Self-Made Man and His Undoing (1993)

Book Review from the October 1993 issue of the Socialist Standard

Jonathan Kingdon: Self-Made Man and His Undoing. Simon At Schuster £20.

Human beings are related to other animals, and most closely to the other primates, especially chimpanzees and gorillas. The first hominid fossils (those belonging to the homo family) are found in Africa, and date back perhaps two-and-a-half million years. The origin of modern humans — as opposed to earlier hominid species such as erectus or Neanderthals is more controversial, but one theory again sees an African homeland, around 200,000 years ago. Since that lime, members of homo sapiens have expanded over most of the planet, changed the world we inhabit in numerous ways, and have themselves been changed in the process. It is this last point which is the focus of Kingdon's book, and, as the title suggest, his view is that humans have changed themselves, by dint of adapting to the world around them.

Our differences from our nearest animal relatives, the chimps, are enormous, even though we are genetically very close to them. For instance, we have a very different facial structure, with far smaller jaws and teeth. This may be explained as the result of humans' developing cooking, so that we no longer needed massive jaws to cope with raw meat and plants, which were eliminated through natural selection. Our hands became more efficient at manipulating tools, as an upright stance meant that they were not needed for support. In general, the invention of tools and technology led to quite drastic changes in our physical characteristics. As jaws became smaller, relative brain size increased and the capacity for speech — with all its implications for social organization evolved.

If the idea of an African origin for modern humans is correct, our ancestors must have spread out from there to the rest of the Earth. Probably the first expansion was to India, and thence to the rest of Asia and Australasia. Sea levels were lower than today, and 65.000 years ago Australia was linked to New Guinea, but travel from the Asian mainland still required boats, which can now be seen as one of the greatest human inventions. Perhaps 40,000 years ago, moderns expanded into Europe, replacing the Neanderthals (though others regard Neanderthals as one of the many ancestors of modern humans). The American continent was settled, from Asia, only around 15,000 years ago.

Human expansion over the Earth led to encounters with many different kinds of prey and different types of climate, and humans adapted to their local circumstances, thus leading to the evolution of different human appearances in terms of build, skin colour and hair type. For instance, people from tropics have on the whole far less body hair than other humans: this is presumably because body hair impairs the efficacy of sweating and so makes it harder for the body to remain cool. Comparably, people in areas where malaria occurs have developed defences against it, such as the sickle cell trait. Brown eyes, probably the original human colour, are a better protection in bright sunlight than blue. Blue eyes turn up in various parts of the world, including Africa and India, but are dominant only in northern Europe, where summer is short and selection working against non-brown eyes must have been weaker.

Kingdon deals dismissively with the concept of "race”: all humans are hybrids with mixed ancestries, and it is quite impossible to identify distinct races. As he says in a fine phrase:

“What it is to be a human will always be more complex, interesting and important than what it is to be any particular type of human."

The "undoing" of the title is dealt with in the last couple of chapters. Unfortunately this is a familiar and unoriginal discussion of environmental damage and the supposed dangers of over population. The usefulness of the book, however, lies elsewhere. It helps, to be honest, to have some prior knowledge of the topics he discusses, but Kingdon gives a clear and well-argued account of human evolution and adaptation, stressing all the while how solving the problems of surviving and reproducing has been the key to this aspect of human history.

Paul Bennett

Proper Gander: Realistically altruistically (2025)

The Proper Gander column from the April 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

Radio 4’s The Infinite Monkey Cage has clocked up 32 series of ‘witty, irreverent’ conversations on science-related subjects, helmed by physicist Brian Cox and comedian Robin Ince. A recent edition asked ‘How selfish are we really?’, although the panellists focused on the flipside of selfishness: altruism, discussing the notion through the frameworks of psychology and evolutionary biology. Psychologist Matti Wilks and comedian Jo Brand give our usual definition of altruism as someone making an effort to be kind to another person with no expectation of anything in return.

Steve Jones, a professor of genetics, defines it in a more Darwinian way as an act which reduces someone’s fitness to survive (by using their time and energy on something they don’t directly gain from) and which increases someone else’s fitness. Superficially, it could seem counter-intuitive to do this, but as Steve clarifies, our genes will spread if we benefit our group overall, and our brains are wired to get a positive feeling when we behave in a nice way. In day-to-day life we don’t tend to think about altruism like this, and run with a general inclination to be helpful with a background assumption of ‘reciprocal altruism’, that if we act altruistically towards someone, then in future they will act similarly.

The panel ponders the extent to which this exists across the animal kingdom, particularly among our distant relatives. Steve says chimps engage in reciprocal altruism by picking lice off each other, although they also fight more than homo sapiens, which is why we’ve had the evolutionary advantage. Our ancestors went from living and collaborating in extended families to larger groups, and he adds that reciprocal altruism was later embedded by religions which have ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ among their principles, with problems arising because as he says wryly, religions hate each other. He mentions that the structure of The Bible and Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species are ‘remarkably similar’, both starting with describing origins and ending with ‘mysterious stuff which you don’t understand’.

Psychologists have aimed to explain altruism through research into our views and behaviour. Matti refers to studies which found that people are prone to empathise with and be altruistic to those they feel akin to, such as Americans giving money to victims of the California wildfires rather than to people in need elsewhere. Children have been understood to also be ‘parochial’ in their ethical outlook, although Matti’s own research has shown they can be more likely than adults to say we should help people in faraway places. This may be because they haven’t yet been socialised to see some people as ‘other’.

The programme doesn’t consider how the type of society we live in shapes relations between people and therefore how we behave altruistically, although it gives numerous examples of this happening. There is the ‘identifiable victim effect’, shown in tests when people gave more money to a charity which used a picture of one person in need than when a picture of several people was shown. While this ostensibly demonstrates that we find it easier to be empathetic and altruistic to individuals rather than groups, the effect depends on there being a context of scarcity and charity, and possibly notions of ‘otherness’ too. Any conclusions drawn about altruism in these studies only apply to this societal situation, rather than necessarily being basic truths of what it is to be human. Further research has found that we’re less altruistic towards large groups, and this could also be socially conditioned. When Matti is asked how altruism expands from small groups (where its benefits are most obvious) to bigger ones, she replies that psychology hasn’t done a good job of illuminating this. To give a socialist perspective not explored in the programme, perhaps wide-scale altruism happens when people see through the divisions between groups which capitalism encourages and recognise our common humanity. This may also explain something else which Matti says psychologists haven’t been able to sufficiently account for: ‘extraordinary’ altruists, those who are exceptionally altruistic to strangers without expectations of reciprocity, such as kidney donors.

Steve cites blood donation as a familiar example of a ‘purely’ altruistic act, at least in the UK, where the only payment the donor receives is a cup of tea and a biscuit. In America, people receive money for their blood, and commodifying the process at this point has meant that to minimise additional costs to profit-hungry healthcare companies, inadequate checks have been done to avoid infected blood being passed on. Matti says that elsewhere, introducing payments to donors has led to a reduction in people coming forward, as the ‘intrinsic motivation’ for doing so had gone when it became monetised.

Economic considerations with altruism are also acknowledged by Matti when she says that it’s a ‘position of privilege’ to be altruistic, meaning that people often can’t afford to give to others if they lack enough goods themselves. This isn’t a blanket rule, though, as levels of trust and compassion in a group affect the extent that altruism is the norm. To try and measure how much altruism there is, researchers have compared which groups have more or less expansive ‘moral circles’, which contain things considered to have moral concern. Trying to quantify these qualities is ‘not as pure a metric’ as comparing countries on their GDP, as Matti says. Asked which country is the most altruistic, Steve jokes that it might be Norway because there’s nothing else to do there.

