True there are other animal societies which have no such biological division. But these have no private property in the means of life, and therefore no classes. Pelicans and crows recognize only three grounds as justification for idleness—infancy, old age and sickness or accident.
A recent Socialist writer said: “Take two babies together—the worker’s baby and the parasite’s baby. There they are, both of them, out of the great mystery. Examine their soft little bodies. Do you see spurs on the one and a saddle on the other? And yet, one is to grow up a profligate loafer, and the other a starved and beaten worker. One to rot at the top; the other to be stunted and oppressed at the bottom.”
Of course these two babies would not be equal, either actually or potentially, but is that any reason why they should be given an unequal start? How are we to find out which is the best in any sense, if a multitude of opportunities open to the one are to be closed to the other?
And here Haeckel’s implied parallel breaks down once more. In nature the strong and capable survive in the struggle for existence; nature gives something like a fair field and no favor. But in capitalist society, a puling son of a rich father is coddled to maturity, and reproduces others of his kind; while the lusty child of a worker is murdered by poisonous milk, or debarred from marriage by low wages.
In nature, “fittest” does not mean best in any moral sense, except indirectly, as that the practice of certain moral principles in animal societies may constitute, or add to, fitness. But in present society in a vast number of instances, fitness does not mean “best” even to the extent that such a word may be used in the natural world.
A real estate “shark” is a libel on the fish. An indispensable qualification in business is to have few scruples and be a first-class liar. Honesty and suicide are synonymous terms.
The statement that natural selection “favors aristocratic aspirations,” involves the same fallacy. It assumes that aristocrats are on top because of fitness to be there. Recent revelations in Berlin indicate that the aristocrats of Haeckel’s own country are “fittest” for the garbage can.
Haeckel’s main position is that “the struggle for existence” in nature is a justification for “competition” in society. To begin with, Kropotkin has shown that Haeckel grossly misrepresents nature when he speaks of “the cruel, pitiless ‘struggle for existence’ which rages everywhere throughout animated nature” and “between all living beings.” When this is used as a defense of present society, it is equal to saying that human society should seek its models among the lowest forms of organic life rather than the highest. Haeckel’s position was taken by Spencer and received the following clever reply from Prof. Ritchie: “The struggle among plants and the lower animals is mainly between members of the same species; and the individual competition between human beings, which is so much admired by Mr. Spencer, is of this primitive kind.”
Kropotkin says: “If we ask nature ‘who are the fittest, those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?’ we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest.”
As to the desirability of that “pitiless struggle,” Huxley pertinently says: “Of all the shapes which society has taken, that most nearly approaches perfection in which the war of the individual against the individual is most strictly limited.”