Correspondence: Is Society an Organism? (1907)

Letter to the Editors from the February 1907 issue of the Socialist Standard

[To the Editor of the Socialist Standard].

The question of the organic nature of Society is only of interest to us, as Socialists, in so far as it throws light on Socialist policy ; and it is to be regretted that Mr. Wright has not, in his letter in the January number, discussed the subject from this point of view. Indeed, he ignores the bulk of the evidence brought forward on this matter, and confines himself to some word-twisting on one or two relatively unimportant points; the discussion, therefore, becomes to a large extent unprofitable. I cannot, however, refrain from joining issue with him on the few points he does raise.

Let me, in the first place, assure Mr. Wright that I had no intention of questioning his good faith when I alluded to him as being professedly revolutionary. I intended to convey that, in my opinion, his ideas on the nature of Society are not consistent with his revolutionary views. This opinion I still hold, while disclaiming any unkind intentions which my words may have appeared to show.

In his main argument Mr. Wright has shifted ground. He said in his first letter: “Reminding you that human society must be as complex and contain the same organic parts as its individual members, I will ask, to where in Society canyon point and say : ‘There are the brains of Society, there are the lungs of Society, there is the heart of Society, and so on.” Clearly the argument here is not that Society may differ from, or be more complex than, its organic unit, but that it must be, as a whole, alike in structure and alike in functions; an identity that he makes to extend even to motherhood and childbirth ! The fallacy of this was shown by taking Mr. Wright’s own analogy of the human body, where the organic unit—the cell—is not the same either in structure or function as the human body as a whole, for new combinations produce new conditions and results. Just as the organisation and differentiation of innumerable cells produce, in the human being, an entity vastly different from the individual cell, so the necessary and involuntary organisation of men in Society produces a social organism very different from the individual human being. Mr. Wright, however, now endeavours to make it appear that his argument was, that Society, to be an organism, should be at least as complex as its organic unit. But he surely wastes his time in arguing that the human body, since it contains cells, is at least as complex as those cells ; for precisely the same is true of Society which is composed of human beings. It is, indeed, mere tautology, and no argument against the organic nature of Society at all. I must, indeed, decline to credit Mr. Wright with having originally intended anything so childish. The whole trend of his first argument was that Society, to be an organism, must be a huge human being, with brains, heart and lungs, going through childbirth and motherhood, the absurdity of which is seen in that by the same reasoning the human body to be an organism should be only one huge cell, and propagate by fission.

My statement that “though the highest types of human society may be indefinite as compared with the human body, yet they are much more definite than many low forms of organic life,” is quite correct, for though even according to Mr. Wright’s reasoning Society cannot be less complex than individual human beings since it contains them, nevertheless Society as a whole does not reproduce the same definiteness and rigidity of outline as does the human body.

In like manner many of the Protozoa (Cenobia) consist of mere aggregations of cells with scarcely a trace of specialisation, and the individual Protozoa, as an entity, is much less constant and definite in form and size than are the regular and definite cells of which it is composed.

The tenour of Mr. Wright’s argument, may be further seen in the following from his second letter. He says : “If a man is subject to certain conditions, surely it follows that his individual cells are subject to the same conditions. Society, therefore, can have no conditions apart from its component cells.” Since Society, like any other organism, is but the combination of its component cells, it follows that Mr. Wright is gravely informing us that “Society can have no conditions apart from Society,” which is very thoughtful of him. Had this been all he intended to convey he doubtless would not have written, but the matter is so worded as to give colour to the absurdity that underlies his whole argument, and which has already been dealt with: to wit, that Society must, as a whole, be the same in the distribution of its parts and in its functions, as the individual unit or cell.

Mr. Wright disagrees with my illustration of the hive bees because the drones do not own and control the means of production and distribution. My analogy, however, was sound, and clearly illustrated my point; though, it is true, the bees do not possess the vote ! The drones, like our capitalist class, live upon others labour, and at one period of their existence both were necessary to the advance of their respective social organisms ; and the drones, like our present capitalist class, outlive their usefulness and must be driven out.

To admit that the hive of bees or colony of ants are social organisms, and at the same time deny the organic nature of human Society would be inconsistent, and Mr. Wright, though careful to say that he does not positively deny that Society is an organism, would, apparently, embrace any absurdity rather than admit that it is ; so the fact that the hive of bees is a social organism is consequently not recognised.

The denial of the organic nature of Society usually arises from Utopianism and an unscientific view of sociology ; it arises from a conception that men are entirely free agents, and that Society as a whole is a voluntary social contract. A very important part of our work consists in pointing out that Society is not a piece of architecture thrown up according to preconceived human plans, but an organism that developes and grows according to discoverable laws; and that human ideas are in their origin the result or reflex of social life and growth; while the intellectual movements of mankind are in reality secondary to, and evidences of adaptation to, great and irresistible economic changes.

F. C. Watts

Social beings (2024)

Book Review from the July 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

Selfish Genes to Social Beings. A Cooperative History of Life. By Jonathan Silvertown. Oxford University Press, 2024, 236pp.

