A political party or a scientific theory are natural products which must pass through the vital phases of infancy and youth, before reaching complete development. It was, then, inevitable that, before becoming scientific or positif (fact-founded), socialism, in Italy as in other countries, should pass through the infantile phases of clannish exclusiveness—the era when socialism was confined to organizations of manual laborers—and of nebulous romanticism which, as it gives to the word revolution a narrow and incomplete meaning, is always fed with false hope by the illusion that a social organism can be radically changed in a single day with four rifle-shots, just as a monarchical regime could thus be converted into a republican regime.
But it is infinitely easier to change the political envelope of a social organization,—because such a change has little effect on the economic foundation of the social life,—than to completely revolutionize this social life in its economic constitution.
The processes of social transformation, as well as—under various names—those of every sort of transformation in living organisms are: evolution,—revolution,—rebellion,—individual violence.
A mineral or vegetable or animal species may pass through, during the cycle of its existence, these four processes.
As long as the structure and the volume of the centre of crystallization, the germ, or the embryo, increase gradually, we have a gradual and continuous process of evolution, which must be followed at a definite stage by a process of revolution, more or less prolonged, represented, for example, by the separation of the entire crystal from the mineral mass which surrounds it, or by certain revolutionary phases of vegetable or animal life, as, for example, the moment of sexual reproduction; there may also be a period of rebellion, that is to say, of organized personal violence, a frequent and well-verified phenomenon among those species of animals who live in societies; there may also be isolated instances of personal violence, as in the struggles to obtain food or for possession of the females between animals of the same species.
These same processes also occur in the human world. By evolution must be understood the transformation that takes place day by day, which is almost unnoticed, but continuous and inevitable; by revolution, the critical and decisive period, more or less prolonged, of an evolution that has reached its concluding phase; by rebellion, the partially collective violence which breaks out, upon the occasion of some particular circumstance, at a definite place and time; and by individual violence, the action of one individual against one or several others, which may be the effect of a fanatical passion or of criminal instincts, or the manifestation of a lack of mental equilibrium,—and which identifies itself with the political or religious ideas most in vogue at the moment.
It must be remarked, in the first place, that while revolution and evolution are normal functions of social physiology, rebellion and individual violence are symptoms of social pathology.
These are, nevertheless, merely natural and spontaneous processes, since, as Virchow has shown, pathology is merely the sequel of normal physiology. Besides, the pathological symptoms have, or should have, a great diagnostical value for the classes in power; but the latter, unfortunately, in every period of history, in times of political crisis, as in those of social crisis, have shown themselves unable to conceive of any other remedy than brutal repression—the guillotine or the prison—and they fancy that thus they can cure the organic and constitutional disease which vexes the social body.[67]
But it is indisputable, at all events, that the normal processes of social transformation (and because they are normal, the most fruitful and the surest, although the slowest and the least effective in appearance) are evolution and revolution, using the latter term in its accurate and scientific sense, as the concluding phase of an evolution, and not in the current and incorrect sense of a stormy and violent revolt.[68]
It is evident, in fact, that Europe and America are, in these closing years of the nineteenth century, in a period of revolution, prepared by the evolution begotten by the bourgeois organization itself and promoted by utopian socialism as well as by scientific socialism. Likewise, we are in that period of social life which Bagehot calls "the age of discussion,"[69] and already we can see what Zola has called, in Germinal, the cracking of the politico-social crust, and, in fact, all those symptoms which Taine has described in his l'Ancien Régime, in relating the history of the twenty years which preceded 1789. As repressive methods are of no avail against domestic revolution, and only serve to expose the symptoms, there can be nothing efficacious and productive of good results, except laws of social reform and preparation which, while safe-guarding the present society, will render less painful, as Marx said, "the birth of the new society."