Steve’s contributions from the perspective of evolutionary biology tell us that we’re primed to act in an altruistic way because this has been evolutionarily advantageous. Some sort of altruism is essential for us to be able to live in groups, especially harmoniously. How altruism is manifested, and how psychology attempts to explain it, are moulded by society’s structures. In capitalism, we are conditioned to view some groups as ‘other’, and behaving altruistically happens through the constraints which a market-driven, divisive society imposes.

Mike Foster

Is anybody up there? (1982)

From the November 1982 issue of the Socialist Standard

Last year the American government published the proceedings of a conference in California in June 1979 whose ostensible purpose was to explore the prospects for research into the nature and distribution of life in the universe (Life in the Universe, NASA Conference Publication 2156. US Government Printing Office). While the case for the establishment of a sane and harmonious society here on earth is obviously not dependent on such findings, the papers do contain much of interest to socialists.

The conference considered the origin of life, life supporting environments, the evolution of complex life, the detectability of technically advanced civilisations and the problem of locating extraterrestrial intelligence. Two different though complementary approaches are encompassed here. The first seeks to develop an understanding of life and the environments necessary to support it. Such research cannot, of course, uniquely determine the existence of life outside the planet earth, but will enable attention to be focused on the more promising candidates among the heavenly bodies. The second approach has already been christened SETI (Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence), and involves listening for potential radio transmissions from intelligent life, and an examination of suitable stars for target. A research programme has been established to pursue these aims.

The advance in thinking in this branch of science since Darwin wrote The Origin of Species is as immense as that made in the same period in the design of weapons of war. The two are in fact linked, as illustrated by the development of nuclear bombs and the use of space-craft for reconnaissance and, potentially at least, for other military purposes. It is a mistake to think of this advance of science in terms of increasing the number of solved problems (with a corresponding reduction of those unsolved), although there is a sense in which this is a valid viewpoint. Attempts to attack one particular problem often lead to unexpected results which themselves cause new questions to be posed and fresh problems identified as requiring solutions. An example of this was the bringing back to earth for analysis of samples from the moon. The results have been somewhat misleadingly reported as having caused confusion among scientists. In fact the longterm result is an enlargement of horizons and an enrichment of understanding.

Certainly this aspect of scientific research can be irritating. It requires the modification of theories in the face of new evidence, often the abandonment of what had appeared to be promising lines of enquiry. Thus the appearance can easily be given that no progress is being made. It is here that the sniping movement calling itself Creation Science has found its opportunity. There have surely been few organisations to which the word reactionary can be more appropriately applied. Claiming that science has failed to provide the answers, it advocates a return to the old creation theories of religion. Its adherents focus on biological evolution and Darwin's work and pose the question, “Was Darwin right?”, as though they were continuing the famous debate between Bishop Wilberforce and T.H. Huxley. Their claim that the fossil record does not support Darwin is technically correct although rather impertinent. Darwin as was understandable in his time, saw evolution as proceeding at a much more constant rate than present-day evidence will support. In fact, as presented by Valentine [1], what now appears to have happened is lengthy periods of relative stability with small changes (microevolution) interspersed with intervals where more revolutionary events happened (macroevolution). Valentine writes: "A large mutation can produce a descendant which is infertile with members of its parental species, including its parents. If it can fertilise itself, however, it may propagate and thrive”. In the human species mutations are produced which differ considerably from their parents. This occurred with much greater frequency immediately following the atomic bombardment of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Like most mutations these were tragic, one-off cases and where they survived they did so only because human society can now prevent natural selection operating. The point is, however, that it was the normal human reproductive process which brought forth these ‘children’, and to claim that a ‘creator’ is at work here is worse than ridiculous.

The concept of concurrent micro and macroevolution appears to be well supported by the fossil record. Indeed in the last 20 years one of the main arguments used by “creationists' has disappeared. As reported by Margolis and Havelock [2], it used to be thought that the Precambrian rocks of the Ediacaran period (700 million to 570 million years ago approximately) did not contain a fossil record. The pioneering work of Elso Barghoorn and Stanley Tyler of Harvard University has shown that this is not the case, the difficulty having been related to detection techniques and scientific expectation. Margolis and Havelock put it thus: “These investigators realised that the conspicuous fossil record of large organisms must have been preceded by something smaller. Such ideas led them to microscopic studies of thin sections of unaltered sedimentary rocks”. Far from supporting biblical or neo-biblical viewpoint, modern science is dealing it ever more crushing blows. This message is forcefully conveyed in nearly all the papers presented at the conference. ‘Creation science', incorporating as it does a complete misunderstanding of modern scientific method, must be largely motivated by its own deadly fear of the consequences of driving God out of the heavens. The complexity of the universe, as it is now understood, shows more clearly than ever before that the idea that we can ‘know all the answers' is a religious and not a scientific one. How could the inert matter which preceded life on earth have left sign-points to show us how it came to be where it was?

When talking about the possibility of detecting the existence of life outside our own planet, we of course mean life as we know it’; that is. life that has evolved in much the same way from much the same material conditions and resources as has life here on earth. We cannot, of course, even begin to discuss any other possible method of life evolution as it would be totally outside our experience and knowledge. All that can be said is that while this possibility cannot be entirely ruled out, the chances do seem to be extremely small. The phrase ‘conditions which will support life’ must also be taken to mean ‘conditions similar to those on earth’.

The space exploration which has already taken place certainly appears to have ruled out any chance of life at the present time anywhere else in the solar system. No attempt was made by sensate beings to intercept or communicate with the spacecraft, and nowhere was a life supporting environment detected. However Chang [3] suggests that Venus and Mars may have supported some form of life in the past. As for the chances of life further afield, this appears to boil down to which is the greater of two very large numbers. The odds against all the requirements of organic life appearing on another plant, or perhaps a satellite, in much the same proportions as on earth, are obviously very great. Equally vast however is the number of heavenly bodies in the universe. The biblical writer who compared their abundance to that of sand on the seashore was considerably more right than he knew. He probably did not believe what he wrote, but he has proved not to be far out. There has even been speculation that the planet earth may not be unique — that is to say. there may be another bloke called Edge writing at this instant about life in the universe for another journal called Socialist Standard on an identical planet many light years away! Opinion at the conference was divided on this issue. Drake [4] states: “The current consensus concerning extraterrestrial life is that it exists in abundance in the universe". However in the present state of knowledge the opinion of Lovejoy [5] seems more realistic: “I think it quite reasonable to suppose that despite the immensity of the known universe, the specificity in the physiostructure of any organism is so great and its immensely complex pathway of progression so ancient that the probability of re-expression is simply infinitesimal". This, needless to say. has nothing in common with the religious view of man as the special creation of God. Lovejoy’s comments are the product of more than a century of dedicated scientific observation.

What is the real purpose of this conference? In his introductory remarks Frosch [6] said: "The ‘golden fleece' idea that searches, gropings for knowledge whose purpose we do not understand are silly and some kind of rip off, results from sheer lack of understanding, lack of imagination and lack of perception of the meaning of the history of the human race". As far as it went, this was very well said. However, it would be naive indeed to accept that the gathering was concerned with pure research for the long-term benefit of humanity. Under the present social system funds are not provided for such studies. Certain capitalist interests, of course, stand to benefit in the short term from the construction of the high technology instruments required to scan the universe for life. Spacecraft travelling up to the speed of light have been envisaged. Generally speaking, however, such interests, despite all their lobbying, are unlikely by themselves to generate enough pressure to force governments, considering the interests of the capitalist class as a whole, to provide them with the necessary finance. Not surprisingly, “earth politics" is ignored in all of the papers. This is an indication, however, that the participants implicitly accepted not only that there is no feasible alternative to the capitalist system here on earth, but that the advanced civilisations which they hope to find elsewhere will be capitalist in character also.