This is a remarkable book. It attempts to cover in a couple of hundred pages the whole 4 billion year history of life on earth – so obviously not just human life. Its author, a specialist in evolutionary ecology, does his best while not shirking necessary biological technicalities, to make it comprehensible to the everyday reader, to the non-specialist. Molecules, bacteria, cells, fungi and genes and their place in and contributions to the development and ongoing-ness of life are all investigated and explained both in their simplicity and their complexity. And it wears its expert knowledge lightly, interspersing it with jokes and other flashes of humour, largely via analogies from everyday human behaviour (eg, ‘insects are airliners for microbes, which travel in the gut, and just like an airliner, parts of the vessel are more hospitable to passengers than others’, or ‘Darwin forbid that I should suggest that nature is a con artist, but who can deny that she has a wicked sense of humour?’).

The book’s main point, the conclusion drawn from its painstaking and expert scientific analysis, is expressed in its sub-title (‘A Cooperative History of Life’) ie, the idea that life, all life, is and has only ever been possible through cooperation and teamwork between its various elements, and this also applies to human society and development. The author lays in its grave, if it was not there already, ‘the stereotype of nature red in tooth and claw’. In other words, he shows incontrovertibly that evolution is explained not by competition but by cooperation which, observed and analysed here, is ubiquitous in nature, not just in microbes and plants and animals but in humans too.

So, while largely about pre-human and non-human life, this study has important things to say about human life. It illustrates how central a role cooperation plays – and has always played – in human interaction and how this applies even in the most dire and challenging circumstances, for example wars and disasters. Underlying this is the fact that, most of the time, cooperation rather than selfishness or competition confers mutual benefit. Not of course that human beings are not capable of selfishness, going it alone or ruthless competition, and indeed it is that kind of behaviour – violence, brutality and the like – that tends to make the news. But the point made here is that cooperative behaviour is far more fundamental and deeply woven into our lives – and into all life – no matter how circumstances and the socio-economic system may militate against it. As the author puts it, ‘cooperation survives in spite of conflict’.

He is not of course alone in making arguments of this kind and is quick to acknowledge the slew of thinkers and writers who, over the last 20-30 years, have contributed to laying to rest the widely held secular version of original sin, ie, the notion of human beings as essentially wicked and Machiavellian and needing to be kept in check by a higher authority. As he puts it, ‘writers on this subject outbid each other in trying to describe just how cooperative we are, and there is little doubt that superlatives are justified’. Among the ’superlatives’ he quotes are ‘super-co-operators’ and ‘ultra-social species’, providing references to the works in which these appear in his notes and list of ‘further reading’. To emphasise this, he makes the point that ‘we are daily considerate towards people whom we have never seen before and may never see again’ and, if we are particularly annoyed when someone is inconsiderate, that is because ‘a norm has been broken’; thus ‘anti-social behaviour provides the exception that proves the existence of a pro-social rule.’ The other element he points to in typical human interaction is ‘having a good reputation’, seen as ‘important to attracting co-operators and acquiring the benefits, which is why we are so intensely interested in what others think of us’.

Despite his intense focus on cooperation and the natural human tendency to what he calls ‘community of interest’, the author is careful not to take up any explicit political position. It is, however, difficult not to sense that, if it were put to him, he would look favourably upon the idea of a system of voluntary cooperation in production and distribution and a wageless, moneyless society organised on the basis of from each according to ability to each according to need. After all, he does (somewhat improbably in the context) devote a short chapter of this book (‘A river of glowing light’) to the Russian anarchist and naturalist Peter Kropotkin and to his view that ‘justice for the masses could only come by abolishing the state altogether and replacing it by spontaneously organised cooperation’.

Howard Moss

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.

Pathfinders: They shoot grouse, don’t they? (2023)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Sometimes, when you’ve had all you can take of class war and capitalist bullshit, it’s great to escape to the great outdoors and walk around in the countryside. Although relatively small, the UK has a lot of large empty spaces, from rolling southern downs to immense glaciated northern landscapes, where there’s hardly a soul or a sign of habitation. You can almost imagine you’re in a different country, a different era, even a different social system. In places like that, the frantic pettifogging trivia of modern capitalist life look small indeed.

If you’re doing it properly, like a seasoned all-weather pro, you’ll get rigged out with the right boots, clothing, backpacks and accessories, and be willing to devote years to acquiring an impressive knowledge of local geography, geology, social history, botany and zoology.

But you can also cheat, using your smartphone to find your position and display a route, check the weather, find the nearest open pub, book a campsite, or phone for a helicopter rescue. Best of all, instead of saying ‘Oh look, some interesting flora and fauna, I wonder what that is?’, you can Shazam it.

Music fans will know Shazam, a free phone app that identifies that cool tune you’re listening to in the boozer. You point your phone at the sound source, the app records it, and then matches it against its billion-song database in order to tell you what the song is and who it’s by. Shazam has been around for years, but is still a living demonstration of that Arthur C Clarke remark about any sufficiently advanced technology being indistinguishable from magic.

Most people understand how to use search engines, but this is an example of a ‘reverse search’. Instead of entering a song title to get the song, you ‘enter’ the song to get the title. You can do this with images too. On a desktop, to identify a picture, painting or whatever, you would drag it into Google Images, which will compare it to its own databank of uploaded images, and hopefully give you the title and artist.

Now, with phone apps like Google Lens, CamFind or Veracity, you can simply point the phone at an unknown plant or crawling insect, take a snap, and let the AI figure out what it is, and then point you to a dozen botanical websites or a Wikipedia page about it. The accuracy is somewhat variable, because not all plants and species are photographed and uploaded equally by users, so there is a built-in AI bias. But it’s still pretty good, and of course there are Shazam-like recognition apps for bird calls too.

