law immanent in the human race, as it is a law of all living beings,
although its forms continually change and though it undergoes more and
more attenuation.

This is still the way it appears to me, and consequently, on this point
I disagree with some socialists who have thought they could triumph more
completely over the objection urged against them in the name of
Darwinism by declaring that in human society the "struggle for
existence" is a law which is destined to lose all meaning and
applicability when the social transformation at which socialism aims
shall have been effected.[13]

It is a law which dominates tyrannically all living beings, and it must
cease to act and fall inert at the feet of Man, as if he were not merely
a link inseparable from the great biological chain!

I maintained, and I still maintain, that the struggle for existence is a
law inseparable from life, and consequently from humanity itself, but
that, though remaining an inherent and constant law, it is gradually
transformed in its essence and attenuated in its forms.

Among primitive mankind the struggle for existence is but slightly
differentiated from that which obtains among the other animals. It is
the brutal struggle for daily food or for possession of the
females--hunger and love are, in fact, the two fundamental needs and the
two poles of life--and almost its only method is muscular violence. In a
more advanced phase there is joined to this basic struggle the struggle
for political supremacy (in the clan, in the tribe, in the village, in
the commune, in the State), and, more and more, muscular struggle is
superseded by intellectual struggle.