In discussing how such advanced civilisations may be detected, Braccwell [7] unwittingly and grimly admits this when he says, "incidental signals offer more interesting grounds for speculation. There is of course the possibility of emission from bomb explosions. Sustained nuclear reactions for the purpose of power generation do not seem a likely source because leakage would represent waste”. Unlike CND, it would appear that this author holds justifiably pessimistic views of the possibility of removing the threat of nuclear war while retaining the system that causes it. It can reasonably be assumed that the conference would have been no more optimistic about the prospect of tackling the problems of pollution and depletion of natural resources. These are also insoluble within capitalism, and are seriously worrying the more thinking among our rulers.

There are perhaps two obvious ways in which such people may see communication with other life-supporting planets as offering a way out. First, there is the hope that some "super intelligence” may be contacted who could point to solutions which have escaped dumb earthlings. However socialists see this as another form of the "great man" idea, and thus doomed to failure. Secondly, and perhaps the speculation on long-distance space travel is indicative, there is the possibility of transplanting earth capitalism to another site (and eventually wrecking this place in the way the earth is now being wrecked). This may prove to be a more practical proposition than trying to establish life support systems on other members of the solar system which are at present inimical to life. Such a migration could involve war. not only with existing inhabitants, but fierce conflict between the rival capitalist groups on earth as they try to extend their space colonies at each other's expense, just as happened here. This scepticism over motives however does not detract from the value of this publication as an abundant source of information and valuable insight into current scientific thinking.

E. C. Edge

References

(All references are taken from NASA Conference Publication 2156)

1. Emergence and Radiation of Multicellular Organisms; James W. Valentine (University of California)

2. Atmosphere and Evolution; Lynn Margolis (Boston University) and James E. Lovelock (Reading University, UK)

3. Organic Chemical Evolution; Sherwood Chang (Ames Research Centre. NASA)

4. Comments by Frank D. Drake (Professor of Astronomy. Cornell University) as session chairman for session 5.

5. Evolution of Man and its Implications for General Principles of the Evolution of Intelligent Life; C. Owen Lovejoy (Kent State University, Ohio)

6. Introductory remarks by Robert A. Frosch (President of the American Association of Engineering Societies)

7. Manifestations of Advanced Civilisations; Ronald N. Braccwell (Stanford University, California)

Engels on Human Evolution (2010)

From the September 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Links to Part 1 and Part 2.

Engels followed the impact of Darwin’s ideas more closely than Marx. He may even have read Darwin's “The Descent of Man”.

Unlike Marx, Engels continued his interest in Darwin and things Darwinian beyond the initial general public furore created by the publication of Origin. Apart from references to Darwin in his correspondence with Marx and others, the first major piece of work Engels produced was the notes for the unfinished The Rôle of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, written between May and June 1876, over five years after the publication of the Descent.

This speculative, but interesting, work which includes a strong element of Lamarckism (but even Darwin had to resort to a version of Lamarck), can be seen as a Marxian response to the “Man’s place in nature” debate in at least two important ways. First of all, it attempts to show in what way humans are different from other animals. Unlike Darwin, who was eager to point to the similarities across species, to indicate the origins of typical human behaviour in a simpler form in other species, and that humans were only quantitatively different from animals, Engels was adamant in showing both the difference and similarities between humans and other animals. Whilst speculating in how human labour activity had evolved from earlier forms along with the evolution of physical organisation, and therefore within the Darwinian explanatory framework, he was also wanted to show how human labour differed from that of lower animals. Following the same line of argument he and Marx had arrived at thirty years previously in The German Ideology, he wrote:

“Animals…change the environment by their activities in the same way, even if not to the same extent, as man does, and these changes, as we have seen, in turn react upon and change those who made them…But animals exert a lasting effect on their environment unintentionally and, as far as the animals themselves are concerned, accidentally. The further removed men are from animals, however, the more their effect on nature assumes the character of premeditated, planned action directed towards preconceived ends” (Marx and Engels Collected Works, volume 25, p.459).

“In short, the animal merely uses its environment, and brings about changes in it simply by its presence; man by his changes makes it serve his ends, masters it. This is the final, essential distinction between man and other animals, and once again it is labour that brings about this distinction” (ibid., p.460).

In addition to this evolutionary explanation of the difference between human and animal labour, Engels’s argument can also be seen as a materialist response to Wallace’s “unseen spirit” explanation of the difference between humans and animal. Furthermore, Engels also opposed the mental materialism of Darwin, who based the difference between humans and other animals in the more developed and complex mentality of humans; a form of idealism that had dominated Western philosophy since the rise of Christianity:

“All merit for the swift advance of civilisation was ascribed to the mind, to the brain. Man became accustomed to explain their actions as arising out of thought instead of their needs (which in any case are reflected and perceived in the mind); and so in the course of time there emerged that idealistic world outlook which, especially since the fall of the world of antiquity, has dominated men’s minds. It still rules them to such a degree that even the most materialistic natural scientists of the Darwinian school are still unable to form any clear idea of the origin of man, because under this ideological influence they do not recognize the part that has been played therein by labour.”

Did Engels Read The Descent?

Engels seems to have kept up with the Darwinian literature on human evolution, making reference to T.H. Huxley, Ernst Haeckel, John Lubbock Charles Lyell and Alfred Russel Wallace, although it is not always clear which of their works he is referring to. So it is somewhat surprising that there is no explicit reference to The Descent or to what Darwin wrote on the matter. But seeing that he had read all these other authors, who had made their contribution before 1871, and that Darwin was the most important figure in this group, it would seem unusual that Engels would not read The Descent. Also, he had five years to read him before he started work on The Rôle of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man in May 1876.

There is, however, some textual evidence that Engels did read The Descent. In the second paragraph of his pamphlet, Engels writes:

“Darwin has given us an approximate description of these ancestors of ours. They were completely covered with hair, they had beards and pointed ears, and they lived in bands in trees.”

This description attributed to Darwin comes in part from The Descent. In Chapter 6, “On the Affinities and Genealogy of Man,” Darwin writes:

“The early progenitors of man must have been once covered with hair, both sexes having beards; their ears were probably pointed, and capable of movement; and their bodies were provided with a tail, having proper muscles”

(Darwin The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex, 1871; Penguin edition 2004, p.188).

The reference to “they lived in bands in trees“ too seems to have come from The Descent, as Darwin writes:    

“We thus learn that man is descended from a hairy, tailed quadruped, probably arboreal in habits, and an inhabitant of the Old World.” (p. 678)

Therefore, unless Engels got these from another author, these two separate references provide adequate justification for thinking that Engels did read The Descent.

From Darwin to Marx: From Biology to History

Human beings possess a dual character, as both biological and historical beings, in a radically different way from any other animal.

For non-human animals, the biological, structural determination of their activity is dominant. As they get more biologically complex, they acquire the capacity for their activity to be modified by previous interactions with the world, but they live in the “now”; their activity is concerned with adjusting to the immediate circumstances they are interacting with. They have a blind past, as a species and as individual organism, but not a history.

Only humans have history. Through their linguistic ability and social co-operation, human beings have over centuries achieved (it is not nature-given) a greater degree of purpose and agency than any other species. As a result, they not only have a history, but can make history. But making history requires that the impersonal, law-like relations of the capital relationship, of production for profit, be destroyed and replaced by a free association of producers who create a world in their own interests and their own purpose. Only then will humanity shift from a determined pre-history to a determining history.

Ed Blewitt

(concluded)

Some Publications. (1907)

From the April 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

Messrs. Watts & Co. are issuing, as one of the R.P.A. Cheap Reprints, Mr. Dennis Hird’s “An Easy Outline of Evolution,” which has passed through a large edition in a more expensive form. They are also issuing the popular edition of Professor Haeckel’s “The Evolution of Man,” complete in a shilling volume with stout paper covers. It consists of nearly 400 double-column, well-printed pages, and has more than 400 excellent illustrations—truly a remarkable publication at the low price mentioned.

