Evolution Social and Organic

by Arthur M. Lewis

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.