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Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) Enrico Ferri 59610K 2022-07-22

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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.