Halo, Halo! (2024)

The Halo Halo Column from the April 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Nautilus, 28 February, reviews a book by a Professor of Psychiatry at the American University of Yale. The article is titled Evolution Is Going According to God’s Plan. The reviewer says its author believes ‘evolutionary theory is, in fact, theologically reaffirming; natural selection is purposeful and guided, and provides both evidence for a creator.’ Double quelle surprise! The Prof is a lifelong Mormon and is now a Latter Day Saints Bishop.

It seems it’s not only Christian evangelicals who have problems with reality, other religions do too. The Yetkin Report, 23 February, notes that those in charge of education in Turkey, having their country’s children’s best interests at heart, banned Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution from being taught in schools several years ago. Now ‘The Ministry of (Turkey’s) National Education, under the title of the biology curriculum, has introduced the notion of creationism into the 2024-25 schedule’.

Atlantic Council, 16 February, reports an elderly Iranian gentleman has seriously upset the Iranian authorities and has quite rightly (ahem) been taken into custody to undergo rehabilitation. George Orwell’s 1984 wasn’t just a work of fiction but a manual used by totalitarian regimes for the suppression of dissent. Totalitarian? Did someone mention Julian Assange? The heinous crime of this individual? Posting himself singing and dancing on social media. ‘The hardline Islamist world-view of the Islamic Republic, and its small but powerful constituency, subscribes to outlawing public dancing and singing as “un-Islamic” practices.’

American politician Mike Johnson again. Windytimes (14 February) notes that he flies three flags outside his office. The national flag, the State flag and ‘a white flag with a green tree in the centre and the words “An Appeal to Heaven”. This flag, which originated in the American Revolution, today is associated with a religious movement, New Apostolic Reformation, a rapidly growing force among various evangelical and charismatic groups that seeks to conform society’s seven spheres—education, religion, family, business, government, arts, and entertainment—with their interpretations of Christian scriptures and history’.

Any extraterrestrials who arrive to check out the third rock from the Sun would, if they have any sense, turn right around and avoid it like the proverbial. It is to be sincerely hoped that such visitors are not Vogons intent on demolishing the planet to provide an interplanetary space by-pass. Douglas Adams in his series of books beginning with Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy was using his imagination. There have been many who have insisted that they have indeed been abducted by aliens or who have been taken up into a UFO and had unspeakable things happen to them.

A Frenchman named Claude Maurice Marcel Vorilhon claimed to have met with ETs and, in December 1973, formed the Raëlian Movement and changed his name to Raël. Perhaps these alien visitors possess a twisted sense of humour because the number of times that various religious/cult founders have had revelations conveyed to them through hearing or meeting with ‘other worldly’ beings is quite a coincidence.

DC

Letter: Naked bonobos? (2007)

Letter to the Editors from the February 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Naked bonobos?

Dear Editors

I agree with much of “Bonobo Fides” (Pathfinders, January), but I would like to take issue on a few significant points.The author follows the sources on which he relies in placing too much emphasis on the power of the “combined females” as a deterrent to male violence. Bonobos of both genders keep the peace mainly by using friendly activities – grooming, play and sharing food as well as frequent sex – to soothe the tensions that might lead to violence. (They don’t “run off into the bushes,” by the way, but have sex in plain view of others. Here the author is mixing up bonobos with humans.) It also helps that with bonobos, unlike chimps, the males can’t tell which females are ovulating, so they are unable to compete to sire offspring.

Bonobos may “live largely as vegetarians,” but they do have a taste for meat. “Like chimpanzees, they are ready to grab and eat small antelope infants. They eat flying squirrels and sometimes earthworms” (Demonic Males, p. 216).

Unlike chimps, however, they never eat monkeys. Instead, bonobos play with monkeys as though they were pets. Monkeys are terrified of chimps but show no fear of bonobos. Apparently, this reflects a cultural taboo against killing and eating fellow primates, and such a taboo may be one reason why bonobos rarely attack and never kill one another. (Local humans have a similar taboo against hunting bonobos.)

Would chimps adopt bonobo behaviour in a bonobo environment and vice versa, “given long enough”? I think this is an exaggeration. Bonobos are a distinct species, not a kind of chimpanzee. (“Pygmy chimp” is a misleading term that dates from the time when this  was not yet recognized.) To the extent that bonobo sociality is a product of genetically  determined characteristics like large sexual organs and always being on heat, environmental change can affect it only to a limited degree. Over a period long enough  for evolution to occur the bonobo might lose these characteristics, but then it would no longer be a bonobo!

Especially for socialists, the good news about the bonobo is how close it is to man. We have 98.7 percent of our genes in common with the bonobo. That’s the same figure as for the chimpanzee, but in numerous respects we – and also, according to physical anthropologist Adrienne Zihlman, our proto-human ancestors living in Africa 3 to 5 million years ago – are closer to bonobos than to chimps. This applies, for example, to bodily proportions, facial appearance (look at the photos in Frans de Waal and Frans Lanting, Bonobo: The Forgotten Ape), posture (bonobos walk upright much of the time, along trails that they make themselves), and of course sexual functioning. In 1967 Desmond Morris gave ammunition to the “human nature” objectors to socialism by “exposing” man as The Naked Ape. It’s not quite so bad if we change that to “the naked bonobo”!

Only a few thousand bonobos are left, all of them in the war-torn Congo. Their extinction would be a tragedy for man too, not least because they are living proof of the positive side of our evolutionary heritage.

Stephen Shenfield (by e-mail)

Human capacity (2001)

Book Review from the December 2001 issue of the Socialist Standard

Becoming Human. Evolution and Human Uniqueness by Ian Tattersall, OUP, 2001.

Like all the other life-forms on this planet, we humans are the product of a process of evolution from earlier life-forms. Our immediate ancestors will have been ape-like animals which had evolved to walk upright. The fossil record suggests that there will have been many species of such animals, from one line of which we are descended. All the other lines not only became extinct but left no descendants either. The last of these other types of Homo to go extinct were the Neanderthals, a mere (in evolutionary time) 27,000 years ago.

All this is described by Tattersall, who is the curator of the Department of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, in this paperback edition of a book that was first published in 1998. According to him, although there was no predetermined course of evolution leading to us as the “highest form” of life, there is a feature that distinguishes us from all other life-forms—the capacity for symbolic thought, i.e. the ability to generate and manipulate complex abstract symbols (words naming parts of our environment and relationships between them). This allows us not just to react to the external world but to refashion it. This of course is tied up with language and it is what makes us unique. It has enabled us to develop technologies that have changed both the rest of nature and the societies in which we live.

Tattersall speaks of “human capacity” (as opposed to “human nature”) and clashes with those, such as the sociobiologists and the evolutionary psychologists, who have a very narrow view of this capacity, seeing it as being severely limited by our genes. But, Tattersall points out, while our genes can’t be ignored “they only intervene in our behaviours in an indirect way, by programming the development of our brains”. Therefore, “if we are to understand the complexities of our behaviour, it is to our brains, not directly to our genes, that we have to look”.

When we do this then, we can add, we find that our brains allow us, as a species, to adopt – and, as prehistory and history bear out, we have in fact adopted – a great variety of different behaviours depending on the natural, economic and social environments we have found ourselves in. So, contrary to the biological determinists of various hues, “human nature” is not a barrier to socialism. On the contrary, our biologically evolved and inherited “human capacity” will allow us to live in a socialist society.

Tattersall has his own particular theory of how our brains developed, which is not accepted by all anthropologists and palaeontologists. He suggests that the ability to think abstractly, and to express such thoughts vocally, arose for other reasons than directly to be able to do these, for instance perhaps as a result of the mental images involved in fashioning tools, in one line of Homo which only later exploited this capacity. Hence his view that the Neanderthals did not use symbolic language.

