ABSTRACT

This reprint of Marx’s earliest exposition of his peculiar economic views is notable, not in point of novelty, nor because it adds to what is already currently known by students of Marx with regard to his early position, but because it is evidence of the unabated authority with which the writings of the master still appeal to the thoughtful and studious adherents of the school. It may be noted in this connection that a German translation of the book (by men as eminent in the socialist world as Bernstein and Kautsky) has also recently (1892) appeared. The present reprint is an unaltered reproduction of the book as it originally appeared in 1847, in Marx’s polemical onslaught on Proudhon, except for the incorporation of certain minor corrections made by the author in the margins of his private copy of the volume. There are also added, by way of appendices, three briefer papers by Marx, – a condemnatory letter on Proudhon, reprinted from the Socialdemokrat (Berlin) of 1865; an extract from Zur Kritik der politischen Oekonomie, going to disprove Proudhon’s claim to originality in his proposed banque du peuple; and the address on free trade before the Democratic Association of Brussels. These supplementary documents go to enforce the impression made by Engels’s preface, that the purpose of the reprint is in some measure a polemical one. The preface is directed to the disproof of any possible indebtedness of Marx to Rodbertus, as well as to the definitive confutation of all who may claim any originality or other merit for Rodbertus, whether as against Marx or otherwise in connection with economic discussion. Although Engels’s preface dates from 1884, it may not be out of place to repeat, for the good of Rodbertus’s admirers and champions at this day, certain characteristic claims and assertions here made by Marx’s lifelong intimate friend, “the most [98] truthful of the socialists.” After referring for details to his prospective discussion of the relation between Marx and Rodbertus in the subsequently published preface to the fourth edition of Marx’s Kapital, he goes on to say:

It will be sufficient here to say that when Rodbertus accuses Marx of having “despoiled” him and “of having in his Kapital drawn extensively on,

but without citing,” his work, Zur Erkenntniss, etc., he has allowed himself to be led into a calumny which can be explained only through the ill humor naturally to be expected of an unappreciated genius, and through his remarkable ignorance of things which took place outside of Prussia, and more especially his ignorance of economic and socialistic literature. Neither these complaints nor Rodbertus’s work above cited had ever come under Marx’s eyes; he had no acquaintance with Rodbertus beyond the three Sozialen Briefe, and even these assuredly not prior to 1858 or 1859.

Professor Ferri’s work, which has now come to hand in a French edition, is no less laudatory of Marx. The juxtaposition of names in the sententious subtitle (“Darwin, Spencer, Marx”) is of itself a sufficient promise of an appreciatory discussion of Marx’s writings and of his place in the science. The eminent Italian criminologist gives in his adhesion to the tenets of scientific socialism without equivocation, and sets out with a promise to justify the claims of that dogma to be the complement, on the side of the social sciences, of that theory of development for which, in its general features, Darwin’s name serves as catchword in the biological sciences. Part I (pp. 13-85) of the volume is in great measure taken up with a refu-

tation of what Professor Ferri regards as the three fundamental objections that have been made against socialism on grounds of evolutionary theory. These three points of alleged contradiction between Darwinism and socialism are: (a) Socialism demands equality of individuals, while the evolutionary process constantly accentuates that inequality between individuals which alone affords play for the selective adaptation of the species or the type; (b) socialism demands the survival, in comfort and fullness of life, of all individuals, whereas Darwinism (taking the term here, as elsewhere in the book, in the broad sense in which it is popularly used) requires the destruction, through the struggle for existence, of the great majority of individuals; (c) the struggle for existence secures a progressive elimination of the unfit and a survival of the superior individuals, resulting in a progressive amelioration of the selected minority of individuals that are [99] in this way delegated to carry on the development of the species or of the type, whereas socialism, by giving all an even chance of life, reduces the aggregate of individuals to a dead level of democratic uniformity, in which the superior merits of the “fit” count for nothing. Of these objections to socialism Haeckel is regarded as the best and most

effective spokesman that has yet appeared; other and later restatements, of which the number is by no means small, being taken only as feebler variants of the apology for natural selection made by the great German apostle of Darwinism. The alleged contradictions are reviewed somewhat in detail, and the socialist position which claims a full accord between the teachings of evolutionary science and the prospectus of revolutionary evolution offered by spokesmen of Marxism are summarized and restated in a telling manner, though with somewhat more of a declamatory turn than would be required

for the purpose of an enumeration of the data bearing on the question of human evolution and a formulation of the inferences to be drawn from these data. The three contradictions which are passed under review are disposed of by showing, in rather more convincing form than is usual with the scientific apologists of socialism, (a) that the equality of individuals demanded by the socialist scheme is an equality of opportunities rather than an identity of function or of the details of life; (b) that the struggle for existence, as applied within the field of social evolution, is a struggle between groups and institutions rather than a competition à outrance between the individuals of the group, and that this struggle can lead to socially desirable results only as it is carried on on the basis of a large measure of group solidarity and co-operation between the individuals of the group; that the “normal” milieu for the competitive development of individuals in society in the direction of availability for the social purpose and a fuller and more truly human life is afforded only by an environment which secures the members of the community a competent and equitable – if not equal – immunity from the sordid cares of a life of pecuniary competition. Only under such an environment can we look for the development and fixation of a type of man which shall best meet the requirements of associated human life. That is to say, the closer an approach is made to a condition of pecuniary equality and solidarity the better are the chances of a survival of the “fittest,” in the sense of the most efficient for the purposes of the collective life. And this brings us to the consideration [100] of the third alleged contradiction between the socialist scheme and Darwinism – that an abolition of the pecuniary struggle would abolish the evolutionary factor of a selective survival of the fittest individuals. It is (c) only by injecting a wholly illegitimate teleological meaning into the term “fittest,” as used by Darwin and the Darwinists that the expression “survival of the fittest” is made to mean a survival of the socially desirable individuals. This whole objection, therefore, is a sophism which proceeds on a teleological preconception – a survival in modern discussion of a concept which belongs among the mental furniture of the metaphysical speculations of the preDarwinian times. A sober review of well-known facts, we are told, shows that the present competitive system does not by any means uniformly result in a working out of favorable results by a process of natural selection. “It is well known that in the modern civilized world the action of natural selection is vitiated by the presence of a military selection, by matrimonial selection, and especially by economic selection” (p. 49). Professor Ferri here develops very briefly, and turns to socialist account, the theory of “social selection” of types originated by Broca, and more recently developed with greater fullness and effect by Lapouge, Ammon, and Loria. It is only in the “milieu normal” afforded by such an equality of pecuniary competence as the socialist scheme contemplates that the factor of “choice” has a chance to act and to award the victory to “the most normal individuals” and types. The struggle for existence, and therefore the fact of a selective adaptation,

is a fact inseparable from the life process, and therefore inseparable from the

life of mankind; but while its scope remains unaltered, the forms under which it expresses itself in the life of society change as the development of collective life proceeds. The most striking general modification which the struggle has suffered in the past growth of society, and the feature which most immediately concerns the present discussions, is seen in the transformation of this struggle for existence in the communities of the occidental culture into a struggle for equality.