I maintained, and I still maintain, that the struggle for existence is a law inseparable from life, and consequently from humanity itself, but that, though remaining an inherent and constant law, it is gradually transformed in its essence and attenuated in its forms.
Among primitive mankind the struggle for existence is but slightly differentiated from that which obtains among the other animals. It is the brutal struggle for daily food or for possession of the females—hunger and love are, in fact, the two fundamental needs and the two poles of life—and almost its only method is muscular violence. In a more advanced phase there is joined to this basic struggle the struggle for political supremacy (in the clan, in the tribe, in the village, in the commune, in the State), and, more and more, muscular struggle is superseded by intellectual struggle.
In the historical period the Graeco-Latin society struggled for civil equality (the abolition of slavery); it triumphed, but it did not halt, because to live is to struggle; the society of the middle ages struggled for religious equality; it won the battle, but it did not halt; and at the end of the last century, it struggled for political equality. Must it now halt and remain stationary in the present state of progress? To-day society struggles for economic equality, not for an absolute material equality, but for that more practical, truer equality of which I have already spoken. And all the evidence enables us to foresee with mathematical certainty that this victory will be won to give place to new struggles and to new ideals among our descendants.
The successive changes in the subject-matter (or the ideals) of the struggles for existence are accompanied by a progressive mitigation of the methods of combat. Violent and muscular at first, the struggle is becoming, more and more, pacific and intellectual, notwithstanding some atavic recurrences of earlier methods or some psycho-pathological manifestations of individual violence against society and of social violence against individuals.
The remarkable work of Mr. Novicow[14] has recently given a signal confirmation to my opinion, although Novicow has not taken the sexual struggle into account. I will develop my demonstration more fully in the chapter devoted to l'avenir moral de l'humanité (the intellectual future of humanity), in the second edition of Socialismo e Criminalità.
For the moment I have sufficiently replied to the anti-socialist objection, since I have shown not merely that the disproportion between the number of births and the number of those who survive tends to constantly diminish, but also that the "struggle for existence" itself changes in its essence and grows milder in its processes at each successive phase of the biological and social evolution.
Socialism may then insist that human conditions of existence ought to be guaranteed to all men—in exchange for labor furnished to collective society—without thereby contradicting the Darwinian law of the survival of the victors in the struggle for existence, since this Darwinian law ought to be understood and applied in each of its varying manifestations, in harmony with the law of human progress.
Socialism, scientifically understood, does not deny, and cannot deny, that among mankind there are always some "losers" in the struggle for existence.
This question is more directly connected with the relations which exist between socialism and criminality, since those who contend that the struggle for existence is a law which does not apply to human society, declare, accordingly, that crime (an abnormal and anti-social form of the struggle for life, just as labor is its normal and social form) is destined to disappear. Likewise they think they discover a certain contradiction between socialism and the teachings of criminal anthropology concerning the congenital criminal, though these teachings are also deducted from Darwinism.[15]
I reserve this question for fuller treatment elsewhere. Here is in brief my thought as a socialist and as a criminal anthropologist.