This is a neat refutation of the views of those who claim that our brains only evolved for life on the open grasslands of East Africa and that therefore we have “stone age minds” which make it difficult for us to live under capitalism let alone in a socialist society. In any event, Tattersall points out, the idea that the brains of us modern humans (Homo sapiens) evolved out of living in a single environment has been overstated. During the time that the various different species of Homo evolved, and all except the line that led to us became extinct, the natural environment was unstable. The Earth cooled and warmed and cooled again, shifting patterns of vegetation even in East Africa. “It is out of this ecologically and geographically unstable world that our ancestors ultimately arose,” concludes Tattersall. “The widely cited notion of a monolithic ‘ancestral environment’ that, through our genetic heritage, still conditions our behavior today is simply untenable”.

Adam Buick

Darwin’s Origin of Species (2006)

Book Review from the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

Darwin’s Origin of Species by Janet Browne. (Atlantic Books, 2006)

In a New York Times poll in November 2004, 55 percent of respondents agreed that God had created human beings in their present form. Clearly the Darwinian revolution has some way to go. Darwin’s revolutionary work was first published in November 1859 with the full title: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. And yet the theory of evolution could have been known under a different name. In the previous year the naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace had sent Darwin an essay in which he set out the theory of evolution by natural selection. Darwin’s friends hurriedly arranged for both works to be published at the same time, so the theory should really be known as the Wallace-Darwin theory, if not the Wallace theory of evolution. In any event, Wallace and Darwin became good friends and Wallace collaborated with Darwin in his research and helped in the revised editions of Origin of Species.

Origin of Species went through six editions during Darwin’s lifetime and he made many corrections and alterations. In the fifth edition (1869), at Wallace’s suggestion, Darwin first introduced the notorious phrase “survival of the fittest.” Wallace had taken this phrase from the writings of Herbert Spencer, a well known atheist and supporter of capitalism in late nineteenth century Britain. Spencer’s ideas would became known as “Social Darwinism” and he maintained that society was an organism exactly the same as a biological organism. From his perspective he argued against the building of lighthouses around the British coastline because, so he claimed, shipwrecks were “nature’s” (i.e. capitalism’s) way of sorting out the fit from the unfit. Darwin had never taken any of Spencer’s ideas on social evolution seriously and the phrase “survival of the fittest” is at odds with Darwin’s own ideas about natural selection by adaptation.

Browne ends her account of Wallace by saying that he went on to become a “utopian socialist.” In fact he became a supporter of utopian capitalism. He advocated land nationalisation and was an enthusiast for Edward Bellamy’s state capitalist vision of the future in his novel Looking Backward (1888). When Darwin died in April 1882 aged seventy-three, Origin of Species had truly become one of the “Books That Shook The World,” the publisher’s title for this series of biographies which includes Marx’s Das Kapital (see the review in the October Socialist Standard). There is a slight link between the two books. Marx thought very highly of Origin of Species and sent Darwin a presentation copy of Das Kapital. But he did not, as sometimes claimed, offer to dedicate Das Kapital to Darwin. Rather it was Marx’s son-in-law, Edward Aveling, who offered to dedicate one of his books to Darwin. Darwin never read Das Kapital and he rejected Aveling’s offer.

Lew Higgins

Why the need for Conscription? (1995)

Book Review from the August 1995 issue of the Socialist Standard

On Human Nature by Edward O. Wilson (Penguin. £7.99.)

First published in 1978, this book is now available in paperback. Wilson is one of the leading proponents of the school of thought known as socio-biology. which he defines as “the scientific study of the biological basis of all forms of social behaviour in all kinds of organisms, including man." The crucial word here is ‘social’: no-one would deny that human characteristics such as walking on two legs have a biological basis, but the question is how much of the behaviour that might appear to be learned is actually inherited with our genes. The basic claim of socio-biologists is that Darwin’s mechanism of evolution through natural selection can be extended to explaining social behaviour. Darwin argued that properties (such as bigger brains) which enabled individuals to survive and reproduce more than others would inevitably spread at the cost of less advantageous variants. Socio-biology says that human socio-cultural behaviour is equally influenced by evolution, and that since for all but a few thousand years humans have lived as hunter-gatherers, the traits that were useful in such a way of life still dominate.

To take a particular example which is relevant to the case for Socialism, Wilson argues that humans are innately aggressive. In the jargon he employs, this becomes: "human beings have a marked hereditary disposition to aggressive behaviour". The evidence cited for this is that warfare has been endemic to every form of human society. Hunter- gatherers supposedly relied on warfare to defend territory and resources, so people predisposed to aggression would have had more chance of surviving and so passing on their "aggressive" genes to their offspring than other more pacific individuals. Human aggression is then seen as not simply an animal instinct, but a result of an evolution that has predisposed us to divide other people into friend and foe, to be suspicious of the actions of strangers and to solve conflict by means of aggression. War can supposedly be avoided by inculcating cross-cutting loyalties in people, so that any simple “them- us" distinction is invalid.

However, a broader look at hunter-gatherer society might, in contrast, suggest that we are genetically adapted to live in egalitarian non-market societies (not that socialists would make such a claim). There are many characteristics of hunter-gatherer societies that Wilson ignores, and that would suggest a very different picture of human beings. In any case, the argument for the innateness of aggression falls at the fact that the overwhelming majority of people don't take part in war, and that those who do usually have to be conscripted or otherwise forced to do so. And under capitalism, war is not caused by a dislike of strangers but by straightforward economic motives, motives which are in the interests only of a small ruling class, not of the majority of the population. If "Human beings are strongly predisposed to respond with unreasoning hatred to external threats", as Wilson claims, then this will be no problem in a society which is not based on such threats or competition. Even if Wilson’s explanation for aggressive behaviour were correct (and it isn’t), this would be no argument against Socialism.

Wilson describes Marxism as “socio-biology without biology.", though he does not expand on this cryptic statement The political nature of his claims is revealed more clearly in his dogmatic declaration that the anarchist society proposed by Bakunin is "biologically impossible”, but again he does not expand on this. Leaving aside the question of the kind of society that Bakunin actually advocated, the implication that a society without government is unachievable is simply nonsense. What socio-biology cannot come to grips with is the fact that human nature enables us to learn and adapt, and so transcend the limitations placed on all other creatures by their genetic endowment.

Paul Bennett

Mr. Brown goes to town (1946)

From the August 1946 issue of the Socialist Standard

Mr. W. J. Brown, M.P., in an Evening Standard article (15/3/46), "What Price Utopia?”, says Darwinism reduces man to a non-moral unrestrained biological process (unproven, of course) and has served to justify the barbarities of capitalist anarchy and the Marxian "Class Struggle.” Also Marxism is merely its application to the political field. Such trivialities are a commonplace of anti-Marxist propaganda, but Mr. Brown is as useful as anyone else to provide the means for restating some Marxist essentials.

His unsupported contention that Darwinism is unproven implies that its partner in crime, Marxism, is likewise. “David” Brown thus kills two ”Goliaths” with one stone. True Darwinism has been implemented by further research, but Darwin’s evolutionary principle of organic life—with overwhelming evidence—remains to-day the touchstone of biological science. Further, it would be a strange theory of evolution in which the theory itself failed to evolve.

Mr. Brown’s non-moral allegation exhibits abysmal ignorance as to the scope and function of the scientific method, which is a discipline of general and impersonal facts, and no more relevant to the scientist’s personal bias than pipe-fitting is applicable to a plumber’s politics. Scientific investigation is ethically neutral and no more impugned than the activity of bricklaying, regardless as to whether that activity assists in building a church or a brothel. Ethical consideration of those institutions, like other things, is a matter of social evaluation. Science as a social result is subject to social motivation, which depends on the nature of the society. In this profit-motive society, science serves to increase wealth productivity and is a social instrument for increased working-class exploitation.

