Socialism and Modern Science | Page 7

privileged few only, as it is to-day; it will, on the contrary, give to all
the arts a marvelous impulse, and if it abolishes private luxury this will
be all the more favorable to the splendor of the public edifices.
More attention will be paid to assuring to each one remuneration in
proportion to the labor performed. This ratio will be ascertained by
taking the difficulty and danger of the labor into account and allowing
them to reduce the time required for a given compensation. If a peasant
in the open air can work seven or eight hours a day, a miner ought not
to work more than three or four hours. And, indeed, when everybody

shall work, when much unproductive labor shall be suppressed, the
aggregate of daily labor to be distributed among men will be much less
heavy and more easily endured (by reason of the more abundant food,
more comfortable lodging and recreation guaranteed to every worker)
than it is to-day by those who toil and who are so poorly paid, and,
besides this, the progress of science applied to industry will render
human labor less and less toilsome.
Individuals will apply themselves to work, although the wages or
remuneration cannot be accumulated as private wealth, because if the
normal, healthy, well-fed man avoids excessive or poorly rewarded
labor, he does not remain in idleness, since it is a physiological and
psychological necessity for him to devote himself to a daily occupation
in harmony with his capacities.
The different kinds of sport are for the leisure classes a substitute for
productive labor which a physiological necessity imposes upon them,
in order that they may escape the detrimental consequences of absolute
repose and ennui.
The gravest problem will be to proportion the remuneration to the labor
of each. You know that collectivism adopts the formula--to each
according to his labor, while communism adopts this other--to each
according to his needs.
No one can give, in its practical details, the solution of this problem;
but this impossibility of predicting the future even in its slightest details
does not justify those who brand socialism as a utopia incapable of
realization. No one could have, a priori, in the dawn of any civilization
predicted its successive developments, as I will demonstrate when I
come to speak of the methods of social renovation.
This is what we are able to affirm with assurance, basing our position
on the most certain inductions of psychology and sociology.
It cannot be denied, as Marx himself declared, that this second
formula--which makes it possible to distinguish, according to some,
anarchy from socialism--represents a more remote and more complex

ideal. But it is equally impossible to deny that, in any case, the formula
of collectivism represents a phase of social evolution, a period of
individual discipline which must necessarily precede communism.[8]
There is no need to believe that socialism will realize in their fulness all
the highest possible ideals of humanity and that after its advent there
will be nothing left to desire or to battle for! Our descendants would be
condemned to idleness and vagabondage if our immediate ideal was so
perfect and all-inclusive as to leave them no ideal at which to aim.
The individual or the society which no longer has an ideal to strive
toward is dead or about to die.[9] The formula of communism may then
be a more remote ideal, when collectivism shall have been completely
realized by the historical processes which I will consider further on.
We are now in a position to conclude that there is no contradiction
between socialism and Darwinism on the subject of the equality of all
men. Socialism has never laid down this proposition and like
Darwinism its tendency is toward a better life for individuals and for
society.
This enables us also to reply to this objection, too often repeated, that
socialism stifles and suppresses human individuality under the leaden
pall of collectivism, by subjecting individuals to uniform monastic
regulations and by making them into so many human bees in the social
honey-comb.
Exactly the opposite of this is true. Is it not obvious that it is under the
present bourgeois organization of society that so many individualities
atrophy and are lost to humanity, which under other conditions might
be developed to their own advantage and to the advantage of society as
a whole? To-day, in fact, apart from some rare exceptions, every man is
valued for what he possesses and not for what he is.[10]
He who is born poor, obviously by no fault of his own, may be
endowed by Nature with artistic or scientific genius, but if his
patrimony is insufficient to enable him to triumph in the first struggles
for development and to complete his education, or if he has not, like