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All life is a struggle for existence. Why should it cease to be a struggle if it spreads among the stars?
--
Chapter 14 “The Extraordinary and Remarkable Ship” (p. 239)

 

Ken MacLeod

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In the animal world we have seen that the vast majority of species live in societies, and that they find in association the best arms for the struggle for life: understood, of course, in its wide Darwinian sense — not as a struggle for the sheer means of existence, but as a struggle against all natural conditions unfavourable to the species. The animal species, in which individual struggle has been reduced to its narrowest limits, and the practice of mutual aid has attained the greatest development, are invariably the most numerous, the most prosperous, and the most open to further progress. The mutual protection which is obtained in this case, the possibility of attaining old age and of accumulating experience, the higher intellectual development, and the further growth of sociable habits, secure the maintenance of the species, its extension, and its further progressive evolution. The unsociable species, on the contrary, are doomed to decay.

 

Peter Kropotkin

 

From the changes that have occurred in the world, there must be drawn correct, revolutionary, Marxist-Leninist conclusions: there must be drawn such conclusions as not to create reformist and pacifist illusions and weaken the struggle against imperialism, but to strengthen ever more this just struggle: there must be drawn such conclusions as not to alienate the peoples from the cause of revolution, but bring them ever closer to it, not divert them from the struggle for their national liberation, but raise this struggle to an ever higher level.

 

Enver Hoxha

 

It is now necessary to face the truth and to acknowledge against all prejudices that the struggle that the Albanian tribe is leading today is a natural and unavoidable historic struggle for a different political life than that experienced under Turkish rule – different also from that which its neighbours Serbia, Greece and Montenegro would like to force upon the Albanians.

 

Dimitrije Tucovic

 

In the name of the dogma of struggle for existence and natural selection, they paint for us in the saddest colors this primitive humanity whose hunger and thirst, always badly satisfied, were their only passions; those sombre times when men had no other care and no other occupation than to quarrel with one another over their miserable nourishment. To react against those retrospective reveries of the philosophy of the eighteenth century and also against certain religious doctrines, to show with some force that the paradise lost is not behind us and that there is in our past nothing to regret, they believe we ought to make it dreary and belittle it systematically. Nothing is less scientific than this prejudice in the opposite direction. If the hypotheses of Darwin have a moral use, it is with more reserve and measure than in other sciences. They overlook the essential element of moral life, that is, the moderating influence that society exercises over its members, which tempers and neutralizes the brutal action of the struggle for existence and selection. Wherever there are societies, there is altruism, because there is solidarity.

 

Emile Durkheim

 

Goethe in Weimar sleeps, and Greece,
Long since, saw Byron’s struggle cease.

 

Matthew Arnold