All this modern AI technology is great fun for us ignorant townies discovering the wilds and learning titbits and vocabulary terms for the first time, while perhaps reflecting philosophically on that vast and ancient lore known to generations of our forebears and now forgotten by most of us.

The trouble is, you almost can’t avoid diving a little too deep into the AI well of infinity, and discovering things you probably didn’t want to know, that cast something of a black cloud over your fine day out.

For instance, the fact that you are hiking ‘over mountains, moorland, heath, downland and common land, without having to stay on the paths’ is not some de-facto given, as it would be in socialism, it’s a legal concession that was only established in 2000, after extended legal battles dating from 1884 over the ‘right to roam’, which involved mass trespasses and mass arrests. Suddenly the world of private property rears its ugly head. Even when you can’t see a single road or farm building, you know that somebody owns all this land, and once fought like hell to keep the likes of you off it (more details here).

The fact that, in the UK, there is an unusual degree of freedom to roam is testament to generations of workers who simply refused to take no for an answer, facing off against landowners who gradually caved in under the pressure. It’s not socialism but it is the way socialism will be won.

Then there’s the vanishing bird problem. With capitalist profit as the goal, pesticide-rich intensive farming displaced traditional mixed farming, and in the process destroyed hedgerows and habitats, leading to a drop in bird populations of 38 million in the last 50 years. Meanwhile intensive battery farming has generated bird flu epidemics, most recently leading to 50,000 UK bird deaths since 2021 (bit.ly/3BzHvec).

But accidents like these are part of the law of unintended capitalist consequences. It’s even harder to take when you know it’s deliberate.

Take grouse moors. Why do they shoot grouse? Because you can eat them, and because skylarks are small, fast and bloody hard to hit. Grouse are big, slow and lumbering birds which the idle fox-hunting rich love to massacre from every Glorious Twelfth of August. Know what else eats grouse? Raptors, like hen harriers and falcons. So, to protect the supply of fat grouse for the weekend Bertie Wooster set, the groundskeepers regularly shoot all the raptors out of the sky, even though all raptor species are ‘protected’. Because this is illegal, they typically hide the evidence from investigators (bit.ly/3o99XQU).

Raptors have been persecuted for centuries, but capitalism adds its own extinction accelerator effect. The rarer the birds get, the more their eggs are worth to collectors, thus speeding them over the edge. 5 raptor species were wiped out this way, and all the rest are endangered or critically endangered.

All this just for the amusement of a few self-indulgent rich slobs on their weekends away from exploiting the rest of us. And to make matters worse, grouse moors are regularly burned of old growth, destroying ground-nesting fauna and degrading the underlying carbon-storing peat, to make way for new heather shoots which grouse prefer to eat. So, species depletion and carbon release in one glorious double whammy.

The upshot is, even in the wilds of nature, you can never really escape the class war and capitalist bullshit, because it’s everywhere, in the air and water and land and inside your head, cascading like an invisible neutrino storm through all time and space. And it always will be until we collectively abolish it, and extend the ‘right to roam’ to the more general principle of global common ownership and democratic control, with no idle rich calling the shots.

Paddy Shannon

A Man’s Eye View of Evolution (1960)

From the June 1960 issue of the Socialist Standard

Link to Part 1

The study of the cosmos is a study of physical-chemical relationships.

Astronomy, which arose out of material developments, eventually gave rise to the next smaller great generalization of existence, geology, the science and study of the earth.

Some billions of years ago a hot gaseous mass emerged from the sun. In all the conflicting speculations and educated guesses as to the specific details of the origin of the earth, there is no quarrel that the solar system consists of the various planets revolving around the sun in their respective orbits.

It took a few billion years before the gaseous mass became a vast sea and, later, came the emergence of the geological formations. Evolution in geology can be traced through the strata by the fossils found in them. The evolutionary stages of geology may be summarized as archeozoic (transition to and beginnings of life), proterozoic (earliest life), paleozoic (ancient life), mesozoic (middle life, reptiles) and cenozoic (recent life, mammals).

In the course of a very long time there appeared on earth pre-biological forms which later developed into living matter. Organic life is only a more complex organization of inorganic substances which have acquired the properties of growth and reproduction. In order for life to arise on earth, propitious conditions had to exist. The earth’s average mean temperature had to cool sufficiently to support life, which can only exist within relatively very small limits of temperature. There also had to exist an atmosphere, moisture and other favourable circumstances. [2].

As a rule, charts of the tree of life start with the single-celled animal, as though this were the simplest and earliest form of life. Of course, this is not true. The single-celled animal is already a very complex form of a living being.

Inorganic matter, more especially carbon, with other elements, became joined together into complex molecules which were the building blocks of ultra-microscopic life. Of special significance is it that proteins are inorganic, yet under certain specific conditions function as organic matter. The viruses may be called the first true life forms. The next higher stage is bacteria. Eventually appeared the single-celled plants.

The primary distinction between plants and animals is that plants can subsist on inorganic matter, i.e., they can transform the inorganic into organic substances whereas animals can only subsist on the organic. In order of evolution, single-celled plants preceded single-celled animals.

