Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx)Ferri, Enrico
Philosophy
Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx)
Ferri, Enrico
Evolution; Socialism; Spencer, Herbert, 1820-1903
This form of individual ownership will then always continue to exist,
since it is necessary and perfectly consistent with social ownership of
the land, mines, factories, houses, machines, tools and instruments of
labor, and means of transportation.
The collective ownership of libraries--which we see in operation under
our eyes--does it deprive individuals of the personal use of rare and
expensive books which they would be unable to procure in any other way,
and does it not largely increase the utility that can be derived from
these books, when compared to the services that these books could render
if they were shut up in the private library of a useless book-collector?
In the same way, the collective ownership of the land and the means of
production, by securing to everyone the use of the machines, tools and
land, will only increase their utility a hundred-fold.
And let no one say that, when men shall no longer have the exclusive and
transferable (by inheritance, etc.) _ownership_ of wealth, they will no
longer be impelled to labor because they will no longer be constrained
to work by personal or family self-interest.[57] We see, for example,
that, even in our present individualist world, those survivals of
collective property in land--to which Laveleye has so strikingly called
the attention of sociologists--continue to be cultivated and yield a
return which is not lower than that yielded by lands held in private
ownership, although these communist or collectivist farmers have only
the right of use and enjoyment, and not the absolute title.[58]
If some of these survivals of collective ownership are disappearing, or
if their administration is bad, this can not be an argument against
socialism, since it is easy to understand that, in the present economic
organization based on absolute individualism, these organisms do not
have an environment which furnishes them the conditions of a possible
existence.
It is as though one were to wish a fish to live out of water, or a
mammal in an atmosphere containing no oxygen.
These are the same considerations which condemn to a certain death all
those famous experiments--the socialist, communist or anarchist colonies
which it has been attempted to establish in various places as
"experimental trials of socialism." It seems not to have been
understood that such experiments could only result in inevitable
abortions, obliged as they are to develop in an individualist economic
and moral environment which can not furnish them the conditions
essential for their physiological development, conditions which they
will, on the contrary, have when the whole social organization shall be
guided by the collectivist principle, that is to say, when society shall
be _socialized_.[59]
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