Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) Part 14

[74] A. ROSSI, _l'Agitazione in Sicilia_, Milan, 1894. COLAJANNI, _In Sicilia_, Rome, 1894.

[75] The _camorre_ were tyrannical secret societies that were formerly prevalent and powerful in Italy.--Translator.

[76] I must recognize that one of the recent historians of socialism, _M. l'Abbe Winterer_--more candid and honorable than more than one jesuitical journalist--distinguishes always, in each country, the _socialist_ movement from the _anarchist_ movement.

WINTERER, _le Socialisme contemporain_, Paris, 1894, 2nd edition.

PART THIRD.

SOCIOLOGY AND SOCIALISM.

XIII.

THE STERILITY OF SOCIOLOGY.

One of the strangest facts in the history of the scientific thought of the nineteenth century is that, though the profound scientific revolution caused by Darwinism and Spencerian evolution has reinvigorated with new youth all the physical, biological and even psychological sciences, when it reached the domain of the social sciences, it only superficially rippled the tranquil and orthodox surface of the lake of that social science _par excellence_, political economy.

It has led, it is true, through the initiative of Auguste Comte--whose name has been somewhat obscured by those of Darwin and Spencer, but who was certainly one of the greatest and most prolific geniuses of our age--to the creation of a new science, _Sociology_, which should be, together with the natural history of human societies, the crowning glory of the new scientific edifice erected by the experimental method.

I do not deny that sociology, in the department of purely descriptive anatomy of the social organism, has made great and fruitful new contributions to contemporary science, even developing into some specialized branches of sociology, of which _criminal sociology_, thanks to the labors of the Italian school, has become one of the most important results.

But when the politico-social question is entered upon, the new science of sociology is overpowered by a sort of hypnotic sleep and remains suspended in a sterile, colorless limbo, thus permitting sociologists to be in public economy, as in politics, conservatives or radicals, in accordance with their respective whims or subjective tendencies.

And while Darwinian biology, by the scientific determination of the relations between the individual and the species, and evolutionist sociology itself by describing in human society the organs and the functions of a new organism, was making the individual a cell in the animal organism, Herbert Spencer was loudly proclaiming his English individualism extending to the most absolute theoretical anarchism.

A period of stagnation was inevitable in the scientific productive activity of sociology, after the first original observations in descriptive social anatomy and in the natural history of human societies. Sociology represented thus a sort of arrested development in experimental scientific thought, because those who cultivated it, wittingly or unwittingly, recoiled before the logical and radical conclusions that the modern scientific revolution was destined to establish in the social domain--the most important domain of all if science was to become the handmaid of life, instead of contenting itself with that barren formula, science for the sake of science.

The secret of this strange phenomenon consists not only in the fact that, as MalaG.o.di said,[77] sociology is still in the period of scientific _a.n.a.lysis_ and not yet in that of _synthesis_, but especially in the fact that the logical consequences of Darwinism and of scientific evolutionism applied to the study of human society lead inexorably to socialism, as I have demonstrated in the foregoing pages.

FOOTNOTE:

[77] MALAG.o.dI, _Il Socialismo e la scienza_. In _Critica Sociale_, Aug.

1, 1892.

XIV.

MARX COMPLETES DARWIN AND SPENCER. CONSERVATIVES AND SOCIALISTS.

To Karl Marx is due the honor of having scientifically formulated these logical applications of experiential science to the domain of social economy. Beyond doubt, the exposition of these truths is surrounded, in his writings, with a mult.i.tude of technical details and of apparently dogmatic formulae, but may not the same be said of the FIRST PRINCIPLES of Spencer, and are not the luminous pa.s.sages on _evolution_ in it surrounded with a dense fog of abstractions on time, s.p.a.ce, the unknowable, etc.? Until these last few years a vain effort was made to consign, by a conspiracy of silence, the masterly work of Marx to oblivion, but now his name is coming to rank with those of Charles Darwin and Herbert Spencer as the three t.i.tans of the scientific revolution which begot the intellectual renaissance and gave fresh potency to the civilizing thought of the latter half of the nineteenth century.