Starting with the single-celled plant, the evolution of plants were algae, mosses, ferns, non-flowering seed producers and, its highest development, the flowering seed producers.

The evolution of animals was from single-celled animals into spores, fishes, reptiles, mammals and, finally, man. In this man’s eye view of the evolution of existence, we are only considering the main trunk and ignoring the branches of the tree.

Again, we see that evolution is a continuing process. The appearance of homo sapiens on the scene gave rise to sociology. In a very real sense, sociology is but a division of biology; which, in turn, is a division of geology; in its turn, a division of astronomy; which is but a branch of the greatest generalization of all matter.

Man "is the only animal species that, from the very moment he came into existence, has been continuously changing and during a continuing process has become a different thing.” [3] Through the interrelations of his brain and thinking processes, his acquirements of speech and the development of tools man has become a social animal whose evolution can be traced through his social organizations. Only a Marxist, such as Anton Pannekoek in his invaluable “Anthropogenesis,” [3] could have filled in the gap between the primates and the origin of homo sapiens, i.e., tied Darwinism and Marxism into an interrelated whole.

Man, the social animal, evolved from the pre-cave man into primitive tribal society (savagery and barbarism) and, then, into chattel slavery, through feudalism into capitalism and is now on the very dawn of a new society.

This whole development of social evolution arose from changes taking place in the material conditions of existence under which mankind lived. In response to these changes, there evolved changes in his ideas and institutions. Man makes his own history, “not out of the whole cloth” but out of the conditions at hand. This is Marxism, in a nutshell.

Our tribute to Darwin is for emancipating man from biological superstitions by his revolutionary contribution revealing the material forces that brought about the evolution of the species in biology.

Our tribute to Marx is for furnishing the key that unlocked the mystery of mankind’s social evolution and for establishing the understanding that it is now possible and necessary for man to be master of his own form of social organization and, at the same time, the lord over nature.

Isaac Rab

(WSPUS)

(concluded)

[2] All the speculations about life on other planets in the cosmos, more especially our sister planets in the solar system—Mars and Venus, are predicated upon the existence on them of the conditions favourable for the support of life. Though there may be millions of planets in the cosmos (a relatively small number, actually), it is not reasonable to imagine that very many of them have life-forms.

[3] Published by North-Holland Publishing Company, Amsterdam, Holland

The Historical Method of Karl Marx by Paul Lafargue. (1920)

From the July 1920 issue of the Socialist Standard

Reprinted from the “International Socialist Review,” Oct., 1907.

Link to Part 2.

IV. The Natural Environment and the Artificial or Social Environment—Continued.

A simple change in the habits, by subjecting one or more organs to an unaccustomed use, sometimes results in radical modifications in the whole organism. Darwin says that the mere fact of constantly browsing on steep slopes has occasioned variations in the skeletons of certain breeds of Scottish cows. Naturalists agree in regarding the cetacean – whales, cachalots and dolphins – as former terrestrial mammals which, finding in the sea food more abundant and easier to procure, became swimmers and divers: this new sort of life transformed their organs, reducing to a rudimentary state those no longer used, developing the others and adapting them to the needs of the aquatic environment. The plants of the Sahara Desert, to adapt themselves to the arid environment, have been obliged to dwarf themselves, to reduce the number of their leaves to two or four, to take on a layer of wax to prevent evaporation, and to prolong their roots enormously in search of moisture: their periodic changes come counter to the ordinary seasons; they are dormant in summer during the hot season and vegetate in the winter, in the season relatively cold and moist. Plants in other deserts present analogous characteristics: a given environment implies the existence of beings showing a combination of definite characteristics.

The cosmic or natural environments, to which vegetables and animals must adapt themselves under pain of death, constitute, like the organised being of which Cuvier speaks, combinations, complex systems without precise limits in space, the parts of which are: the geologic formation and composition of the soil, nearness to the equator, elevation above the sea level, courses of rivers which irrigate it, quantity of rain which it receives and the solar heat which it stores up, etc., and plants and animals which live in it. These parts correspond to each other in such a way that one of them cannot change without involving change in the other parts: the changes in the natural environment, although less rapid than those produced in organised beings, are nevertheless appreciable. The forests, for example, have an influence on the temperature and the rains, consequently on the humidity and the physical composition of the soil. Darwin has shown that animals apparently insignificant, like the worm, have played a considerable part in the formation of vegetable mould; Berthelot and the agricultural experts Hellriegal and Willfarth have proved that the bacteria which swarm in the protuberances of the roots of the leguminosae are active in fertilising the soil. Man by tillage and cultivation exercises a marked influence over the natural environment; forest clearings begun by the Romans have transformed fertile countries in Asia and Africa into uninhabitable deserts.

Vegetables, animals and man in a state of nature, all of which are subject to the action of the natural environment, without other means of resistance than the faculty of adaptation of their organs, must end by differentiating themselves, even though they might have a common origin, if, during hundreds and thousands of generations they live in different natural environments. The unlike natural environments thus tend to diversify men as well as plants and animals. It is, in fact, during the savage period that the different human races were formed.

Man does not merely modify by his industry the environment in which he lives, but he creates out of whole cloth an artificial or social environment, which permits him, if not to remove his organism from the natural environment, at least to reduce this action considerably. But this artificial environment in its turn operates upon man as he comes to it from his natural environment. Man, like the domesticated plant and animal, thus undergoes the action of two environments.

