Arthur M. Lewis

“ 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. ”

“ And so death came into the world, not by sin, as the Genesis legend reports, but through sex; a most astonishing conclusion, it may be, but one from which there is apparently no escape. Immortality still remains, it is true, but it is not the immortality of the conscious self. Positive science, nothwithstanding all its glorious gifts, has dealt a terrible blow to those gorgeous dreams of primitive men and modern mystics; those hopes and longings which have sustained millions of our race in hours of supreme sorrow; a blow which not even the bravest has been able to receive without flinching. ”

“ What the capitalist class wanted now was peace, and long life, and above all, no disturbances.
And it was just at this point that Darwin came forward with a theory that seemed made to order. True this theory spoke of evolution and change, but the change was so slow it was impossible to notice it. A million years was as ten minutes to this theory, and if it took as long for one class in society to displace another, or for one social regime to succeed another, as it does for one species to develop from another, the capitalists and their heirs had nothing to apprehend for a thousand generations. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The cruel and pitiless ‘struggle for existence’ which rages everywhere through animated nature, and which in the nature of things must rage, this eternal and inexorable competition between all living beings is an undeniable fact. Only a small picked number of the strongest or fittest is able to come forth victoriously from this battle of competition. The great majority of their unfortunate competitors are inevitably destined to perish. ”

“ For half a century this argument of slow evolution has done valiant service as an antidote for Socialism, and the present ruling class would like to retain it forever.
But no ruling class ever was or ever can be wholly omnipotent. The capitalists of to-day can no more hinder the process of social evolution, with its resulting march of ideas, than they can intercept gravitation or divert the tides. They are being driven blindly to their fate by social forces which are beyond their command. ”

“ On the contrary, as Dietzgen says: “Philosophy is a subject which closely concerns the working class,” and he adds: “This, of course, does by no means imply that every workingman should try to become acquainted with philosophy and study the relation between the idea and matter. From the fact that we all eat bread does not follow that we must all understand milling and baking. But just as we need millers and bakers, so does the working class stand in need of keen scholars who can follow up the tortuous ways of the false priests and lay bare the inanity of their tricks.” ”

“ 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. ”

“ All that as well as the coin and bullion in the trunks and safes form but an appendix or, so to speak, the tassels and tufts, behind which is concealed that great and real wealth—the rock on which our hope is built.
“What authorizes the people to believe in the salvation from long ages of torture—nay, not only to believe in, but to see it, and actively strive for, is the fairy-like productive power, the prodigious fertility of human labor. ”

“ This is precisely what Marx and Engels accomplished, and this why their work is so fundamentally opposed to the conventional theories and theological superstitious current in their time, and so fully in harmony with all the latest achievements in the scientific world. History ceases to be a meaningless mass of war and famine, bloodshed and cruelty. It becomes a panorama presenting the development of society according to laws which may be understood and with a future that may be measurably predicted.
It develops by the operation of forces that no man or class can wholly stay or hinder. ”

“ Today it reverses its attitude and would fain suppress science or at least prevent its reaching the proletarian brain. But alas, it is in the grip of evolutionary processes of which it is merely a part, and it is bound, more securely than Prometheus to the rock, to a mode of production which makes the education of the proletariat a relentless necessity. The nation which keeps its working class in semi-feudal darkness is ground to pieces by the industrial competition of its neighbors—it goes to the wall in the struggle for existence. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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?” ”

“ 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. ”

“ There will be no real airship until we master the laws of aerial flight. Socialism solves the social problem, not because it has, but because it is, an explanation of the laws of social development in general, and of existing society in particular. On these laws our faith is founded. By consciously arranging the social institutions which so profoundly affect our lives, in harmony with these laws, we shall cease to be the slaves of a blind necessity. ”

“ These are facts so simple and so obvious that it seems to me every intelligent and enlightened statesman ought to be an advocate of the theory of descent and the general doctrine of evolution as the best antidote for the absurd equalitarian, utopian notions of the Socialists.
“And it was Darwinism, the theory of selection, that Virchow, in his denunciation, had in mind, rather than the mere metamorphic development, the theory of descent, with which it is always confused! Darwinism is anything rather than socialistic. ”

