Part 9
Sociological literature has failed to produce any individualist champion able to reconcile this astonishing contradiction. And so there it stands plainly before the eyes of Mr. Spencer’s readers.
“Suppose,” says Professor Huxley, “that, in accordance with this view, each muscle were to maintain that the nervous system had no right to interfere with its contraction except to prevent it from hindering the contraction of another muscle; or each gland, that it had a right to secrete, so long as its secretion interfered with no other; suppose every separate cell were left free to follow its own “interest” and laissez-faire lord of all, what would come of the body physiological? The fact is that the sovereign power of the body thinks for the physiological organism, acts for it, and rules the individual components with a rod of iron. Even the blood corpuscles can’t hold a public meeting without being accused of “congestion”--and the brain, like other despots whom we have known, calls out at once for the use of sharp steel against them.”
This is the rock upon which Spencerian Individualism struck and went to pieces, independently of those great forces, which I shall point out, that made for its disintegration.
These two contradictory positions are the upper and nether millstones between which the individualistic philosophy of Anarchism is ground to powder. Socialists are not stupid enough to argue that because society can get along without a king therefore an orchestra should have “no head.” We are also able to distinguish between “the state” which Socialism will abolish, and the “administration of industry” which it will establish.
Every step forward in modern thought has emphasized the importance of that factor called “environment.” The evolution philosophy is an environment philosophy. Lamarck, the greatest pioneer of modern science, makes a change of environment the prime necessity of organic development. Darwin makes environment the selective factor in “Natural Selection” and in this he is supported by every living biologist of note. Karl Marx paralleled these great advances by discovering that every political philosophy takes its origin in some particular economic environment. This is true of Socialism and Individualism alike.
And so if we wish to understand the historic significance of Individualism we must go back to the period of its birth and examine the social processes of production of that day. This takes us back to the early years of the 19th century.
In the closing half of the 18th century, laborers individually owned the small and crude tools by which they made their living. In this stage of social development the laborer owning the tools he used, appropriated the result. There was here no contradiction and whatever notion of justice is supposed to inhere in the “individual ownership of the means of production” derives its whole force from the economic status of the worker of this period. If that status had remained unchanged, Socialism would never have been heard of. But in the process of evolution the truth and justice of the 18th century became a lie and a social wrong in the 19th.
This transformation was wrought by the development of machinery. It was impossible for every individual worker to own a large machine, and so some men became toolless wage laborers employed by the owners of machinery. This is the beginning of the present labor problem and here arises the struggle in the world of ideas between the philosophy of Individualism and that of Socialism.
Let us examine the vital change which had taken place even before we reach the middle of the last century. Now, one man uses the tools, but another owns them and appropriates the result. And this is the economic foundation of the class war between the exploited wage worker and the exploiting capitalist.
But the individualist theories proper to the 18th century, and its mode of wealth production, passed over into the 19th where their economic justification had ceased. As the fortunate individual owners of machinery found themselves growing rich at a great rate apart from their own individual efforts, they became enthusiastic supporters of “Individualism” and eventually founded the “Manchester” school of politics, which had Herbert Spencer as its chief mouth-piece and Henry George as a somewhat belated trumpeter.
In this heyday of Individualism the “rate of profit” was at its highest, one Lancashire cotton spinner boasting of one thousand per cent. But the social hell in which the English working class of this period lived is without parallel in modern times. Its system of child labor, as recorded in the government blue books as well as already shown by Owen, was indescribably horrible, but the manufacturers were opposed to “government interference” and the individualist philosophy and its bogey of “paternalism” was their craven plea.
With the grouping of the workers in factories production became socialized, and now came this contradiction, production was social while ownership and appropriation were individual. The Socialists of that period rightly maintained that society should either go back in production to the individual form so as to be in harmony with the existing individual form of ownership and appropriation, or it should adopt social ownership and social appropriation to harmonize with the already existing social production.
But the wheel of history never revolves backward, and the latter solution is destined ultimately to prevail. Social evolution has already carried us far in that direction. With the organization of capital individual ownership disappeared and class ownership has taken its place. The struggle of the 20th century is not a struggle between individuals, it is a struggle between classes, and so Individualism has lost its meaning--it is defunct.
With the disappearance of the economic foundation of Individualism, and the overthrow of the philosophic superstructure erected thereon, all its watchwords have lost their power to charm. Free trade, free labor, free contract, free competition; all these are the lingering and belated echoes of a day that is gone.