The artificial or social environments which men have successively created differ among themselves in their degree of elaboration and complexity, but environments of the same degree of elaboration and complexity offer great resemblances among themselves, whatever may be the human races which have created them, and whatever may be their geographical habitats: so that if men continue to undergo the diversifying action of unlike natural environments, they are equally subject to the action of similar artificial environments which operate to diminish the differences of races and to develop in them the same needs, the same interests, the same passions and the same mentality. Moreover, the same natural environments, as for example, those situated at the same latitude and altitude, exercise an equal unifying action on the vegetables and animals which live in them; they have an analogous flora and fauna. Like artificial environments thus tend to unify the human species, which unlike natural environments, have diversified into races and sub-races.

The natural environment evolves with such extreme slowness that the vegetable and animal species which adapt themselves to it seem immutable. The artificial environment, on the contrary, evolves with an increasing rapidity, thus the history of man and of his societies compared with that of animals and vegetables is extraordinarily mobile.

The artificial environments, like organised being and the natural environment, form combinations, complex systems without precise limits in space and time, the parts of which correspond to each other and are so closely bound together that one alone cannot be modified without all the others being shaken and being compelled to undergo retouchings in their turn. The artificial or social environment, of an extreme simplicity and consisting of a small number of parts in savage peoples, becomes complicated in proportion as man progresses by the addition of new parts and by the development of those already existing. It has been formed, since the historic period by economic, social, political and legal institutions, by traditions, customs, manners and morals, by common sense and public opinion, by religious literatures, arts, philosophies, sciences, modes of production and exchange, etc., and by the men who live in it. These parts, by transforming themselves and by reacting on each other, have given birth to a series of social environments more and more complex and extended, which, in proportion to the extension, have modified men; for, like the natural environment, a given social environment implies the existence of men presenting a certain combination of analogous characteristics, physical and moral. If all these corresponding parts were stable or varied only with excessive slowness, like those of the natural environment, the artificial environment would remain in equilibrium and there would be no history; its equilibrium, on the contrary, is extremely and increasingly unstable, constantly put out of balance by the changes working in one or another of the parts, which then reacts on all the others.

The parts of an organised being, like those of a natural environment, react upon each other directly, mechanically, so to speak: when in the course of animal evolution the upright posture was definitely acquired by man, it became the point of departure for transformation of all the organs: when the head, instead of being carried by the powerful muscles at the back of the neck, as in the other animals, was supported by the spinal column, these muscles and the bones to which they are attached became modified, and with their modifications modified the skull, the brain, etc. When the layer of vegetable soil in a locality increases through any cause whatever, instead of bearing stunted plants it nourishes a forest, which increases the rainfall, which again increases the volume of the water courses, etc. But the parts of an artificial environment can react on each other only through the intermediary of man. The part modified must begin by transforming physically and mentally the men whom it causes to function, and must suggest to them the modifications which they must bring to the other parts to put them on the level of the progress realised in it, in order that they may not hinder it in its development, and in order that they may again correspond to it. The parts not modified manifest their inconvenience precisely by the useful qualities which formerly constituted their “good side”, which by becoming superannuated are hurtful and then constitute so many “bad sides”. They are the more insupportable according as the modifications which they should have undergone are more important. The re-establishment of the equilibrium in the parts of the artificial environment is often accomplished only after struggles between the men particularly interested in the part in course of transformation and the men concerned in the other parts.

Paul Lafargue

(Translated by Chas. H. Kerr.)

(To Be Continued)

Proper Gander: Out Of The Blue (2018)

The Proper Gander Column from the January 2018 issue of the Socialist Standard

Programmes like Blue Planet II (BBC1) make us feel a bit less begrudging if and when we cough up for our TV Licence. A follow-up to 2001’s Blue Planet, the epic documentary series is a fascinating look at life in the world’s oceans. Its production involved 125 expeditions across four years, using the latest camera technology to record more than 6,000 hours of underwater dive footage alone. The lengths which the researchers and camera crews took to get the right shots shows an impressive amount of determination, such as staking out places over months waiting for rare events, like the Marbled Grouper Fish’s annual spawning in French Polynesia. The end result is both a jaw-dropping spectacle and a valuable piece of research, which has netted over 13 million viewers for Auntie Beeb.

David Attenborough is our guide as each episode takes us somewhere different, from coastlines to the deepest depths, with their own colourful, interconnected, varied ecosystems. The more we learn about the creatures which live in and around the oceans, the more complex they turn out to be. Who knew, for example, that Clown Fish make noises and apparently communicate with each other, almost like they do in Finding Nemo? Or that Orca Whales perform backflips into shoals of herring to stun them before eating them? Both of these species are impacted upon by the ways we use and abuse the seas: noise from boats confuses Clown Fish by drowning out their own sounds, and Orca Whales have been killed by the fishing fleets they’re competing with for herring. Blue Planet II’s last instalment concentrates on these and other threats to the oceans caused by society. The programme’s tone remains optimistic, though, by highlighting people who have dedicated their lives to protecting the seas and what dwells within them.