“ For example, starting from the standpoint of achievement, it would naturally be held that there would be great injustice in robbing those who by their superior wisdom had achieved the great results upon which civilization rests and distributing the natural rewards among inferior persons who had achieved nothing. All would assent to this. And yet this is in fact practically what has been done. The whole history of the world shows that those who have achieved have received no reward. The rewards for their achievement have fallen to persons who have achieved nothing. ”

“ DeVries raised the question as to whether new species “arrive” by a gradual accumulation of tiny changes, or by sudden leaps—mutations—and demonstrated the latter by his experiments with the evening primrose.
And now comes Kropotkin with the question, “Who are the fittest?” What constitutes the fitness, which makes for survival? Are those organisms the fittest which are constantly waging a war of extermination against every other organism in the struggle for existence, or, are those the fittest which co-operate with each other in the preservation of the common life of all? ”

“ Darwin discovered the great principle which rules the evolution of organisms. It is the principle of natural selection. It is the sifting out of all organisms of minor worth through the struggle for life.”
The greater part of the adverse criticism, aimed at Darwinism applies only to the extravagant claims put forward by his overenthusiastic disciples; claims not to be found in the works of Darwin himself. As we shall see later, one of the greatest offenders in this respect was no less a person than the co-discoverer of the selection theory—Alfred Russell Wallace. ”

“ In order properly to estimate the sociological significance of DeVries’ theory it will be necessary to go back more than a century, and observe the sociological import of the leading biological ideas of that period.
And here let us remark, that nobody knows better than we do the danger of transplanting, without criticism, biological theories into the field of sociology. Nevertheless, our opponents have never lost an opportunity to twist and distort science, if perchance by any possibility it could be made to contradict anything that had so much as the semblance of Socialism. ”

“ And so Ward’s conclusion is that the greatness of the present consists in that mass of achievements called civilization, among which are those inventions which have so wonderfully increased the capacity of social labor in its production of wealth. And the hope of the future lies in the socialization of those achievements so as to make their rich fruits the common heritage of all mankind. There are no Socialists who will quarrel with these conclusions. ”

“ The great law of variation teaches—both in the general theory of evolution and in the smaller field of biology where it becomes the theory of descent—that the variety of phenomena flows from an original unity, the diversity of functions from a primitive identity, and the complexity of organization from a primordial simplicity. The conditions of existence for all individuals are, from their very birth, unequal. ”

“ The men who laid the foundations of modern knowledge, and imparted sense and force to hitherto meaningless terms, were they who threw aside theological phantasms and metaphysical speculations and set themselves the task of gathering the facts and ascertaining the laws of the real—the material—world. This is the method of science, and it is to this method that we owe all our knowledge of world problems. ”

“ The struggle for existence, with its resultant, survival of the fittest.
Darwin requires very little of heredity, and what he does ask is beyond dispute. It is enough for his theory if like begets like and “figs do not grow on thistles.”
Similarly with variation, the demands of his hypothesis are very slight. If it be conceded that variation is a fact, that offspring do vary from their parents and each other, it is enough. And who will dispute this in a world where no two creatures are exactly and in all particulars alike? ”

“ Of all the mischievous misconceptions of Darwin’s theory none have worked so much harm as that which regards natural selection as the active and efficient cause of evolution. Although evolution is an established fact, our knowledge of its processes are incomplete and must always remain so until we have solved that most vexed of all biological problems, the “causes of variation.” ”

“ We must never forget or under-estimate, however, the inestimable value of the services rendered by Darwin, who by his patience, industry, and rare genius for observation and experiment, and his powers of lucid exposition, convinced the world of the truth of evolution, with the result that it has transformed the philosophy of our day. ”

“ Malthus applied his theory to human society where it is palpably false. Darwin transferred it to the natural world where it proved to be a great truth. The obvious explanation of this paradox is: that man, by agriculture and industry, can increase his food supply to a greater proportion than any probable or even possible increase of population. Animals cannot; their food supply is beyond their control; they have no power to artificially increase the supply. ”

“ It is one of the most astonishing discoveries of science and at the same time one of the most convincing proofs of evolution, that the whole process of the development of the human race from the lowest or simplest forms, which constitutes the subject-matter of phylogeny, is reproduced in brief in the development of the embryo of the individual. ”