Socialism And AnarchismIncidentally, I made the acquaintance of anarchist men and women, and found them, for the most part, actuated by such honest revolutionary ardor as went straight to my heart (not to my head). Some of them were narrow-minded in their attitude towards socialism, just as some of us let us tell the truth and shame the devil have been narrow-minded in our attitude towards anarchism; but I found others, too, who were sincere students and who met my skepticism not with the futile reiterations of bigotry but with the earnest discussion of the honest seeker after truth. I owe much to these men.
Now, after two years of listening and reading and thinking, I feel that I may warrantably set down my conclusions, not with any delusion as to their permanence in the face of further mental acquisition and development, but with the hope that this brief self-expression will help to clarify my own thought, and incidentally, perhaps, to clarify if only by disagreement the thought of such friends as may care to read.
II. • Fundamental with me is the conviction that anarchism, like socialism, has roots deep down in biologic fact. They are both of them factors in the new evolution,—the evolution that has become self-conscious, the evolution that takes in hand, so far as it can and will, the forces of merciless nature. The frightened conservative who, after a day’s dalliance with a primer of biology, tells us that we radicals are trying to interfere with “natural selection,” is quite right; we are trying to do precisely that. We thank that the laisser-faire policy with regard to Mother Nature (let us personify for convenience sake) has gone far enough, and done sufficient harm. We are not convinced that this “survival of the fattest,” this elimination of the uncrafty in the “struggle for existence,” is really making for that kind of evolution which we should he willing to call progress. Nature needs ethical culture. She has had free rein these many thousand years; and what has she done? To begin with, she has used the most ridiculous methods,—not to apply a more anthropomorphically ethical adjective. She has subjected her creatures to more or less rigorous conditions, and decreed that all organisms unable to meet these rigors shall die a premature death. Not content with that, she has fitted out her creatures with elaborate apparatus—claws, talons, horns, trichocysts, poison-glands, etc —for attack or self-defense,—i. e., for fighting. It is, one might say, a cock-fight evolution, mitigated only by that biologic socialism which Kropotkin has called “mutual aid.” And its results?—the product of its aeons of prolific wastefulness? We call the result “civilization.”
Civilization. It is a comforting word, but what does it mean?
Something like this: 2,000,000 children working in the factories and mines of the United States; 12, 000,000 married women ditto; 6,000,000 (sometimes 12,000,000) unemployed in the United States,—the city of Chicago forced to use its armories to shelter the unemployed homeless; 2,000 suicides in this country in one year; men with $500,000,000, $600,000,000, $700,000,000 and $800,000,000, and more coming out of worker- squeezing dividends faster than it can be spent; that new disease-alcoholism-creeping generation by generation into the very vitals of the race; in- sanity increasing so rapidly that sober scientists predict the speedy extinction of the white races by less degenerate rivals; the age of marriage being further and further deferred (in England, in one hundred years, from twenty-two to twenty-six) by young men too insecure, financially, to care to “groan and sweat” under the “holy b o n d s” (it is a good word!) of matrimony; marriage itself becoming more and more a commercial matter to women forced to do the work of men in the industrial world; 6,000 prostitutes flourishing in New York City alone under the efficient management of men viler than any type of mart the world has ever seen; several Chicago factories paying their women employees $1.50 a week (and making aver $2,500- coo profit i n o n e year) while the lowest prostitute in Philadelphia, says Goodchild, makes $20 a week; go% of all prostitutes diseased; 20% of all men sexually diseased before the age of twenty-one, 60% before twenty-five, 80% before thirty; 60% of all men in New York now suffering from gonorrhea, 80% of the men in Paris now or formerly afflicted with the same disease; 200,000 syphilitics in New York City; 80,000 of our 60,000 Philippine troops sexually diseased; 1,000,000 married women in the United States who have been infected by their husbands, 2,000 women in England and Wales forced to resort to excision of the sexual organs,— and this in one year, 45% of senility in women, women, 70% of sterility in men, due to gonorrhea; 20,000 children dying in France every year because of syphilitic infection ; 15% of all infant blindness due to gonorrheal infection ; 100,000 children dying every year in this country alone before they have lived a twelve-month, and from preventable causes; and-but surely this is enough?* You may say the foolishness of men has caused all this ; but if you do you forget that I am arguing not against a supposedly benevolent deity, but against a 1 a i s-sez-faire evolution. And there are elements in it not traceable, methinks, to the vices of men ; an earthquake in the “evil city” of San Francisco is followed by an earthquake among the Pope’s “beloved people” of Calabria. And you tell me, perhaps, that I have sketched only one side of the picture; that there are still good things in the world, still green fields, beautiful women, and good beer.