One major threat to the oceans is plastic waste: around eight million tons of plastic a year end up in the sea, whether through shoddy disposal practices or cargo falling overboard, which happens more often than you might think; on average, four shipping containers a day fall into the drink. In 1992, a container ship 1,000 miles off Alaska lost a consignment of rubber ducks, and their journeys across the seas have usefully been tracked, with some reaching as far as Australia and Scotland. The durability which makes plastic so useful isn’t a good thing when it’s thrown away. A rubber duck–or a drinks bottle used for a few minutes one lunchtime–will take many centuries to biodegrade naturally. If it ends up floating around an ocean it will eventually break down into smaller pieces which get mistaken for food by marine life. Even plankton ingest tiny fragments of plastic, and when other creatures eat plankton and they in turn get eaten, plastic travels up the food chain. Deposits of plastic build up inside larger creatures, and these toxins contaminate their offspring. The programme includes sad footage of a Pilot Whale carrying its dead child, probably poisoned by pollution, and a collection of debris regurgitated by a declining Albatross colony. Discarded fishing nets, six pack rings and carrier bags entangle birds, fish and whales. It’s estimated that tens of millions of sharks are killed by nets every year.

Not mentioned in the programme are the ‘garbage patches’, where ocean currents have swept up plastic rubbish to form islands. The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is estimated to be at least the size of Texas, and may even be over twenty times larger. Cleaning this up is just one of those problems which we’re leaving for our grandchildren to deal with, along with radioactive waste and landfill sites. It’s difficult to turn a profit out of dealing with detritus, so there’s little incentive to address this now. And it seems that the garbage patches aren’t threatening the smooth running of capitalism enough for legislation to be put in place to deal with the problem. Less than 1 percent of international waters are protected by law, because laws to safeguard the oceans require agreement across states with their own commercial interests. Donald Trump’s decision to withdraw America from the Paris Agreement about climate change was presumably made because he recognises that the treaty could limit profitable-but-polluting industries.

The effects of climate change are most apparent at the poles. In the Arctic, the amount of ice during its Summer months has reduced by 40 percent over the past 30 years. Oceanographer John Copley gathers data for international research into changing global temperatures and flies over Antarctica to see the massive splits in ice shelves caused by their melting. As ice thaws and breaks up, stored water is released, leading to a gradual rise in sea levels. It’s estimated that by the end of the century the sea could have risen one or two metres, displacing millions of people.

As well as the rise in sea levels, climate change is also leading to an increase in sea temperatures. One result of this is to damage the algae which lives in coral, leading to the coral being weakened until it dies, a process known as bleaching. In recent years, half the world’s reefs have been affected. Underwater cameraman Dr Alex Vail, who regularly films around the Great Barrier Reef saw a bank of coral ‘turn to rubble’over a period of just a few weeks. This also had a disastrous effect on the countless other creatures which lived on the reef.

Climate change and garbage patches have both come about because capitalism encourages us to produce and consume in ways which make money for the few rather than make sense for the environment. Fossil fuels remain more profitable to produce than renewable energy, and it’s doubtful if the tide will turn quickly enough to reduce climate change. And it’s in commodity manufacturers’ interests for us to use more plastic, such as with the cycle of throwing out a Coke bottle so we can then buy another one. The consequences of our wasteful, short-sighted society are being played out in the world’s oceans. How much sea ice and coral will be left by the time they start filming Blue Planet III?

Mike Foster

Life on Earth (1979)

TV Review from the July 1979 issue of the Socialist Standard

Life on Earth, the recent BBC television scries, was quite excellent. The story began with intelligent guesses about the formation of the earth many millions of years ago, continued through the probable origins of living matter, the evolution of plant and animal species, to human society today. The presenter, David Attenborough, was thoroughly convincing all the way through, until the very last programme, which was — albeit predictably — something of a let-down. But more of that anon.

One very interesting aspect was apparent right from the start. The series was put out by the BBC, which is the official broadcasting body of this still supposedly Christian country. Yet never once did Attenborough discuss, or even remotely consider, the possibility that some god had anything whatever to do with the unfolding of his fascinating story. It is not all that long since the reign of the original boss of the BBC, Lord Reith, and it is impossible to imagine that puritanical, god-fearing man countenancing it. The story of the world was told in a way that reminds one of the answer which Laplace gave when Napoleon asked him where god figured in his picture of the universe: “I have no need of that hypothesis.'’

Workers’ understanding of their position in society is, at present, excruciatingly backward. Nevertheless, one can see that in the course of barely one generation, the religious outlook in which most people were once steeped has altered beyond recognition. If such a sudden and remarkable change can occur in the thoughts of so many people in a matter which had always been considered of such fundamental importance, perhaps we should not feel too despondent!

Unanswerable Retort

There was another aspect of the series which is worth noting here, as it gives the unanswerable retort to the religious claim that the world was created and ruled by an all-powerful and beneficent deity. Ask a parson to explain the sufferings of humanity and how it is that their loving god allows it to happen (actually makes it happen, of course) and he will reply that god gives people free will and it is people’s own sinful nature that is to blame. (We won’t bother here with wondering why god gave people their sinful nature.) But Life on Earth blows all this nonsense to pieces, because it is made very clear that pain and suffering among living creatures were occurring on a boundless scale many millions of years before human beings emerged on the scene.