“Free trade” was the protest of the rising capitalist class against the trammels placed upon its commerce by the feudal regime. Now it appears in a new role; it is the cry of the small capitalist against those “predatory trusts” which discovered that competition is not the life but the death of trade, and are using protection to destroy their weaker fellow-robbers.
“Free labor” was the demand of the capitalist that the serf should be released from the soil in the country so that he might be available for exploitation in the factory, in the city. In England an attempt has been made to give this defunct phrase a new lease of life by the “Free Labor Association” an organization which had this in common with our “Citizen’s Alliance” that it sought to encourage the dear good workingman to keep out of the “tyrannical” labor unions.
“Freedom of contract” or, as it is sometimes called “Voluntary Co-operation” never existed in capitalist society and has never been anything but a grim joke or a plain lie. Where is the freedom or voluntaryism of the worker who must work for what he can get or starve like a dog in the street?
The effects of “free Competition” in England in the early days of capitalism, where it was most free, were such that none but a fiend would wish them recalled. The “might have been” halo with which present day individualists seek to surround this principle, is a midsummer night’s dream that never had any existence in the world of reality and can never be realized, except in the phantasmogoria of their own ideological imaginations.
Individualism in all its forms has become an anachronism. The deified ego of Max Stirner, which imagines itself sitting enthroned on the pinnacle of the universe, directing the motions of the planet Jupiter by crooking its little finger, is an ideological phantasm, which has no connection with the solid earth. The flowery exhortations of Emerson, to live a noble life in ignoble surroundings, is an invitation to attempt what is, for the mass, impossible. Any philosophy which proposes to save the individual without transforming his social environment stands condemned by modern science.
If, with a society more highly organized than any known to history, we still have anarchy in the production and distribution of our wealth, the remedy is, not less social organization, but more. If with all our dental science toothache still exists, the cure is not fewer dentists, but more dentistry. The need of to-day is not less society, but more social organization. There is no hope in going back to the small production of sixty years ago as Hearst and Bryan desire. Increasing the number of bandits in any society is not the concern of their victims. The golden age of labor is not in the past but in the future. The labor problem cannot be solved by going back to the scramble of the hog-pen or the methods of the jungle. There is no succour in flying at each other’s throats in the name of business.
Freedom cannot live in a society rent by class wars. Her conquests are only possible with a humanity united to subdue the cosmic world by which it is interprenetrated and surrounded.
Happily for us, society evolves independently of anybody’s opinion. Our opinions follow blindly and gropingly in the rear. The opinions of individualists do not manufacture social laws, according to certain ethical requirements; they interpret and explain those laws which they discover in operation. The fundamental question is not, “is Individualism better than Socialism?” but “Is society moving in the direction of the one or the other?”
To answer this question it is only necessary to compare the world of to-day with that of ten or even five years ago. America moves steadily toward Socialism, while Europe advances in great leaps. Every civilized country tells the same story, and the recent development of Finland and Austria astonished the world.
Society moves forward, as irresistibly as the ocean tides, and it moves in a direction predicted by those greatest thinkers of this or any age--the men who linked their lives with the blood and the tears and the struggles of half a century in the greatest cause that ever throbbed in the brain of man--the cause of Socialism.
X.
CIVILIZATION--WARD AND DIETZGEN
One of the darkest curses that has fallen on the working class is its being shut out of the wondrous world of modern thought. The great gates of the Temple of Science are clanged in its face, and its mind is fed on the theological garbage of the Middle Ages. In the school, the press, and especially the pulpit, ideas are gravely presented as serious truths, which are known by all university men to be thoroughly exploded lies.
A twentieth century newspaper will brazenly devote a whole page to presenting, with pictorial illustrations, alleged recently discovered proofs of the truth of that Genesis legend which has done such loyal service to the ruling class by stultifying the brains of its victims. These hypocritical displays are never publicly contradicted, although every man with the least smattering of scientific knowledge, including the editors, knows how utterly false they are. These worthies indulge in a sly grin and lower one eyelid, for it is generally understood among them that the great donkey--the working class--will only consent to carry everybody’s burdens in addition to its own, just so long as it is kept in childish ignorance of everything it ought to know.
And this is not all. Now that a great body of workingmen are discarding these ancient lies, and groping for those great truths that contain the germs of their redemption, the official savants, true servants of the ruling class, twist and warp their own science in order to make it contradict every working class idea.
