Part 16

“Suppose,” says Professor Huxley, “that, in accordance with this view, each muscle were to maintain that the nervous system had no right to interfere with its contraction except to prevent it from hindering the contraction of another muscle; or each gland, that it had a right to secrete, so long as its secretion interfered with no other; suppose every separate cell were left free to follow its own “interest” and laissez-faire lord of all, what would come of the body physiological? The fact is that the sovereign power of the body thinks for the physiological organism, acts for it, and rules the individual components with a rod of iron. Even the blood corpuscles can’t hold a public meeting without being accused of “congestion”--and the brain, like other despots whom we have known, calls out at once for the use of sharp steel against them.”

This is the rock upon which Spencerian Individualism struck and went to pieces, independently of those great forces, which I shall point out, that made for its disintegration.

These two contradictory positions are the upper and nether millstones between which the individualistic philosophy of Anarchism is ground to powder. Socialists are not stupid enough to argue that because society can get along without a king therefore an orchestra should have “no head.” We are also able to distinguish between “the state” which Socialism will abolish, and the “administration of industry” which it will establish.

Every step forward in modern thought has emphasized the importance of that factor called “environment.” The evolution philosophy is an environment philosophy. Lamarck, the greatest pioneer of modern science, makes a change of environment the prime necessity of organic development. Darwin makes environment the selective factor in “Natural Selection” and in this he is supported by every living biologist of note. Karl Marx paralleled these great advances by discovering that every political philosophy takes its origin in some particular economic environment. This is true of Socialism and Individualism alike.

And so if we wish to understand the historic significance of Individualism we must go back to the period of its birth and examine the social processes of production of that day. This takes us back to the early years of the 19th century.

In the closing half of the 18th century, laborers individually owned the small and crude tools by which they made their living. In this stage of social development the laborer owning the tools he used, appropriated the result. There was here no contradiction and whatever notion of justice is supposed to inhere in the “individual ownership of the means of production” derives its whole force from the economic status of the worker of this period. If that status had remained unchanged, Socialism would never have been heard of. But in the process of evolution the truth and justice of the 18th century became a lie and a social wrong in the 19th.

This transformation was wrought by the development of machinery. It was impossible for every individual worker to own a large machine, and so some men became toolless wage laborers employed by the owners of machinery. This is the beginning of the present labor problem and here arises the struggle in the world of ideas between the philosophy of Individualism and that of Socialism.

Let us examine the vital change which had taken place even before we reach the middle of the last century. Now, one man uses the tools, but another owns them and appropriates the result. And this is the economic foundation of the class war between the exploited wage worker and the exploiting capitalist.

But the individualist theories proper to the 18th century, and its mode of wealth production, passed over into the 19th where their economic justification had ceased. As the fortunate individual owners of machinery found themselves growing rich at a great rate apart from their own individual efforts, they became enthusiastic supporters of “Individualism” and eventually founded the “Manchester” school of politics, which had Herbert Spencer as its chief mouth-piece and Henry George as a somewhat belated trumpeter.

In this heyday of Individualism the “rate of profit” was at its highest, one Lancashire cotton spinner boasting of one thousand per cent. But the social hell in which the English working class of this period lived is without parallel in modern times. Its system of child labor, as recorded in the government blue books as well as already shown by Owen, was indescribably horrible, but the manufacturers were opposed to “government interference” and the individualist philosophy and its bogey of “paternalism” was their craven plea.

With the grouping of the workers in factories production became socialized, and now came this contradiction, production was social while ownership and appropriation were individual. The Socialists of that period rightly maintained that society should either go back in production to the individual form so as to be in harmony with the existing individual form of ownership and appropriation, or it should adopt social ownership and social appropriation to harmonize with the already existing social production.

But the wheel of history never revolves backward, and the latter solution is destined ultimately to prevail. Social evolution has already carried us far in that direction. With the organization of capital individual ownership disappeared and class ownership has taken its place. The struggle of the 20th century is not a struggle between individuals, it is a struggle between classes, and so Individualism has lost its meaning--it is defunct.

With the disappearance of the economic foundation of Individualism, and the overthrow of the philosophic superstructure erected thereon, all its watchwords have lost their power to charm. Free trade, free labor, free contract, free competition; all these are the lingering and belated echoes of a day that is gone.

“Free trade” was the protest of the rising capitalist class against the trammels placed upon its commerce by the feudal regime. Now it appears in a new role; it is the cry of the small capitalist against those “predatory trusts” which discovered that competition is not the life but the death of trade, and are using protection to destroy their weaker fellow-robbers.

