Socialism and Modern Science | Page 4

theories are natural phenomena and not the
capricious and ephemeral products of the free wills of those who
construct and propagate them, it is evident that if these two currents of
modern thought have each been able to triumph over the opposition
they first aroused--the strongest kind of opposition, scientific and
political conservatism--and if every day increases the army of their
avowed disciples, this of itself is enough to show us--I was about to say
by a law of intellectual symbiosis--that they are neither irreconcilable
with, nor contradictory to, each other.
Moreover, the three principal arguments which form the substance of
the anti-socialist reasoning of Haeckel resist neither the most
elementary criticisms, nor the most superficial observation of every-day
life.
These arguments are:
I.--Socialism tends toward a chimerical equality of persons and
property: Darwinism, on the contrary, not only establishes, but shows
the organic necessity of the natural inequality of the capabilities and
even the wants of individuals.
II.--In the life of mankind, as in that of plants and animals, the immense
majority of those who are born are destined to perish, because only a

small minority can triumph in the "struggle for existence"; socialism
asserts, on the contrary, that all ought to triumph in this struggle, and
that no one is inexorably destined to be conquered.
III.--The struggle for existence assures "the survival of the best, the
victory of the fittest," and this results in an aristocratic hierarchic
gradation of selected individuals--a continuous progress--instead of the
democratic, collectivist leveling of socialism.
FOOTNOTE:
[2] Les preuves du transformisme.--Paris, 1879, page 110 et seq.

II.
THE EQUALITY OF INDIVIDUALS.
The first of the objections, which is brought against socialism in the
name of Darwinism, is absolutely without foundation.
If it were true that socialism aspires to "the equality of all individuals,"
it would be correct to assert that Darwinism irrevocably condemns
it.[3]
But although even to-day it is still currently repeated--by some in good
faith, like parrots who recite their stereotyped phrases; by others in bad
faith, with polemical skillfulness--that socialism is synonymous with
equality and leveling; the truth is, on the contrary, that scientific
socialism--the socialism which draws its inspiration from the theory of
Marx, and which alone to-day is worthy of support or opposition,--has
never denied the inequality of individuals, as of all living
beings--inequality innate and acquired, physical and intellectual.[4]
It is just as if one should say that socialism asserts that a royal decree or
a popular vote could settle it that "henceforth all men shall be five feet
seven inches tall."

But in truth, socialism is something more serious and more difficult to
refute.
Socialism says: Men are unequal, but they are all (of them) men.
And, in fact, although each individual is born and develops in a fashion
more or less different from that of all other individuals,--just as there
are not in a forest two leaves identically alike, so in the whole world
there are not two men in all respects equals, the one of the
other,--nevertheless every man, simply because he is a human being,
has a right to the existence of a man, and not of a slave or a beast of
burden.
We know, we as well as our opponents, that all men cannot perform the
same kind and amount of labor--now, when social inequalities are
added to equalities of natural origin--and that they will still be unable to
do it under a socialist regime--when the social organization will tend to
reduce the effect of congenital inequalities.
There will always be some people whose brains or muscular systems
will be better adapted for scientific work or for artistic work, while
others will be more fit for manual labor, or for work requiring
mechanical precision, etc.
What ought not to be, and what will not be--is that there should be
some men who do not work at all, and others who work too much or
receive too little reward for their toil.
But we have reached the height of injustice and absurdity, and in these
days it is the man who does not work who reaps the largest returns,
who is thus guaranteed the individual monopoly of wealth which
accumulates by means of hereditary transmission. This wealth,
moreover, is only very rarely due to the economy and abstinence of the
present possessor or of some industrious ancestor of his; it is most
frequently the time-honored fruit of spoliation by military conquest, by
unscrupulous "business" methods, or by the favoritism of sovereigns;
but it is in every instance always independent of any exertion, of any
socially useful labor of the inheritor, who often squanders his property

in idleness or in the whirlpool of a life as inane as it is brilliant in
appearance.
And, when we are not confronted with a fortune due to inheritance,