FE" AND THE "CLASS-STRUGGLE."

Darwinism has demonstrated that the entire mechanism of animal evolution
may be reduced to the struggle for existence between individuals of the
same species on the one hand, and between each species and the whole
world of living beings.

In the same way all the machinery of social evolution has been reduced
by Marxian socialism to the law of the _Struggle between Classes_. This
theory not only gives us the secret motive-power and the only scientific
explanation of the history of mankind; it also furnishes the ideal and
rigid standard of discipline for political socialism and thus enables it
to avoid all the elastic, vaporous, inconclusive uncertainties of
sentimental socialism.

The only scientific explanation of the history of animal life is to be
found in the grand Darwinian law of the _struggle for existence_; it
alone enables us to determine the natural causes of the appearance,
development and disappearance of vegetable and animal species from
paleontological times down to our own day. In the same way the only
explanation of the history of human life is to be found in the grand
Marxian law of the _struggle between classes_; thanks to it the annals
of primitive, barbarous and civilized humanity cease to be a capricious
and superficial kaleidoscopic arrangement of individual episodes in
order to become a grand and inevitable drama, determined--whether the
actors realize it or not, in its smallest internal details as well as in
its catastrophes--by the _economic conditions_, which form the
indispensable, physical basis of life and by the _struggle between the
classes_ to obtain and keep control of the economic forces, upon which
all the others--political, juridical and moral--necessarily depend.

I will have occasion to speak more at length--in studying the relations
between sociology and socialism--of this grand conception, which is the
imperishable glory of Marx and which assures him in sociology the place
which Darwin occupies in biology and Spencer in philosophy.[37]

For the moment it suffices for me to point out this new point of contact
between Socialism and Darwinism. The expression, _Class-Struggle_, so
repugnant when first heard or seen (and I confess that it produced this
impression on me when I had not yet grasped the scientific
import of the Marxian theory), furnishes us, if it be correctly
understood, the primary law of human history and, therefore, it alone
can giv