“Free labor” was the demand of the capitalist that the serf should be released from the soil in the country so that he might be available for exploitation in the factory, in the city. In England an attempt has been made to give this defunct phrase a new lease of life by the “Free Labor Association” an organization which had this in common with our “Citizen’s Alliance” that it sought to encourage the dear good workingman to keep out of the “tyrannical” labor unions.

“Freedom of contract” or, as it is sometimes called “Voluntary Co-operation” never existed in capitalist society and has never been anything but a grim joke or a plain lie. Where is the freedom or voluntaryism of the worker who must work for what he can get or starve like a dog in the street?

The effects of “free Competition” in England in the early days of capitalism, where it was most free, were such that none but a fiend would wish them recalled. The “might have been” halo with which present day individualists seek to surround this principle, is a midsummer night’s dream that never had any existence in the world of reality and can never be realized, except in the phantasmogoria of their own ideological imaginations.

Individualism in all its forms has become an anachronism. The deified ego of Max Stirner, which imagines itself sitting enthroned on the pinnacle of the universe, directing the motions of the planet Jupiter by crooking its little finger, is an ideological phantasm, which has no connection with the solid earth. The flowery exhortations of Emerson, to live a noble life in ignoble surroundings, is an invitation to attempt what is, for the mass, impossible. Any philosophy which proposes to save the individual without transforming his social environment stands condemned by modern science.

If, with a society more highly organized than any known to history, we still have anarchy in the production and distribution of our wealth, the remedy is, not less social organization, but more. If with all our dental science toothache still exists, the cure is not fewer dentists, but more dentistry. The need of to-day is not less society, but more social organization. There is no hope in going back to the small production of sixty years ago as Hearst and Bryan desire. Increasing the number of bandits in any society is not the concern of their victims. The golden age of labor is not in the past but in the future. The labor problem cannot be solved by going back to the scramble of the hog-pen or the methods of the jungle. There is no succour in flying at each other’s throats in the name of business.

Freedom cannot live in a society rent by class wars. Her conquests are only possible with a humanity united to subdue the cosmic world by which it is interprenetrated and surrounded.

Happily for us, society evolves independently of anybody’s opinion. Our opinions follow blindly and gropingly in the rear. The opinions of individualists do not manufacture social laws, according to certain ethical requirements; they interpret and explain those laws which they discover in operation. The fundamental question is not, “is Individualism better than Socialism?” but “Is society moving in the direction of the one or the other?”

To answer this question it is only necessary to compare the world of to-day with that of ten or even five years ago. America moves steadily toward Socialism, while Europe advances in great leaps. Every civilized country tells the same story, and the recent development of Finland and Austria astonished the world.

Society moves forward, as irresistibly as the ocean tides, and it moves in a direction predicted by those greatest thinkers of this or any age--the men who linked their lives with the blood and the tears and the struggles of half a century in the greatest cause that ever throbbed in the brain of man--the cause of Socialism.

CIVILIZATION--WARD AND DIETZGEN

One of the darkest curses that has fallen on the working class is its being shut out of the wondrous world of modern thought. The great gates of the Temple of Science are clanged in its face, and its mind is fed on the theological garbage of the Middle Ages. In the school, the press, and especially the pulpit, ideas are gravely presented as serious truths, which are known by all university men to be thoroughly exploded lies.

A twentieth century newspaper will brazenly devote a whole page to presenting, with pictorial illustrations, alleged recently discovered proofs of the truth of that Genesis legend which has done such loyal service to the ruling class by stultifying the brains of its victims. These hypocritical displays are never publicly contradicted, although every man with the least smattering of scientific knowledge, including the editors, knows how utterly false they are. These worthies indulge in a sly grin and lower one eyelid, for it is generally understood among them that the great donkey--the working class--will only consent to carry everybody’s burdens in addition to its own, just so long as it is kept in childish ignorance of everything it ought to know.

And this is not all. Now that a great body of workingmen are discarding these ancient lies, and groping for those great truths that contain the germs of their redemption, the official savants, true servants of the ruling class, twist and warp their own science in order to make it contradict every working class idea.

This attitude of the time serving intellectual lackeys of the professorial chairs has brought with it another blighting curse--it has made a considerable number of working men suspicious of modern science itself. It is an old-time tragedy, this breaking with one’s best friend because of the groundless calumnies of an interested enemy.