One episode showed how insects developed wings, and then how their predators, the spiders, seeing their prey escaping, managed to construct a vast tailoring industry so that the flies were caught in the sticky web and were eaten alive. The pain and suffering involved in this arc all too obvious. Untold billions of flies met their gruesome fate this way without any reference to homo sapiens. (Though 1 did once read an article in a scientific magazine which argued that spiders were humanity’s best friend, as the billions of insects they consumed would otherwise simply eat humans off the earth.) And it is reasonable to assume that the spiders will go on eating the flies even if the time comes when human beings disappear from the earth.

The suffering in the animal world is too immense to contemplate. The spiders themselves are of course victims in their turn. In that magnificent work, Social Life in the Insect World, Henri Fabre describes how a wasp will sting a spider in its nervous centre, thus rendering it paralysed. It then proceeds to lay its eggs on the living spider so that when the grubs in due course hatch out, they have a ready supply of living fresh meat to hand. (If the wasp mercifully just killed the spider, the meat would be rotten by the time it was needed.) How does god account for his actions to the suffering flies, and the suffering spiders? Are all the endless series of animal life all being punished for their original sin? And will god make it up to all the untold billions in some insect heaven one day?

In the unfolding of his story, Attenborough was able to show us pictures of the fossil record — photographs of creatures which died out millions of years ago. (The scientific method of dating the ages of the rocks in which the fossils are found is no longer challenged by anyone but the most crackpot type of religious maniac.) The Darwinian theory of the evolution of the species provides the most convincing explanation for what has happened. However many gaps remain, the alternative theory of the Great Designer in the Sky is unsupported by any sound evidence. And as Engels put it, if god really did create the universe, then it has been left to its own devices. A very odd sort of creator — one who retired from the scene billions of years ago, and whom nobody has ever seen since. And if god ever turns up again, the spiders and the flies will have a lot to tell it, let alone babies born with cancer.

Lovable Gorillas

The last programme dealt with the one animal which, for a combination of reasons that need not concern us here, was able to challenge and control nature instead of being controlled by it. This last programme showed that Attenborough (and the scientists who had helped him devise the scries), having shown such a marvellous understanding of a world long gone and of species that we never knew, was far less sure of his ground in dealing with our own species in our own time. It began with a picture of a crowd watching a wrestling match: the camera dwelt at length on the features of the people there — black, white, men, women. The purpose was to show the amazing range of human facial expressions. But the scientist did not seem to notice that the faces were all extremely nasty. (I was going to say 'bestial’ but that would be an insult to the beasts like the huge and lovable gorillas Attenborough had been disporting himself with the previous week). It never occurred to the presenters to suggest that there was something unpalatable in the fact that all this evolution had at the end produced the human being — who gloated horribly over the viciousness of paid wrestlers.

So is this what we are all about? Fortunately, the programme also showed us a tribe recently discovered in the depths of New Guinea. These were savages in the scientific sense of the term. They appeared to have not even reached the Stone Age. Not only were their faces and their naked bodies the same as ours, they had the attribute of human speech, though the only word that was intelligible to their discoverers was ‘bayami’ which was apparently the name of the tribe. In the ordinary use of the term, the savages were the modern crowd we saw at the beginning of the film, while these smiling, delightfully ‘backward’ members of our own kind were clearly pleasant and friendly and lovable.

And the great lesson of the whole splendid series was the very one that the producers missed: that the human being in its original state is by no means an aggressive brute. We can be as lovable as a Bayami (or indeed, as a gorilla). We can be as horrible as a screaming fan at a wrestling match. We still live in a jungle: it is called the competitive system — capitalism. When the working class decides to cut the jungle down, the harmonious environment which will take its place will allow the innate human qualities of friendliness and cooperation to flourish.

L. E. Weidberg

Darwin on human evolution (2010)

From the June 2010 issue of the Socialist Standard

150 years ago in June the famous confrontation over evolution took place between Bishop Wilberforce and TH Huxley. We begin a three-part series where we look at Darwin’s theory of human evolution and the reaction of Marx and Engels to it.

The Origin of Species (1859) was, arguably, the most shattering book of the 19th century, and Darwin’s most famous book. It was not, of course, his only book, nor was it the one in which he dealt with the evolution of the human species, even though it sparked off the “Man’s place in nature” debate. In fact, it took Darwin just over 11 years to publish his first book on the human species, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871). Yet it did not have the same social impact as The Origin, and it is unlikely that the same celebratory hoopla will accompany its 150th anniversary in 2021.

Unlike The Origin, there is no evidence that either Marx or Engels bought a copy or even read The Descent, as there are no references to it in their collected works. However, the fact that Engels continued to discuss Darwin and Darwinian literature, especially in the context of German socialism, most importantly in Anti-Dühring (1878), and wrote the uncompleted The Role of Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man in 1876 (he broke off the work in order to write Anti-Dühring, which makes extensive references to Darwin), shows that he kept up an interest in at least some of Darwin’s later writings.

Darwin on Human Descent

The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex was published on the 24 February 1871, in two large volumes, at around 700 pages in length, and selling at 24 shillings (The Origin cost 15 shillings). The first print run was of 2,500 copies (compared to 1,250 for The Origin), increasing to 4,500 by the end of March, and 7,500 by the end of the year.

The Descent was the first of Darwin’s works to deal with the human species, and was followed in 1872 by The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Originally, Darwin had planned to discuss emotions in The Descent, but, as with much of his work, the material on it just piled up and required a separate volume. The only other published work dealing with humans was A Biographical Sketch of an Infant. This was published in Mind, the first psychology journal, and was based on observations of his first child, his son William (affectionately called Doddy) carried out 37 years earlier.