This attitude of the time serving intellectual lackeys of the professorial chairs has brought with it another blighting curse--it has made a considerable number of working men suspicious of modern science itself. It is an old-time tragedy, this breaking with one’s best friend because of the groundless calumnies of an interested enemy.
This terribly mistaken antagonism to science has unfortunately found its way, in some measure, into the Socialist movement, though happily, increasing acquaintance with Socialism’s classic literature is breaking it down. In this connection the following passage from the pen of Isador Ladoff is very pertinent:
“Rationalistic modern Socialism is based, not exclusively on certain economic theories and maxims, as some narrow-minded ‘Socialists pure and simple’ think and would fain make us believe, but on the broad foundation of modern science and thought. The economic theories peculiar to modern Socialism are derived from the application of the results of the achievements of modern knowledge and philosophy to the field of social economics. The trouble with the ‘Socialists pure and simple’ is in the extreme limitation of their mental horizon. They happen to know, or rather imagine they have mastered Marxian economics, while modern science and philosophy remains to them a sealed letter. That is why they get irritated whenever and wherever they meet in the socialistic press an article containing something else than the everlasting parrot-like repetitions of pseudo-socialistic commonplaces and shibboleths. Every attempt to present to the attention of the readers of socialistic publications, glimpses of the radiant world of science and philosophy, leading up to socialistic ideas and ideals in all their world-redeeming significance, appears to the simpleminded and superstitious simon-pure Socialists as an attack on somebody or something, as a heresy and heterodoxy of some kind. To such people the religion of science is the religion of ignorance and vice versa, ignorance is their religion and science.”
The use of science and philosophy by the ruling class as a pretence for the appropriation of the lion’s share of the wealth produced by labor does not prove that workingmen should abandon philosophy as useless to their cause. On the contrary, as Dietzgen says: “Philosophy is a subject which closely concerns the working class,” and he adds: “This, of course, does by no means imply that every workingman should try to become acquainted with philosophy and study the relation between the idea and matter. From the fact that we all eat bread does not follow that we must all understand milling and baking. But just as we need millers and bakers, so does the working class stand in need of keen scholars who can follow up the tortuous ways of the false priests and lay bare the inanity of their tricks.”
It is quite clear that working men, instead of underestimating the value of mental training, should remember what a terrible weapon it has proved in the hands of their enemies. It is precisely because the workers have lacked this weapon, that in spite of their overwhelming numbers and physical strength, they have always been outwitted. “The emancipation of the working classes,” concludes Dietzgen, “requires that they should lay hold on the science of the century.”
Lester F. Ward, whose theories we shall now examine, warns us against the erroneous supposition “formerly quite prevalent,” that “science consists in the discovery of facts.” He maintains that “there is not a single science of which this is true, and a much more nearly correct definition would be that science consists in reasoning about facts.”
We may recall here that learned body which sneered at Darwin as “a mere theorizer” and conferred its honors upon an unknown man who had collected some facts about butterflies but had carefully avoided “reasoning about them.” Of course the value of this reasoning is that it leads to the discovery of those laws or generalizations which reveal the relation of the facts to each other, and thus enables us to appreciate their real significance.
Therefore we might venture to push the matter a little further and define science as the discovery of laws. But for the uniformity and invariability of physical phenomena, astronomy would be impossible. The discovery of evolution laid the foundations of modern biology. Dalton’s theory of atoms and Lavoisier’s permanence of matter emancipated chemistry from the superstitions of alchemy.
Ward is therefore on solid ground when he maintains that “the indispensable foundation of all economic and social science” consists in the fact that “all human activities and all social phenomena are rigidly subject to natural law.” It is just the difficulty of discerning uniform laws amidst the highly complex phenomena of society that delays the proper development of sociology, although, as we have seen, this difficulty is materially augmented by the class interests at stake.
Again, just as biology was hindered in its growth by the doctrine of special creations and, still earlier, Copernican astronomy was checked by the geocentric theory, so now the progress of sociology is restrained by the doctrine of divine providence. Believers in divine providence are well represented by the Hindoo who in his lesson on English composition spoke of his father as having “died according to the caprice of God which passeth all understanding.”
It is precisely because “caprice” can not be understood and cannot therefore, be made the basis of prevision, that it can not be admitted into the domain of science. Science, as Starcke well said, is founded on “faith in the universality of causation.” If the activities of men and the policies of nations are not ruled by cause and effect a science of society is impossible.