In like manner is the birth and growth of scientific ideas integrated into the prevailing social structure. A closed feudal economy, with fixed hierarchical status, and where men prayed to be kept in their station of life, would have made an evolutionary conception of life impossible, even unthinkable. An early capitalism needed science, and "the reign of scientific law.” Moreover, in its quest for markets it opened up the world, and vast unknown tracts of land with unknown animals and plants, which hitherto would have made it impossible to generalise about life, could now be explored. The practical triumphs of capitalism also brought into being a leisured section who could devote time to intellectual and scientific pursuits. Thus Darwin was handed on a well documented and detailed classification of Natural History. Geological science also expanded in this expanding world and gave Darwin those vast time periods needed for the presentation of his cosmic drama. And because mid-Victorian capitalism was still expanding, what more natural that the capitalist class should, with mid-Victorian complacency, view it as the best of all possible worlds and see in Darwin’s scientific theory their own social projection as "the fittest to survive.” But the first expanding bloom has withered, and in the sombre deepening of modern capitalism’s insoluble contradictions and conflicts the theme of scientific apologetics is replaced by mysticism and miracles; virile confidence gives way to doubt and even despair, unconscious credos, perhaps, of a doomed social order.

Is there a parallel, then, between Darwinism and Marxism? The answer, is only in so far as they both reveal the same ordered pattern of evolutionary development. Purely biological considerations, however, do not hold good in social relationships. Society is not a biological organism, but a social organisation into which men consciously enter into relationships for a given end. The development of society is not a result of man’s biological adaptation of his own organs to a natural environment, but the development of productive tools—for he is the only tool-producing animal- in a "social environment.” The enormous material advance which this tool-producing ability has made possible gives to social development its unique character. The laws that explain this unique development constitute Marxism.

Marx did not invent the class struggle, he traced it to its objective source and found it was not located in the consciousness of men but in the relationship in which they stood to each other in the division of wealth. If, for instance, you have at different periods slave labour, then the feudal windmill, and later the modern power plant, then not only will you have different methods of wealth production, but a correspondingly different division of classes of owners and non-owners in the distribution of wealth as between master and slave, feudal overlord and serf, capitalist and wage dependent. The different methods of production create then their own type of economic structure, and economic struggle over the participation of the fruits of labour. This will not only profoundly affect men’s lives, but through their lives, the social institutions and ideas of the period. Productive activity and social institutions, however, do not exist apart from or prior to each other, for all these activities are found in any period as an interrelated and interacting living whole, each exercising a mutual influence on the other. Thus politics influences religion, education, law and economic struggles, and is in turn influenced by each. But the economic factor or the way men live in order to reproduce their kind constitutes the central structural factor of social life. and forms the preponderating influence in social development. The functioning of the methods of wealth production and the changes that arise in them provide the key to the driving force of social development.

The significance of changes in the instruments of wealth production is seen especially in modern societies, and in the course of development a stage is reached where the forces of production come into conflict with the relations of production, which means that the method of distributing income arising from class ownership and control does not permit the fullest expansion of the productive agencies, or as Marx says: "From forms of development of the forces of production the relations of production turn into their fetters.” The class, then, that suffers from the existing operation of wealth production must seek to strike off these fetters and secure the widest possible expansion of these productive forces in their own class interests. To-day the wealth-producing but non-owning class, the working class, merely receive, the value of their labour power, or the average sufficiency of things necessary to sustain and restore their working capacities. All over and above what they produce goes to the owners of the wealth-producing agencies, the capitalist class, in the form of surplus value. The struggle of the workers to maintain or improve existing “standards” and the desire of the capitalists for greater profits produce the mutual antagonism of class interests in the participation of the social product. The capitalist class will then seek to improve the productive efficiency of the workers as an incentive for greater profit. But on the basis of income distribution, inherent in capitalist society, certain results ensue. Working class consumption of available wealth is limited by their wages, which is a fraction of this total available wealth. The consumption of surpluses in the hands of the capitalist class and its retainers is restricted by physical limitations. This tends to lead to heavier investments of the residue of these surpluses, in industries making productive goods, rather than consumption goods. This, however, ultimately leads to greater productive efficiency and consequently to a greater quantity of commodities being thrown on the market. A point is finally reached where effective demand ceases or, to put it another way, no purchasers can be found. Overproduction then results. It must not be thought that this is under-consumption of what the worker needs, for that is merely determined by the value of the commodity he sells—his labour power. Moreover, workers' wages always tend to be higher in the boom which precedes the slump. It is his under-consumption in relation to what he produces.

To produce for use, however, would undermine the very foundations of capitalist society. To turn out wealth to the fullest extent of existing plant capacity would normally invite, comparatively speaking, a “standstill” over night. For that reason its monopolistic class character compels it at one period to restrict and destroy the wealth so lavishly produced at another. For the working class it must ever remain the system of organised scarcity.

But the working class, to secure the greatest expansion of productive forces, must become a self- conscious independent political force, having as its aim the replacement of the existing system by one based on its own economic interests. For that reason it must seek through existing agencies the control of the State, which, because of its own control of the armed forces, provides the ultimate physical sanction for all social authority. This is our own historical justification as a political party. The struggle between the working class and the capitalist class is, however, the last historic form of fundamental social antagonism. With the abolition of private property in the means of production, it is no longer a question of who shall enjoy the fruits of ownership, but the vesting of ownership in the hands of a community of free producers for satisfying the needs of society as a whole. The State itself, as an instrument of class domination, likewise disappears and is replaced by “the administration of things.”

The class struggle is not then an eternally imposed necessity of “Nature red in tooth and claw." Even within capitalism working class resistance seeks to limit the system's rapacious and degrading effects. In its final outcome the class struggle establishes universal co-operation, thus constituting the greatest progressive human force in history.

Mr. Brown's diagnosis of our troubles as a Cosmic sadness, and deep frustration, haunting and troubling man's soul, and his remedy a return to the faith of the past, with its conception of the Fatherhood of God, brotherhood of man, and duty towards our neighbours, might further suggest that there is no place for morality in the Marxist critique. That is a denial of Marx's own dictum, “ that men make history.” What Marxism denies is the relevance of an abstract classless morality in a class-divided society. Class conflicts generate moral conflicts. The shining swords of moral truths often reveal the camouflaged weapons of class interests. A system productive of class conflicts, racial hatreds, fierce national rivalries, and even though still war-exhausted can yet contemplate the final "atomic” catastrophe, "where only the stars will be neutral,” turns such alleged categorical imperatives as the brotherhood of man, love thine enemy, etc., into ghostly and grisly caricatures. There is a morality, of course, as old as man's social instincts, but each class struggling towards political maturity gives its own significance to moral concepts in accordance with its class aims. Each class then fashions its moral code. Against the "ruling” morality largely divorced from social practice, and tending to become an ethical game whose rules are politely admitted in theory, but ignored in practice, an increasingly politically conscious majority will oppose with a higher moral code, based on higher social objectives. The moral idea becomes then an indispensable feature of working-class emancipation. With the growth of class knowledge grows the moral indignation to finish with this sorry scheme of things—forever. Morality by itself cannot, however, in a class society, provide a common ethical denomination to which some general social goal is referable. Reduced to a social abstraction, it merely seeks a change of heart, but class needs are alone capable of changing a social system and realising in practice what the moral ideal merely contemplates. Because Socialism has an economic basis its ideals, nevertheless, lose none of their greatness, or impoverish in any way the rich field of human experience. It is in the struggle for what is attainable that men are motivated by that deep sense of urgency arising from deep social needs, and it is this which gives to their actions its intrinsic human character. Likewise, the brotherhood of man and duty towards our neighbour will, when based on democratic co-operative economic equality, cease to be a vain ethical plea and become integrated into the social practice—"From each according to his capacity, to each according to his needs.”

