Socialism and Modern Science | Page 5

we
meet with wealth due to fraud. Without talking for the moment of the
economic organization, the mechanism of which Karl Marx has
revealed to us, and which, even without fraud, normally enables the
capitalist or property owner to live upon his income without working, it
is indisputable that the fortunes which are formed or enlarged with the
greatest rapidity under our eyes cannot be the fruit of honest toil. The
really honest workingman, no matter how indefatigable and economical
he may be, if he succeeds in raising himself from the state of
wage-slave to that of an overseer or contractor, can, by a long life of
privations, accumulate at most a few hundreds of dollars. Those who,
on the contrary, without making by their own talent industrial
discoveries or inventions, accumulate in a few years millions, can be
nothing but unscrupulous manipulators of affairs, if we except a few
rare strokes of good luck. And it is these very parasites--bankers,
etc.,--who live in the most ostentatious luxury enjoying public honors,
and holding offices of trust, as a reward for their honorable business
methods.
Those who toil, the immense majority, receive barely enough food to
keep them from dying of hunger; they live in back-rooms, in garrets, in
the filthy alleys of cities, or in the country in hovels not fit for stables
for horses or cattle.
Besides all this, we must not forget the horrors of being unable to find
work, the saddest and most frequent of the three symptoms of that
equality in misery which is spreading like a pestilence over the
economic world of modern Italy, as indeed, with varying degrees of
intensity, it is everywhere else.
I refer to the ever-growing army of the unemployed in agriculture and
industry--of those who have lost their foothold in the lower middle
class,--and of those who have been expropriated (robbed) of their little
possessions by taxes, debts or usury.

It is not correct, then, to assert that socialism demands for all citizens
material and actual equality of labor and rewards.
The only possible equality is equality of obligation to work in order to
live, with a guarantee to every laborer of conditions of existence
worthy of a human being in exchange for the labor furnished to society.
Equality, according to socialism--as Benoit Malon said[5]--is a relative
thing, and must be understood in a two-fold sense: 1st, All men, as men,
must be guaranteed human conditions of existence; 2d, All men ought
to be equal at the starting point, ought not to be handicapped, in the
struggle for life, in order that each may freely develop his own
personality in an environment of equality of social conditions, while
to-day a child, sound and healthy, but poor, goes to the wall in
competition with a child puny but rich.[6]
This is what constitutes the radical, immeasurable transformation that
socialism demands, but that it also has discovered and announces as an
evolution--already begun in the world around us--that will be
necessarily, inevitably accomplished in the human society of the days
to come.[7]
This transformation is summed up in the conversion of private or
individual ownership of the means of production, i. e. of the physical
foundation of human life (land, mines, houses, factories, machinery,
instruments of labor or tools, and means of transportation) into
collective or social ownership, by means of methods and processes
which I will consider further on.
From this point we will consider it as proven that the first objection of
the anti-socialist reasoning does not hold, since its starting-point is
non-existent. It assumes, in short, that contemporary socialism aims at
a chimerical physical and mental equality of all men, when the fact is
that scientific and fact-founded socialism never, even in a dream,
thought of such a thing.
Socialism maintains, on the contrary, that this inequality--though
greatly diminished under a better social organization which will do

away with all the physical and mental imperfections that are the
cumulative results of generations of poverty and misery--can,
nevertheless, never disappear for the reasons that Darwinism has
discovered in the mysterious mechanism of life, in other words on
account of the principle of variation that manifests itself in the
continuous development of species culminating in man.
In every social organization that it is possible to conceive, there will
always be some men large and others small, some weak and some
strong, some phlegmatic and some nervous, some more intelligent,
others less so, some superior in mental power, others in muscular
strength; and it is well that it should be so; moreover, it is inevitable.
It is well that this is so, because the variety and inequality of individual
aptitudes naturally produce that division of labor that Darwinism has
rightly declared to be a law of individual physiology and of social
economy.
All men