And yet, contends Ward, it was the very adoption of this “altogether sound abstract principle” that “led to the greatest and most fundamental of all economic errors, an error which has found its way into the heart of modern scientific philosophy, widely influencing public opinion, and offering a stubborn resistance to all efforts to dislodge it.”
And now we come to the keynote of Ward’s whole system and at the same time to the point where he completely breaks with the biological sociologists. The error, which Ward attributes to them all, the refutation of which is the main object of his work, is described as follows:
“This error consists in practically ignoring the existence of a rational faculty in man, which, while it does not render his actions any less subject to natural laws, so enormously complicates them that they can no longer be brought within the simple formulas that suffice in the calculus of mere animal motives. This element creeps stealthily in between the child and the adult, and all unnoticed puts the best laid schemes of economists and philosophers altogether aglee. A great psychic factor has been left out of the account, the intellectual or rational factor, and this factor is so stupendous that there is no room for astonishment in contemplating the magnitude of the error which its omission has caused.”
This is the foundation stone of Ward’s sociology. With great care he elaborates the vital difference between the economy of nature with its blind forces, and the economy of society with its mental arrangement of means to ends. He marshals that well-known array of facts which prove the tremendous waste continually going on in the natural world.
According to M. Quatrefages, two successive generations of a single plant-louse would cover eight acres. A large chestnut tree in June contains as much as a ton of pollen. Considering the size of pollen-grain the number on such a tree would be next to inconceivable. Burst a puff-ball and there arises from it a cloud that fills the air for some distance around. This cloud consists of an almost infinite number of exceedingly minute spores, each of which should it by the rarest chance fall upon a favorable spot, is capable of reproducing the fungus to which it belongs.
And yet in spite of all this enormous reproductivity the population of these species remains practically stationary. Ward objects very strongly to this insane waste of nature being set up as a model for human society, and he is entitled to the sympathy of Socialists who have always protested against the planless anarchy of capitalist production, which however, bad as it is, can hardly be considered a circumstance compared with the random waste of nature.
“The waste of being,” says Asa Gray, “is enormous, far beyond the common apprehension. Seeds, eggs, and other germs, are designed to be plants and animals, but not one of a thousand or a million achieves its destiny.” And Gray quotes with approval from an article in the Westminster Review: “When we find that the sowing is a scattering at random, and that for one being provided for and living, ten thousand perish unprovided for, we must allow that the existing order would be considered the worst disorder in any human sphere of action.”
Ward, of course, takes the same view: “No one will object to having nature’s methods fully explained and exposed, and thoroughly taught as a great truth of science. It is only when it is held up as a model to be followed by man and all are forbidden to ‘meddle’ with its operations that it becomes necessary to protest. I shall endeavor still further to show that it is wholly at variance with anything that a rational being would ever conceive of, and that if a being supposed to be rational were to adopt it he would be looked upon as insane.”
“Such,” says Ward, “is nature’s economy. How different the economy of a rational being! He prepares the ground, clearing it of its vegetable competitors, then he carefully plants the seeds at the proper intervals so that they shall not crowd one another, and after they have sprouted he keeps off their enemies whether vegetable or animal, supplies water if needed, even supplies the lack of chemical constituents of the soil, if he knows what they are, and thus secures, as nearly as possible, the vigorous growth and fruition of every seed planted. This is the economy of mind.”
And now Ward presents a truth that is very familiar to all Socialists--that the difference between an animal living in a state of nature and man living in human society, is that man is a tool using animal. This use and development of tools is due to that application of reason called the inventive faculty, which no other animal possesses. “The beaver indeed, builds dams by felling trees, but its tools are its teeth, and no further advantage is taken than that which results from the way the muscles are attached to its jaws. The warfare of animals is waged literally with tooth and nail, with horn and hoof, with claw and spur, with tusk and trunk, with fang and sting--always with organic, never with mechanical weapons.”
And because man can invent tools and improve them he has an immense advantage over other animals. It is this advantage which the biological sociologists have overlooked. But this advantage makes an incalculable difference. The fundamental difference is, that “the environment transforms the animal, while man transforms the environment.”
What, then, is civilization? It is human development beyond the animal stage. What it its chief factor? It is psychic--the application of “mind” to the problems of life.
Now we see still further how Ward is irresistibly driven, by the logic of his position, to Socialist conclusions. He sees that another striking difference between irrational nature and rational society is that nature is competitive, while society is increasingly co-operative. And this co-operation is due to the greater development of that psychic factor, which is the chief instrument of civilization and leads men to avoid waste.