Mr. Brown’s own remedy is grotesque. He proposes to retain the man-eating tiger, capitalism, and convert it into a playful pet as well, while in the moral atmosphere of the jungle he would expound the ethics of the Bible class. Like many others, Mr. Brown sees no economic problem, only a religious and psychological malaise. He thus appears to have become a neurotic victim of his own views. Having no solution for the future, he seeks salvation in the past . . . for him everywhere the horizon looms dark and menacing . . . it is the Socialist who sees on the skyline the classless commonwealth.

Ted Wilmott

Marx and the Ideology of Darwin (2010)

From the August 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

Marx admired Darwin’s work but was critical of some of the conclusions drawn from it. The second of our three-part article on Marx and Engels and Darwin .

In Marx’s initial enthusiastic reading of The Origin of Species he had written to both Engels (19 December 1860) and Lassalle (16 January 1861) that it “contains the natural-history foundation of our viewpoint” and that “it provides a basis in natural science for the historical class struggle.” What could he have meant by these comments? He was certainly not saying that the Darwinian process applied to human society. After all, Marx had spent nigh on 20 years grappling with trying to understand social processes and arriving at the “guiding thread” of his materialist conception. It is unlikely that in the 18 months separating what he wrote in the famous 1859 Preface and his reading of Darwin’s Origin that he would have jettisoned his own hard won approach and replaced it with Darwin’s. So what was the connection with Darwin? It is unlikely to have been Darwin’s Malthusianism, as anything smacking of Malthus would have been contemptible to Marx. Perhaps a closer look at what Darwin meant by the phrase “struggle for existence” may help.

Darwin made clear in The Origin that he used this phrase in a metaphoric sense to cover a wide range of situations:

“I should premise that I use the term Struggle for Existence in a large and metaphoric sense, including dependence of one being on another, and including (which is more important) not only the life of the individual, but success in leaving progeny. Two canine animals in time of dearth, may be truly said to struggle with each other which shall get the food and live. But a plant on the edge of a desert is said to struggle for life against the drought, though more properly it should be said to be dependent on the moisture.”

(Charles Darwin, On the Origin of Species, 1859; Penguin edition 1968, p.116.)

And:

“Hence, as more individuals are produced than can possibly survive, there must in every case be a struggle for existence, either one individual with another of the same species, or with the individuals of distinct species, or with the physical conditions of life.” (ibid., p.117.)

This “large and metaphoric” meaning of the phrase “struggle for existence” includes more than the Hobbesian “war of all against all” or of “nature red in tooth and claw” of Tennyson, and refers to the necessity of all biological species to obtain their means of survival and reproduction from their interaction with the environment they inhabit, and that different biological forms have different kinds of interaction with their surroundings. Human beings, too, have to confront this problem of obtaining their conditions of existence. Indeed, in The German Ideology (1845) in which Marx and Engels first formulated their materialist conception, they state:

“The premises from which we begin are not arbitrary ones, not dogmas, but real premises from which abstraction can only be made in the imagination. They are the real individuals, their activity and the material conditions of their life, both those which they find already existing and those produced by their activity. These premises can thus be verified in a purely empirical way.

The first premise of all human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. Thus, the first fact to be established is the physical organisation of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature. Of course, we cannot here go either into the actual physical nature of man, or into the natural conditions in which man finds himself – geological, oro-hydrographical, climatic and so on. All historical writing must set out from these natural bases and their modification in the course of history through the action of men.” (Marx and Engels, Collected Works, volume 5, p. 31.)

In this process of obtaining their conditions of existence humans in particular construct and use tools as instruments of production, but so too, to a lesser degree, do other animals. Far more important for animals in this was the specialised development of parts of their body. And it was this aspect of Darwin’s “epoch-making work” (Capital, volume 1, Penguin edition, 1976, p. 461, note 6) that Marx referred to in the only comments published during his lifetime, and then only as footnotes in Capital, volume 1:

“Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e., the formation of organs of plants and animals, which serve as the instruments of production for sustaining their life. Does not the history of the productive organs of man in society, of organs that are the material basis of every particular organisation of society, deserve equal attention? And would not such a history be easier to compile, since, as Vico says, human history differs from natural history in that we have made the former, but not the latter. Technology reveals the active relation of man to nature, the direct process of the production of his life, and thereby it also lays bare the process of production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations. . . . The weaknesses of the abstract materialism of natural science, a materialism which excludes the historical process, are immediately evident from the abstract and ideological conceptions expressed by their spokesmen whenever they venture beyond the bounds of their own speciality.” (Capital, volume 1, Penguin edition, 1976, pp. 493-494, note 4.)

Throughout his work, Marx always made a distinction between natural history and human history, and the difference between animals and humans in their relationship to their conditions of existence. Again in the German Ideology, he and Engels had written of this:

“[Men] themselves begin to distinguish themselves from animals as soon as they begin to produce their means of subsistence, a step which is conditioned by their physical organisation. By producing their means of subsistence men are indirectly producing their actual material life.” ( p. 31.)

As soon as human beings start to produce their means of subsistence they must enter into certain kinds of relations of production, and these are not nature-determined as they are with other species. The earliest humans may have started out with nature given conditions, but the evolution of their biological structures made it both possible and necessary for them to move beyond this. This aspect of human beings was beyond Darwin’s viewpoint; he could not move beyond natural history.

Although Marx appreciated the scientific significance of The Origin, his critical perspective brought to the fore some of Darwin’s ideological assumptions, especially when applied to human society and the use made to justify capitalism as “natural.” In one of his last letter in which he mentions Darwin, writing to Laura and Paul Lafargue (15 February 1869) he wrote:

“Darwin is led by the struggle for life in English society – the competition of all with all, bellum ominum contra omnes – to discover competition […] as the ruling law of ‘bestial’ and vegetative life. The Darwinian, conversely, considers this a conclusive reason for human society never to emancipate itself from its bestiality.”

Marx’s interest in Darwin did not extend beyond The Origin, and there is no evidence that he read The Descent of Man or any other of Darwin’s works. However, there is no doubt that he appreciated Darwin’s “epoch-making work” and held Darwin in high regard. This is made clear when he sent Darwin, on 25 September1873, an inscribed copy of the second German edition of Capital: “Mr Charles Darwin on the part of his sincere admirer Karl Marx.”

Darwin (1 October 1873) sent a typically courteous but non-committal reply, and the majority of the pages remain uncut in Darwin’s library. And since the mid-1970s the myth that Marx wished to dedicate volume 2 of Capital to Darwin has been laid to rest.

On the same day he sent his inscribed copy to Darwin, Marx also sent one to Herbert Spencer, another giant of 19th century thought, perhaps even more widely read by others than even Darwin. But apart from the long forgotten Italian criminologist, Enrico Ferri, who wrote Socialism and Positivism (1894; English edition 1905), who else has attempted a Darwin-Spencer-Marx link up?

Ed Blewitt

Next month (concluding article): Had Engels read Darwin’s The Descent of Man? The first part appeared in the June issue.

Halo Halo! (2023)

The Halo Halo! column from the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard 

In Belgium only ten percent of its population now go to church regularly. Dwindling congregations means more socially useful churches. They’re being turned into hotels, breweries, libraries, cultural centres, and night clubs (Yahoo News, 22 June).

Think of the uses they can be put to in socialism.

Capitalism damages your health. So do religious beliefs.

The fanatical kind of American Christian believes that Darwin and evolution science is bunkum. They are convinced and conditioned that the Armageddon is imminent and when the Rapture occurs they will be transported up into heaven leaving the rest of us heathens behind.

Who knows if this involves travelling upwards in a space ship? In 1997 thirty nine members of the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide in such a belief.

James Ussher (1581-1656), Armagh Archbishop, working from Genesis decided that the universe was created on Sunday 23 October 4004 BCE. Though apparently he didn’t know what time this occurred.