This latter fact shows that Darwin had from the beginning included human beings in the scheme for his big book on Natural Selection (The Origin was only an abstract of this proposed big book) and it would not be something he needed to think anew for The Descent. In 1839 he had written:

"Looking at Man, as a Naturalist would any other Mammiferous animal, it may be concluded that he has parental, conjugal and social instincts, and perhaps others. The history of every race of man shows this, if we judge him by his habits, as another animal. These instincts consist of a feeling of love (& sympathy) or benevolence to the object in question. Without regarding their origin, we see in other animals they consist in such active sympathy that the individual forgets itself & aids & defends & acts for others at his own expense." (cited in White and Griffin Darwin: A Life in Science, 1995, p.248)

Publish and Be Damned!
The application of natural selection to the human species would be the linchpin in the argument against critics, and it is likely that, as with other criticisms he rehearsed before the publication of The Origin, he would be aware that any failure to meet his critics would be fatal to the future of the concept of natural selection as a naturalistic explanation. So rather than being a late issue in the debate, Darwin saw it as being a necessary foundation from the very beginning of his studies.

Nevertheless, Darwin was famously reluctant to include the human species in The Origin. Even in 1857 (22 December), he wrote to Alfred Russel Wallace about his reluctance to write about human evolution:

"You ask whether I shall discuss Man; I think I shall avoid the whole subject, as so surrounded with prejudices, though I fully admit that it is the highest and most interesting problem for the naturalist."

In The Origin, he famously wrote that the application of natural selection to human kind would be possible only in the far future:

"In the distant future I see open fields for far more important researchers.... Light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history.” (Darwin On the Origin of Species, 1859; Penguin edition, 1968, p. 458)

But although he didn’t discuss the human species, everybody knew he did. His readers were from the very beginning eager to jump the species gap. It was the human implications of natural selection that they were keen to discuss. Whilst it took Darwin until 1871, by which time the heat of the controversy had cooled somewhat, to publish his views on human evolution in the two volume The Descent, others were not so reticent.

Unwilling or unable to defend his position, or the all too obvious implications of it, in the bear-pit of public debate, Darwin left it to his bulldog, Thomas Henry Huxley, to defend the theory from religious onslaught. Barely six months after the publication of The Origin, the famous British Association debate between Huxley and Bishop Samuel (Soapy Sam) Willberforce took place in Oxford on 30 June, 1860. It was here that Huxley brilliantly replied to Willberforce’s snide query as to whether Huxley was descended from an ape on his father’s side or his mother’s side, by retorting that he would rather have an ape for a grandfather than a man who misused his gifts to obscure scientific discussion by rhetoric and religious prejudice.

By the time Darwin came to publish The Descent, a number of others had already dealt with the issue of human origins: Huxley, Haeckel, Lubbock, Galton, Wallace, Tyndall, and Bagehot. But the Master had not spoken and the public were keen for him to make his pronouncements and settle the matter. Darwin dreaded this expectation. It is not improbable to think that he was glad that others has spoken first (and perhaps too hastily and without adequate evidence), but at least they had taken the first mad hail of flak. By now, some of the heat had been taken out of the battle, and there might be less anger directed his way. However, he knew he was going to be on the receiving end of some fury. As he wrote in a letter to St George Mivart, "Whenever I publish my book I can see that I shall meet with universal disapprobation, if not execution."And at Christmas 1870 he told Batholemew Sullivan that The Descent “would disgust you & many others.” But after 11 years he was ready to show the world his views on the human species. However, even the political climate seemed against him. Radicals and agitators were causing problems and Darwin feared he might be depicted as a black-caped anarchist.

Darwin’s fear of all hell breaking loose on him was not confirmed. To his relieved surprise, the reviews were muted. It seemed that the other Darwinians had successfully shifted the reading public towards acceptance of the evolution of the human species.

What he included in The Descent was to some degree conditioned by what his supporters had written earlier. In particular, unlike Huxley, who had dealt only with human physiological evolution, Darwin wanted to discuss the origins of some of the mental and moral faculties of humans in terms of natural selection. This was necessary as a riposte to what Wallace, especially, had said in his articles of 1864 and 1870. Wallace had come to the conclusion that whilst natural selection could account for human bodily development, it could not do so for human mental development and the brain. To explain human mental development, Wallace resorted to the idea that humans were endowed with mind by an unseen spiritual power. Such a position was anathema to Darwin and he had written to Wallace saying that he feared that he might have murdered their child (that is, natural selection). It was, therefore, essential for Darwin to show that natural selection could account for human intellectual and moral features, without the resort to some ineffable “unseen spirit.”

Wallace did in fact have a good enough reason to believe that the human mind had raised humans above all other animals, ensuring that they were not subject to the Malthusian hell that would later frighten and disgust Huxley in his lectures on Evolution and Ethics (1893). For Wallace it was the human ability to create objects that would compensate for any natural weaknesses in dealing with the struggle for existence. In some respects, this difference is similar to that recognised by Marx and Engels, but they dealt with it materialistically rather than by an idealistic unseen spirit. (while Wallace became a believer in spiritualism).

Ed Blewitt

Next month: Marx’s criticism of the ideology of “Darwinism”.