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
Another contemporary artificial product has contributed to confirm this
impression--_State Socialism_. At bottom, it does not differ from
sentimental or utopian socialism, and as Liebknecht said at the
socialist congress of Berlin (1892), it would be "a State Capitalism
which would join political slavery to economic exploitation." State
Socialism is a symptom of the irresistible power of scientific and
democratic socialism--as is shown by the famous _rescripts_ of Emperor
William convoking an international conference to solve (this is the
infantile idea of the decree) the problems of labor, and the famous
Encyclical on "The Condition of Labor" of the very able Pope, Leo XIII,
who has handled the subject with great tact and cleverness.[65] But
these imperial rescripts and these papal encyclicals--because it is
impossible to leap over or suppress the phases of the social
evolution--could only result abortively in our bourgeois, individualist
and _laissez faire_ world. Certainly it would not have been displeasing
to this bourgeois world to see the vigorous contemporary socialism
strangled to death in the amorous embraces of official artificiality and
of State Socialism, for it had become evident in Germany and elsewhere,
that neither laws nor repressive measures of any kind could kill it.[66]
All that arsenal of rules and regulations and provisions for inspection
and superintendence has nothing in common with scientific socialism
which foresees clearly that the executive guidance of the new social
organization will be no more confused than is the present administration
of the State, the provinces and the communes, and will, on the
contrary, be much better adapted to subserve the interests of both
society and the individual, since it will be a natural product and not a
parasitic product of the new social organization. Just so, the nervous
system of a mammal is the regulating apparatus of its organism; it is,
certainly, more complex than that of the organism of a fish or of a
mollusc, but it has not, for that reason, tyrannically stifled the
autonomy of the other organs and anatomical machinery, or of the cells
in their living confederation.
It is understood, then, that to refute socialism, something more is
needed than the mere repetition of the current objections against that
artificial and sentimental socialism which still continues to exist, I
confess, in the nebulous mass of popular ideas. But every day it is
losing ground before the intelligent partisans--workingmen, middle-class
or aristocrats--of scientific socialism which armed--thanks to the
impulse received from the genius of Marx--with all the best-established
inductions of modern science, is triumphing over the old objections
which our adversaries, through force of mental custom, still repeat, but
which have long been left behind by contemporary thought, together with
the utopian socialism which provoked them.
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