of Spencer In "_Man vs. State_." D. Appleton & Co., New York.

You will recall on this subject the celebrated debate between Spencer and Laveleye: "The State and the Individual or Social Darwinism and Christianity," in the "Contemporary Review," 1885.

Lafargue has also replied to Spencer, but has not pointed out the fact that Spencer's criticisms apply, not to democratic socialism, our socialism, but to State socialism.

See also CICCOTTI on this subject.

[67] At the moment when I was correcting the proofs of the Italian edition of this work, M. Crispi had just proposed the "exceptional laws for the public safety," which, using the outrages of the anarchists as a pretext, aimed by this method to strike a blow at and to suppress socialism.

Repressive laws can suppress men, but not ideas. Has the failure of the exceptional laws against the socialist party in Germany been forgotten?

It is possible to increase the number of crimes, to suppress public liberties ... but that is no remedy. Socialism will continue its forward march just the same.

[68] LOMBROSO and LASCHI, _Le Crime politique_, etc., and the monograph of ELISEE RECLUS, Evolution et Revolution.

[69] WALTER BAGEHOT, Physics and Politics. D. Appleton & Co.

[70] It is this lack of even elementary knowledge of geology, biology, etc., which makes the vague ideal of anarchy so attractive to many men or the people with really bright minds, but with no scientific training, even though they repudiate the employment of violent methods.

In my opinion a more wide-spread instruction in the natural sciences--together with their subst.i.tution for the cla.s.sics--would do more than any repressive laws to suppress the outrages of anarchy.

[71] HAMON, _Les Hommes et les theories de l'anarchie_, Paris, 1893.--LOMBROSO, _Ultime scoperte ed applicazioni dell' antropologia criminale_, Turin, 1893.

[72] At the moment when I was correcting the proofs of the Italian edition of this book, the emotion had not yet subsided which grew out of the harmless attack upon Crispi, at Rome, on the 16th of June, and especially the much keener emotion produced by the death of the President of the French Republic, Sadi Carnot, on the 24th of June.

I reproduce here, as doc.u.mentary evidence, the declaration published by a section of the _Socialist Party of Italian Workers_ in the _Secolo_ of the 27-28 June, and distributed by thousands in Milan as a manifesto, and which was not mentioned by either the Conservative or the Progressive newspapers, who tried by their silence to perpetrate the confusion between socialism and anarchy.

Here is the declaration:

_The Socialist Party to the Workingmen of Italy._--Down with a.s.sa.s.sins! "Humanity now understands that life is sacred, and does not tolerate brutal violations of this great principle which is morally the soul of socialism." C. PRAMPOLINI.

"He who struggles for the right to life, in exchange for his labor, condemns every a.s.sault upon human life,--whether it be the work of bourgeois exploitation in factories, or of the bombs or daggers of unintelligent revolutionists.

"The Socialist Party which has this principle for a s.h.i.+bboleth, which expects everything from the cla.s.s-conscious organization of the working cla.s.s, execrates the crime committed against the person of the President of the French Republic, as a brutal deed, as the negation of every principle of revolutionary logic.

"It is necessary to arouse in the proletariat the consciousness of their own rights, to furnish them the _structure_ of organization, and to induce them to _function_ as a new organism. It is necessary to conquer the public powers by the means which modern civilization gives us.

"To revolt, to throw at haphazard a bomb among the spectators in a theatre, or to kill an individual, is the act of barbarians or of ignorant people. The _Socialist Party_ sees in such deeds the violent manifestation of _bourgeois_ sentiments.

"We are the adversaries of all the violences of bourgeois exploitation, of the guillotine, of musketry discharges (aimed at strikers, etc.), and of anarchist outrages. _Hurrah for Socialism!_"

Socialism represses all these sterile and repugnant forms of individual violence.

Carnot's death accomplished nothing except to arouse a transitory atavistic hatred of Italians. Afterward, the French Republic elected another President and everything was as before. The same may be said of Russia after the a.s.sa.s.sination of Alexander II.

But the question may be regarded from another point of view, which the conservatives, the progressives and the radicals too completely forget.

The very day of these outrages two explosions of gas took place, one in the mines of Karwinn (Austria), and the other in the mines of Cardiff (England); the first _caused the death of 257 miners_ ..., the second _the death of 210_!!

Although the death of an honorable man, like Carnot, may be regretted, it is not to be compared to the ma.s.s of human sufferings, misery and woe which fell upon these 467 working-cla.s.s _families_, equally innocent as he.

It will be said, it is true, that the murder of Carnot was the _voluntary_ act of a fanatic, while no one directly killed these 467 miners!--And certainly this is a difference.

But it must be remarked that if the death of these 467 miners is not _directly_ the voluntary work of any one, it is _indirectly_ a result of individual capitalism, which, to swell its revenues, reduces expenses to the lowest possible point, does not curtail the hours of labor, and does not take all the _preventive_ measures indicated by science and sometimes even enjoined by law, which is in such cases not respected, for the justice of every country is as flexible to accommodate the interests of the ruling cla.s.s as it is rigid when applied against the interests of the working-cla.s.s.

If the mines were collectively owned, it is certain the owners would be less stingy about taking all the technical preventive precautions (electric lighting, for instance), which would diminish the number of these frightful catastrophes which infinitely increase the anonymous mult.i.tude of the martyrs of toil and which do not even trouble the digestion of the _share-holders_ in mining companies.

That is what the individualist regime gives us; all this will be transformed by the socialist regime.

[73] RIENZI, _l'Anarchisme_; DEVILLE, _l'Anarchisme_.