

E-text prepared by Fritz Ohrenschall, Martin Pettit, and the Project
Gutenberg Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net)



Note: Project Gutenberg also has an HTML version of this file
      which includes images of the pages of the original book.
      See 23574-h.htm or 23574-h.zip:
      (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/3/5/7/23574/23574-h/23574-h.htm)
      or
      (http://www.gutenberg.net/dirs/2/3/5/7/23574/23574-h.zip)





SOCIALISM: POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE

by

ROBERT RIVES LA MONTE







     "I will make a man more precious than fine gold;
     even a man than the golden wedge of Ophir."
                            --_Isaiah xiii, 12._


Chicago
Charles H. Kerr & Company
1907

Copyright 1907
by Charles H. Kerr & Company


[Illustration: logo]

Press of
John F. Higgins
Chicago




TO

M. E. M. AND L. H. M.




PREFACE


Of the papers in this little volume two have appeared in print before:
"Science and Socialism" in the International Socialist Review for
September, 1900, and "Marxism and Ethics" in Wilshire's Magazine for
November, 1905. My thanks are due to the publishers of those periodicals
for their kind permission to re-print those articles here. The other
papers appear here for the first time.

There is an obvious inconsistency between the treatment of Materialism
in "Science and Socialism" and its treatment in "The Nihilism of
Socialism." I would point out that seven years elapsed between the
composition of the former and that of the latter essay. Whether the
inconsistency be a sign of mental growth or deterioration my readers
must judge for themselves. I will merely say here that the man or woman,
whose views remain absolutely fixed and stereotyped for seven years, is
cheating the undertaker. What I conceive the true significance of this
particular change in opinions to be is set forth in the essay on "The
Biogenetic Law."

Some Socialists will deprecate what may seem to them the unwise
frankness of the paper on "The Nihilism of Socialism." To them I can
only say that to me Socialism has always been essentially a
revolutionary movement. Revolutionists, who attempt to maintain a
distinction between their exoteric and their esoteric teachings, only
succeed in making themselves ridiculous. But, even were the maintenance
of such a distinction practicable, it would, in my judgment, be highly
inexpedient. As a mere matter of policy, ever since I first entered the
Socialist Movement, I have been a firm believer in the tactics admirably
summed up in Danton's "_De l'audace! Puis de l'audace! Et toujours de
l'audace!_"

Should any reader find himself repelled by "The Nihilism of Socialism,"
let me beg that he will not put the book aside until he has read the
essay on "The Biogenetic Law."

I do not send forth this little book with any ambitious hope that it
will be widely read, or even that it will convert any one to Socialism.
My hope is far more modest. It is that this book may be of some real
service, as a labor-saving device, to the thinking men and women who
have felt the lure of Socialism, and are trying to discover just what is
meant by the oft-used words 'Marxian Socialism,' Should it prove of
material aid to even _one_ such man or woman, I would feel that I had
been repaid a hundred-fold for my labor in writing it.

                                               ROBERT RIVES LA MONTE.
Feb. 7, 1907.




TABLE OF CONTENTS


                                                    PAGE

SCIENCE AND SOCIALISM                                 15

     I. THE MATERIALISTIC CONCEPTION OF HISTORY       25

    II. THE LAW OF SURPLUS-VALUE                      34

   III. THE CLASS STRUGGLE                            46

MARXISM AND ETHICS                                    57

INSTEAD OF A FOOTNOTE                                 75

THE NIHILISM OF SOCIALISM                             81

THE BIOGENETIC LAW                                   131

KISMET                                               143




SCIENCE AND SOCIALISM[1]

(International Socialist Review, September, 1900.)


Until the middle of this (the nineteenth) century the favorite theory
with those who attempted to explain the phenomena of History was the
Great-Man-Theory. This theory was that once in a while through infinite
mercy a great man was sent to the earth who yanked humanity up a notch
or two higher, and then we went along in a humdrum way on that level, or
even sank back till another great man was vouchsafed to us. Possibly the
finest flower of this school of thought is Carlyle's Heroes and Hero
Worship. Unscientific as this theory was, it had its beneficent effects,
for those heroes or great men served as ideals, and the human mind
requires an unattainable ideal. No man can be or do the best he is
capable of unless he is ever reaching out toward an ideal that lies
beyond his grasp. Tennyson put this truth in the mouth of the ancient
sage who tells the youthful and ambitious Gareth who is eager to enter
into the service of King Arthur of the Table Round:


                   "-----------the King
     Will bind thee by such vows as is a shame
     A man should not be bound by, yet the which
     No man can keep."


This function of furnishing an ideal was performed in former times by
these great men and more especially by those great men whom legend, myth
and superstition converted into gods. But with the decay of the old
faiths the only possible fruitful ideal left is the ideal upheld by
Socialism, the ideal of the Co-operative Commonwealth in which the
economic conditions will give birth to the highest, purest, most
altruistic ethics the world has yet seen. It is true the co-operative
commonwealth is far more than a Utopian ideal, it is a scientific
prediction, but at this point I wish to emphasize its function as an
ideal.

But it is obvious that this Great Man theory gave no scientific clue to
history. If the Great Man was a supernatural phenomenon, a gift from
Olympus, then of course History had no scientific basis, but was
dependent upon the arbitrary caprices of the Gods, and Homer's Iliad was
a specimen of accurate descriptive sociology. If on the other hand the
great man was a natural phenomenon, the theory stopped short half way
toward its goal, for it gave us no explanation of the genesis of the
Great Man nor of the reasons for the superhuman influence that it
attributed to him.

Mallock, one of the most servile literary apologists of capitalism, has
recently in a book called "Aristocracy and Evolution" attempted to
revive and revise this theory and give it a scientific form. He still
attributes all progress to Great Men, but with the brutal frankness of
modern bourgeois Capitalism, gives us a new definition of Great Men.
According to Mallock, the great man is the man who makes money. This has
long been the working theory of bourgeois society, but Mallock is the
first of them who has had the cynicism or the stupidity to confess it.
But mark you, by this confession he admits the truth of the fundamental
premise of modern scientific socialism, our Socialism, viz., that the
economic factor is the dominant or determining factor in the life of
society. Thus you see the ablest champion of bourgeois capitalism,
admits, albeit unconsciously, the truth of the Marxian materialistic
conception of history. This book, however, is chiefly remarkable for its
impudent and shameless misrepresentations of Marx and Marxism, but these
very lies show that intelligent apologists of capitalism know that their
only dangerous foe is Marxian socialism.

But just as according to the vulgar superstition the tail of a snake
that has been killed wiggles till sundown, so this book of Mallock's is
merely a false show of life made by a theory that received its deathblow
long since. It is the wiggling of the tail of the snake that Herbert
Spencer killed thirty years ago with his little book "The Study of
Sociology." The environment philosophy in one form or another has come
to occupy the entire field of human thought. We now look for the
explanation of every phenomenon in the conditions that surrounded its
birth and development. The best application of this environment
philosophy to intellectual and literary phenomena that has ever been
made is Taine's History of English Literature.

But while Spencer's Study of Sociology is the most signal and brilliant
refutation of the Great Man theory, no one man really killed that
theory. The general spread