It is true; but are there as many good things as there might be if laisser-faire were not for most of us the sum and summit of our thinking? Let me quote from Galton:
“Now that this new animal, man, finds him-self somehow in existence, endowed with a little power and intelligence, he ought, I submit, to awake to a fuller knowledge of his relatively great position, and begin to assume a deliberate part in furthering the work of evolution. He may infer the course which it is bound to pursue form his observation of that which it has already followed, and he might devote his modicum of intelligence, power and kindly feeling to rendering its future progress less slow and painful. Man has already furthered evolution very considerably, half unconsciously, and for his personal advantages ; but he has not yet risen to the conviction that it is his religious duty to do so deliberately and systematically.” (“Inquiries into Human Faculty,” p. 196.)
Now socialism, as I understand it, is born precisely of this conviction that to a certain extent evolution can and should be humanly controlled. Consciously a protest against the laisser faire attitude towards industry, it is, even if unconsciously, a protest against the laisser faire attitude towards nature, For it is nature that has evolved the type of man whose only religion is the worship of commercial success (meaning thereby a new fast auto and a new “fast” mistress every year or so), and whose “free” unhindered monopolization of the land and its products has brought about that immense enrichment of the rich and comparative impoverishment of the poor which more and more passionately cries out to heaven for revolution. It is nature which has made a man’s success depend, other things equal, on the elasticity of his conscience ; so that an honest man, “noblest work of God” though he be, is doomed from the beginning, unless he mend the goodness of his ways,. to contumely, futility, and ultimate “elimination.” And, therefore, it is nature which produces the “white slave,” the “white slaver” and the syphilitic; the intellectual “white slave,“ lawyer, preacher, teacher, editor, dramatist, publicist of any kind; the “wage-slave,” the “efficiency” sweat-shop, and .the idle, profit-gobbling wage-slaver. Such a prostitution-slavery civilization, given the spread of intelligence which the printing-press and the increasing facility of transportation have made possible, was bound to engender its antithesis (forgive the phrase; it is recovering from Hegel !), was bound to produce the aspirations by which it is condemned. That antithesis, those aspirations we call socialism,-that larger socialism which includes the sanities of anarchism and of eugenics. And this large: socialism, recognizing the biologic bases of capitalism, makes a series of proposals which amount to a reform of nature. We are accused of trying to “change human nature”; and it is true; we are trying to change human nature. Nature makes dishonesty a “favorable” “character,” a condition of survival and success: socialism would eliminate, step by step, the dishonest man, the exploiter, the parasite; it would make honesty an indispensable condition of survival, it would give the honest man a fair chance for the first time since the twilight of private property enveloped the world. It knows that socially, as well as biologically, parasitism makes for degeneration. And I say that socialism has its roots deep down in biologic fact, deep down in the realities ‘of the evolutionary process, because self-conscious intelligence interfering with unconscious nature is a new factor in evolution and is produced by evolution itself; it is a factor coming more and more into selective power, just as the selection of the craftiest is a factor that with the relentless advance of socialism must .lose day by day its present dominance. Biologically, then, socialism might be defined as self-conscious intelligence interfering with unconscious nature for the elimination of social parasitism. Which, to be sure, is no new idea to the socialist, but is only my pretentious way of putting the standard definition, that socialism is a plan for the elimination of exploitation.
*The statistics here used are taken from the United States Census for 1910, the writings of Drs. Holt, Morrow, Sanger and Ricordi, and the reports of the Illinois “Vice” Commission, the Chicago “Vice” Commission, and the New York Committee of Fifteen.