What’s Intelligent Design? Simply put it’s a denial of natural selection because you know there just has to be a supreme being behind it all. There just has! He/she/they created the dinosaurs and fossils as well, you know. Why? Don’t question the divine plan!

In 1925 a teacher in Tennessee. John Scopes was prosecuted for teaching evolution instead of creationism – the Scopes Monkey Trial. The Discovery Institute, an American think tank, is now offering American home-schooling tutors ‘science’ material ‘from the perspective that nature reflects intelligent design.’

A writer in American Thinker, June 16, ‘argues’ that the birth, development and growth of children, of plants, and of the brain, is incontrovertible evidence of ‘intelligent design’. Maybe he’s descended from one of the prosecutors in the Monkey Trial.

The Reno Gazette Journal, June 1, reports a research centre’s findings that over a third of American parents believe, ‘it’s extremely or very important that their children have similar religious beliefs to their own’. The ‘balance’ in the piece comes from Richard Dawkins’ warning ‘don’t force your beliefs on your children.’ The RGJ asked its panel if parents should ‘pass along’ their religion to their children. Their panel consisted of: a rabbi, a Bahá’í, a pastor, a Muslim, a bishop, a Buddhist, and a Mormon. Bet you can’t guess what they all thought?

A scene in the 1979 Monty Python film, Life of Brian, satirises the absurdity of someone being stoned simply for uttering the name, Jehovah. To paraphrase Kenneth Williams as Julius Caesar in Carry On Cleo, ‘Infamy, infamy!’ Blasphemy, blasphemy. However, this is no laughing matter. In certain dominions the accusation alone can result in death.

‘Succumbing to the demands of a radical Islamist party, the Pakistan government has agreed to try blasphemy suspects under terrorism charges in addition to the other sections of the country’s penal code (Rediff.com, 18 June).

Twelve months ago a vicar was discovered, in a public place, having ‘relationships’ with a Henry hoover. Sexual proclivities are entirely a personal matter. Disseminating fairy stories is far more harmful.

DC

What is ‘scientific’ socialism? (2023)

From the August 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

By the middle of the nineteenth century two revolutions in thought occurred. Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace proved the fact of biological evolution by natural selection. This does not imply ‘progress from ‘lower’ to ‘higher’ life-forms’ as some people still imagine. That was the slant put upon it by Victorian bourgeois progressivism. This pseudo-theory of evolution – the ladder principle – enables capitalist society to retain the anthropocentric mythology Judaeo-Christian religion had inculcated for centuries in a supposedly scientific guise. Rather, Darwin and Wallace disliked the term ‘evolution’ as too easily open to such misinterpretation.

The other was that the study of human society since the emergence of settled farming communities to modern industrial capitalist society was scientifically enriched thanks to the work of two German thinkers, Karl Marx and Frederick Engels. Like the biological evolutionists, Marx and Engels had inherited a tradition of social research reaching back in time, and it is no surprise that the two monuments to human self-awareness were published about the same time: Darwin`s The Origin of Species, and Marx`s Capital. Marx`s friend Engels also produced some excellent shorter works such as Socialism, Utopian and Scientific, and The Origins of the Family, Private Property & The State.

In Capital, Marx explained the theory of surplus value and the wages system, which is the basis of capitalist society, and showed how this system grew from its predecessor in Europe, the feudal system. He also showed how, with each move forward in social development since chattel slavery, classes are expunged from society, leaving under capitalism but two classes. The bourgeoisie, or capitalist class, lives on rent, interest and profit – the surplus value produced by the proletariat, or working class.

The worker must first be deprived of any control of means of production – be it land, industry, means of distribution, factories, railways etc. All of which are exclusively owned by the capitalist class. The peasantry had to be dispossessed of its cottage industries and evicted from the land so as to turn them into a propertyless class obliged to work for the capitalists. Having no access to, nor control of, the means of production and distribution, the worker is obliged to sell their physical and mental energy to the capitalist in return for a wage (call it salary for snob-value if you will). This wage is the price of the worker`s labour-power, and does not cover the value of what they produce. The difference constitutes surplus value, which goes straight into the pocket of the capitalist, enriching him at the worker`s expense. The worker thus remains for life in a state of economic dependence on the parasitical capitalist. As for work which is not directly productive, such as the so-called professions, services, and so on, all serve to buttress the system, of which the accumulation of capital, derived from surplus value, is the core.

Just as the slaves of ancient Rome ran the whole of society, so does the working class today. From surgeons to roadsweepers, from astrophysicists to labourers and the unemployed, all are members of the working class. If you are dependent on a salary (wage) in order to live (or on a handout when unemployed), whether your salary is high or low, if you are thus economically dependent, you belong to the working class. It is more likely that small capitalists will be thrown into the ranks of the working class by the machinery of capitalism, than that a worker will become a capitalist. Generally speaking, one is born into one class or the other. Still, it is inculcated in us by capitalist propaganda that ‘if you work hard, you ‘make good’ and that workers who do manage to switch class by exploiting others and becoming social parasites (capitalists) are to be praised and admired.

The state

The state is the organ of coercion with which a ruling class maintains its rule over the rest of the population. Under capitalism, therefore, the state, of whatever political slant or colour, is the machinery by which the minority capitalist class keeps in subjection the majority working class which is exploited for profit. Under capitalism, only these two social classes remain in existence. There can only be a state where there is a class to rule over others. So, with the emancipation of the working class (the last subject class) from the wages system (capitalism), both classes cease to exist. The state therefore will cease to exist. Marx and Engels believed, and today`s genuine socialists (communists) believe, that in order to topple capitalist rule, the working class must seize control of the state and use its forces of coercion (army and police) to dispossess the capitalists of the means of production, placing those means in the hands democratically of everyone. Capitalist and worker both then cease to exist, as does the state, and we have for the first time a society of human beings, in control of their own destiny.

Thus we have scientific socialism (communism) – the common control of the means of production – following from a scientific historical analysis, whereas before we only had utopian socialism (communism) – usually expressed in terms of common ownership of goods – following from the ancient dream, running through the Middle Ages and into the 18th century, with only hope as a basis and incapable of an accurate historical analysis.

Socialism and communism are two words meaning the same – a future society in which the workers of today have emancipated themselves as described above. But very soon, pro-capitalist politicians saw the advantage in misappropriating the terms to confuse the workers. ‘Socialism’ came to mean Labour Party-type state-ownership, or Leninism, while ‘communism’ was misconstrued as something again which was different – a Bolshevik-style one-party tyranny (again, see below). But, since the state can only be the instrument of class rule, so state ownership (nationalisation) is not socialism, but merely capitalism run by state bureaucrats. This was the outcome in particular of the capitalist revolutions which took place in the 20th century in the Russian and Chinese empires.

In the 19th century too, anarchism arose within the genuine socialist movement to oppose the Marxian view that the state must be seized by the working class in order to use its coercive machinery to dispossess the capitalists. Anarchists were afraid that this would prove too tempting to socialist delegates doing the seizing, who would then use the state`s machinery against the workers. Since ‘socialism’ has been perverted by capitalist ideologues to mean ‘state-ownership’, this concern is understandable. However, unless the state is seized from the capitalists and their politicians, the armed forces remain in their hands and might be used to try to smash any attempted revolution. Hence it is absolutely necessary to take control of the state, thus disarming the capitalist class, which can then be dispossessed of the means of production. Socialist delegates to the parliaments (the law-making part of the state) would have but one mandate: the dismantling of capitalism and the establishment of socialism. They would not attempt to enter office under the capitalist state, and would be instantly recalled and dismissed by the workers if they attempted to do so. Furthermore, the absolute majority of workers would be actively making the revolution – which is why, too, any attempt by a socialist minority to stage a take-over against the wishes of the majority of workers would be doomed.

A. W.