The ideas by which the genius of Karl Marx completed in the domain of social economy the revolution effected by science are in number three.

The first is the discovery of the law of surplus-labor. This law gives us a scientific explanation of the acc.u.mulation of private property not created by the labor of the acc.u.mulator; as this law has a more peculiarly technical character, we will not lay further stress upon it here, as we have given a general idea of it in the preceding pages.

The two other Marxian theories are more directly related to our observations on scientific socialism, since they undoubtedly furnish us the sure and infallible key to the life of society.

I allude, first, to the idea expressed by Marx, as long ago as 1859, in his _Critique de l'economie politique_, that the economic phenomena form the foundation and the determining conditions of all other human or social manifestations, and that, consequently, ethics, law and politics are only derivative phenomena determined by the economic factor, in accordance with the conditions of each particular people in every phase of history and under all climatic conditions.

This idea which corresponds to that great biological law which states the dependence of the function on the nature and capacities of the organ and which makes each individual the result of the innate and acquired conditions of his physiological organism, living in a given environment, so that a biological application may be given to the famous saying: "Tell me what you eat and I will tell you what you are,"--this sublime idea which unfolds before our eyes the majestic drama of history, no longer as the arbitrary succession of great men on the stage of the social theatre, but rather as the resultant of the economic conditions of each people, this sublime idea, after having been partially applied by Thorold Rogers[78] has been so brilliantly expounded and ill.u.s.trated by Achille Loria,[79] that I believe it unnecessary to say anything more about it.

One idea, however, still appears to me necessary to complete this Marxian theory, as I remarked in the first edition of my book: _Socialismo e criminalita_.

It is necessary, indeed, to rid this impregnable theory of that species of narrow dogmatism with which it is clothed in Marx and still more in Loria.

It is perfectly true that every phenomenon, as well as every inst.i.tution--moral, juridical or political--is simply the result of the economic phenomena and conditions of the transitory physical and historical environment. But, as a consequence of that law of natural causality which tells us that every effect is always the resultant of numerous concurrent causes and not of one cause alone, and that every effect becomes in its turn a cause of other phenomena, it is necessary to amend and complete the too rigid form that has been given to this true idea.

Just as all the psychical manifestations of the individual are the resultant of the organic conditions (temperament) and of the environment in which he lives, in the same way, all the social manifestations--moral, juridical or political--of a people are the resultant of their organic conditions (race) and of the environment, as these are the determining causes of the given economic organization which is the physical basis of life.

In their turn, the individual psychical conditions become causes and effect, although with less power, the individual organic conditions and the issue of the struggle for life. In the same way, the moral, juridical and political inst.i.tutions, from effects become causes (there is, in fact, for modern science no _substantial_ difference between cause and effect, except that the effect is always the latter of two related phenomena, and the cause always the former) and react in their turn, although with less efficacy, on the economic conditions.

An individual who has studied the laws of hygiene may influence beneficently, for instance, the imperfections of his digestive apparatus, but always within the very narrow limits of his organic capacities. A scientific discovery, an electoral law may have an effect on industry or on the conditions of labor, but always within limits fixed by the framework of the fundamental economic organization. This is why moral, juridical and political inst.i.tutions have a greater influence on the relations between the various subdivisions of the cla.s.s controlling the economic power (capitalists, industrial magnates, landed proprietors) than on the relations between the capitalist--property-owners on the one side and the toilers on the other.

It suffices here for me to have mentioned this Marxian law and I will refer to the suggestive book of Achille Loria the reader who desires to see how this law scientifically explains all the phenomena, from the most trivial to the most imposing, of the social life. This law is truly the most scientific and the most prolific sociological theory that has ever been discovered by the genius of man. It furnishes, as I have already remarked, a scientific, physiological, experiential explanation of social history in the most magnificent dramas as well as of personal history in its most trivial episodes--on explanation in perfect harmony with the entire trend--which has been described as materialistic--of modern scientific thought.[80]

If we leave out of consideration the two unscientific explanations of free will and divine providence, we find that two one-sided and therefore incomplete, although correct and scientific, explanations of human history have been given. I refer to the _physical determinism_ of Montesquieu, Buckle and Metschnikoff, and to the _anthropological determinism_ of the ethnologists who find the explanation of the events of history in the organic and psychical characteristics of the various races of men.

