But though egoism or altruism, separately, each pushed to its extreme, is pernicious to the individual and society, united they are resolved into a third term, which is the law of future societies. This law is solidarity.
Many of us will combine with the intention of realizing one of our aspirations. This association having nothing forced in it, nothing arbitrary, prompted only by some need of our being, it is quite evident that the more pressing the need the more force and activity shall we contribute to the association. All having cooperated in production, we shall all have rights in consumption; that is plain; but as the sum of needs will have been calculated (counting in those which must be foreseen) that the satisfaction of all may be attained, solidarity will have no trouble in securing to each his share. Is it not said that man’s nature is to have his eyes bigger than his stomach? Now, the more intense his desire is the greater an amount of activity will he devote to its realization. Thus he will come to produce not only sufficient to satisfy the co-participants, but also those in whom desire would not have been awakened but for the sight of the thing produced. Man’s needs being infinite, infinite will be his means of satisfying them, and it is this variety of needs which will concur in the establishment of general harmony.
In our present society, wherein we are accustomed to depend upon the toil of others to obtain the things necessary for existence, there is but one object: to procure money enough to enable one to buy what he wants. Now, as manual labor does not even enable one to keep himself from starving, he who has only this resource, seeks to obtain money by every means except work, becoming an official, journalist, or whatnot, including blackmailer. He who has a start goes into commerce and increases his income by robbing his contemporaries; he gambles in stocks, he speculates, or makes others work for him. People engage in all sorts of occupations, more or less dishonorable, except the one thing necessary that all might have their share—useful production. So that each one pulls the cover over himself without concerning himself about those whom he lays naked, whence this unreasoned egoism which seems to have become the sole motive of human actions.
But as man grows refined, he comes also to live not only for himself and in himself. The type of the humane egoist, perfectly developed, is to suffer with the sufferings of those who surround him, to have his enjoyment spoiled by the reflection that others, owing to the vicious social organization in which we live, may suffer by it. Among the bourgeoisie there are persons whose sensitiveness is certainly highly developed; when the influences of environment, education, or heredity, leave them leisure to reflect upon social misery and turpitude; when they reckon up their existence, they try as much as possible to remedy misery with charity. Whence, philanthropic works! But the habit of believing society normally constituted, the habit of considering poverty eternal, the result of the laborer’s misconduct, engenders an unfeeling character, inquisitorial in its philanthropy. Because for the man born, educated, brought up in the hothouses of wealth and luxury, it is very difficult, even impossible, save under exceptional circumstances, to come to doubt the legitimacy of the situation he occupies. For the parvenu it is still more difficult, for he believes he owes his situation to his talent and his work. Religion, conceit, and the economists, have so reiterated that work is a punishment, that poverty is the result of the improvidence of those who are a prey to it, that how can you expect him who has never had to struggle against adversity not to believe himself of a superior essence! From the day he begins to doubt it, sets himself to study the social organization, if he is sufficiently endowed to understand its viciousness, his pleasures will be poisoned at their fountainhead. This man will suffer when he says to himself that his luxury necessitates the misery of a mass of workers, that every one of his possessions is purchased at the expense of the sufferings of those who are sacrificed to produce them. If this man’s combativeness is developed equally with his sensitiveness he will make one more rebel against the social order which does not secure moral and intellectual satisfaction even to him. For it must not be forgotten that the social problem is not confined to a simple material question. We certainly do contend, and that before everything else, that all should have enough to eat. But our demands are not limited to this; we also contend that each should be able to develop himself according to his faculties, and to procure those intellectual gratifications which the needs of his brain create. True that for many Anarchists the question stops there; and that is what has brought about these divers interpretations and discussions of egoism, altruism, etc. Nothing more urgent than the stomach question! Only it would be dangerous to the success of the revolution to stop there, for then one might just as well accept the Socialistic State, which could, and would, secure all in the satisfaction of their physical needs.
If the next revolution were to confine its objects to the sole problem of material life, it would greatly risk being arrested on the way, degenerating into
