CHAPTER II.
SOCIAL ORGANISMS.
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Generally speaking, there is safety in numbers and, therefore, a better chance for survival. Since the beginning, Human beings have tended to live in groups.
Small primitive societies, where each individual family group can be self sufficient, are simple organisms.
Modern industrial societies, on the contrary, are very complex. They are a conglomerate of smaller organisms, each performing definite functions in the overall requirements of the society.
Notwithstanding great differences in Human organisms, their natural motive forces are basically very similar.
What keeps all groups within an organism together is each individual's interest for survival. Even if there is competition between them, they still may find an advantage in staying together, therefore, they must compromise.
Self interest and compromise are the glues that keep the many, often opposite parts of a socio economic system together in a precarious ecological balance.
In such complex organisms no individual can stand wholly on his own feet and be completely independent. To earn one's living within the system is the main condition for survival. As every occupation is more or less only a small part of the total process of production, every individual is dependent on the performance of the others for his own livelihood. Everyone is more or less specialised to perform a task or just a fraction of a task in the social process of production.
One cannot withdraw easily from such a society. If for any reason the social ecological balance is disturbed and people are left out or discarded because they are no longer needed, it would be difficult for them to fit in different occupations and to perform different tasks, if the organism has stopped growing and there has been no planning, as is the case with Capitalism most of the time. For this reason, every individual in the conglomerate of living organisms tends to cling to the established order of which he is a part, whether he likes it or not; an order which provides him with the means of subsistence, as meager or abundant as they may be.
While one has a place which allows one to survive in the society, one will tend to accept compromise in the struggle within the social organism. But when his employment becomes insufficient to provide the means of subsistence, or when one is discarded or becomes alienated, then compromise becomes impossible. One will attempt to change the society or to find or to create another in which he can fit, either within or outside the existing one.
The natural instinct for a meaningful survival is the motive force that will keep a society together or will tear it apart.
It seems to be evident that the more satisfying and the more remunerative somebody's place is in the society, the more stubbornly one will try to preserve the social organism in its present form.
It seems to be also evident that very few individuals within a society will risk destroying it while they still have a place in it and the means of subsistence, as miserable as they may be. Few people will take this risk. The majority will not move unless they have been driven to desperation, and a new organism is already developing which assures them of a better way of life than the one they may have at present, and a better chance to survive in the future.
This digression about social economic organisms should be enough to help us to understand the following chapters. But there is no way that we can avoid returning to this subject in the course of the discussion because it is the main underlying topic of all socio-economic systems.