Karl Marx sums up, combines and completes these two theories by his _economic determinism_.

The economic conditions--which are the resultant of the _ethnical_ energies and apt.i.tudes acting in a given _physical_ environment--are the determining basis of all the moral, juridical and political phenomenal manifestations of human life, both individual and social.

This is the sublime conception, the fact-founded and scientific Marxian theory, which fears no criticism, resting as it does on the best established results of geology and biology, of psychology and sociology.

It is thanks to it that students of the philosophy of law and sociology are able to determine the true nature and functions of the _State_ which, as it is nothing but "society juridically and politically organized," is only the secular arm used by the cla.s.s in possession of the economic power--and consequently of the political, juridical and administrative power--to preserve their own special privileges and to postpone as long as possible the evil day when they must surrender them.

The other sociological theory by which Karl Marx has truly dissipated the clouds which had ere then darkened the sky of the aspirations of socialism, and which has supplied scientific socialism with a political compa.s.s by the use of which it can guide its course, with complete confidence and certainty, in the struggles of every-day life, is the great historical law of _cla.s.s struggles_.[81] ("The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of cla.s.s struggles." Communist Manifesto. Marx and Engels. 1848.)

If it is granted that the economic conditions of social groups, like those of individuals, const.i.tute the fundamental, determining cause of all the moral, juridical and political phenomena, it is evident that every social group, every individual will be led to act in accordance with its or his economic interest, because the latter is the physical basis of life and the essential condition of all other development. In the political sphere, each social cla.s.s will be inclined to pa.s.s laws, to establish inst.i.tutions and to perpetuate customs and beliefs which, directly or indirectly subserve its interests.

These laws, these inst.i.tutions, these beliefs, handed down by inheritance or tradition, finally obscure or conceal their economic origin, and philosophers and jurists and often even the laity defend them as truths, subsisting by virtue of their own intrinsic merits, without seeing their real source, but the latter--the economic sub-stratum--is none the less the only scientific explanation of these laws, inst.i.tutions and beliefs. And in this fact consists the greatness and strength of the perspicacious conception of the genius of Marx.[82]

As in the modern world there are now but two cla.s.ses, with subordinate varieties,--on the one side the workers to whatever category they belong, and on the other the property owners who do not work,--the socialist theory of Marx leads us to this evident conclusion: since political parties are merely the echoes and the mouth-pieces of cla.s.s interests--no matter what the subvarieties of these cla.s.ses may be--there can be substantially only two political parties: the socialist labor party and the individualist party of the cla.s.s in possession of the land and the other means of production.

The difference in the character of the economic monopoly may cause, it is true, a certain diversity of political _color_, and I have always contended that the great landed proprietors represent the conservative tendencies of political stagnation, while the holders of financial or industrial capital represent in many instances the progressive party, driven by its own nature to petty innovations of form, while finally those who possess only an intellectual capital, the liberal professions, etc., may go to the extreme length of political radicalism.

On the vital question--that is to say on the economic question of property--conservatives, progressives and radicals are all individualists. On this point they are all, in their essential nature of the same social cla.s.s and, in spite of certain sentimental sympathies, the adversaries of the working cla.s.s and of those who, although born on _the other sh.o.r.e_, have embraced the political programme of that cla.s.s, a programme necessarily corresponding to the primordial economic necessity--that is to say, the socialization of the land and the means of production with all the innumerable and radical moral, juridical and political transformations, which this socialization will inevitably bring to pa.s.s in the social world.

This is why contemporary political life cannot but degenerate into the most sterile _bysantinisme_ and the most corrupt strife for bribes and spoils, when it is confined to the superficial skirmishes between individualist parties, which differ only by a shade and in their formal names, but whose ideas are so similar that one often sees radicals and progressives less modern than many conservatives.