Magic and Science (1956)

From the October 1956 issue of the Socialist Standard

However, so far as the schemes for controlling events by magic were concerned, men have learned from bitter experience that nature does not work in that way.

Things do not happen in the world as if at the bidding of capricious sprites, but in an orderly manner as if in deference to fixed laws which have to be obeyed.

Night follows day, the seasons pass in due succession from seedtime to harvest, the events of human and animal life form a regular routine. The discovery of this Essential orderliness of nature marks the beginning of what we call science. Once men have reached the scientific stage of development, they realise that success in living does not depend upon coaxing or forcing nature to do what we want.

It depends upon understanding nature's laws, and in making use of them to serve human purposes. That is the principle underlying all the great inventions—steamships, airplanes, radio and so forth, which loom so large in the world today.” (The World of Copernicus, by Angus Armitage, C.Sc. Mentor Book.)

Human Nature and Socialism: The Role of the Socialist (1953)

From the July 1953 issue of the Socialist Standard

Continued from the previous issue.

3—The Role of the Socialist

Let us try to see how socialists can use their knowledge of man in society to achieve social change. We must first discuss human nature a little further from a theoretical standpoint, in order to relate it to other socialist theories, and in particular to historical materialism.

There are two main points about human nature that are implicit in Marxist theory (though Marx and Engels avoided the term “nature” in connection with “human” because of its idealist associations). One is that it is essentially subject to change, and the other is that it is entirely made up of the behaviour and powers of individuals or groups within their environments.

Human nature is to be understood neither idealistically nor mechanically, but dialectically. It is no single universal form or essence which individual human beings share; nor is it the mere sum total of those individuals. It is the sum total of the needs, desires and activities of human beings in society. In other words, man can be no more than what men actually do in their historical and social environments. Thus human nature is essentially the history of humanity, and has nothing to do with any idealistic concept of some changeless entity called man.

Man has evolved as a species slowly and continuously through all the various phases of human society, from tree-climbing anthropoid to his present status. This evolution has been social, cultural, psychological— but hardly at all biological. It is therefore in a dual sense—biologically and socially—that human nature is to be understood; and this is why it has been truly said that human nature changes in some of its respects because it remains the same in others.

Production and Change

Of all the factors determining historical development the decisive element is the production and reproduction of life and its material requirements. Men must be in a position to live in order to be able to make history. The production of the immediate material means of subsistence, and the consequent degree of economic development form the basis upon which all other institutions, concepts and ideas have been evolved. All these things must be explained in the light of the material basis of life, and not vice versa.

Against this, the idealists portray history as though it were dancing to the tune of men’s ideas, or, more precisely, the ideas of a few “great men.” So determined were Marx and Engels to combat this line of thought that they ran the risk of being accused of saying that the production of the means of life is the only factor causing change. But, as Engels points out,

"Political, juridical, philosophical, religious, literary, artistic, etc., development is based on economic development But all these react upon one another and also upon the economic base. It is not that the economic position is the cause and alone active, while everything else has a passive effect There is, rather, interaction on the basis of the economic necessity, which ultimately always asserts itself." — ("Marx-Engels Selected Correspondence," p. 517.)

At each stage of history there is a sum of productive forces and relations of individuals to things and to one another—all handed down to each generation from its predecessor. While these forces and relations are modified by the new generation, they also prescribe the conditions of life of that generation. In short, circumstances make men just as much as men make circumstances.

Men are products of certain conditions, and therefore changed men are products of other conditions. But it must never be forgotten that conditions are changed precisely by men. Man changes history, and is thereby himself changed and, in this sense, “all history is but a record of the continuous transformation of human nature ” (Marx).

When production was primitive, man’s simple biological needs determined his activities—but as production developed his needs developed also. In the process of production man is driven to a fuller comprehension of the world in which he lives. By acting on the external world and changing it, man changes his own nature.

History-making Animal

The basic difference between man and other animals—the change-over, as it were, from non-human to human—is when he begins to produce his own means of subsistence. This is not to say that animals don’t produce. The difference is that human production is premeditated, planned action, directed towards definite ends. Again, this doesn’t mean that no animal acts according to a plan. But, with man, consciousness takes the place of instinct, or, to put it another way, his“ instinct” is a conscious one.

“What distinguishes the most incompetent architect from the best of bees is that the architect raises his structure in imagination before he constructs it in reality,” wrote Marx. The labour process ends in the creation of something which, when the process began, already existed in the worker’s imagination in an ideal form. We may say that what ultimately distinguishes men from other animals is consciousness of method in production. The animal merely uses external nature, and brings about changes in it by his presence. Man, by his changes, makes nature serve his ends.

Yet man is not only a nature-controlling animal. He is also a history-making one. He is the sole animal who has worked his way out of the merely animal state —his normal state is one of consciousness, one to be created by himself. Man’s mastery over nature, of which he is a part, consists in the fact that he is able to know and correctly apply its laws.

Man has achieved a considerable measure of success as a nature-controlling animal, but when it comes to history-making there is much less cause for satisfaction. Broadly speaking, human action has achieved its desired end only in exceptional cases, and much more often it has achieved the exact opposite. Unforeseen effects have predominated, and uncontrolled forces have been far more powerful than those set in motion according to a plan.

These and other considerations lead socialists to believe that man has not yet made truly human history. “Only conscious organisation of social production,” says Engels, "can lift mankind above the rest of the animal world as regards the social aspect, in the same way that production in general has done this for men in their aspect as species.”

Understanding and Co-operating

The question may be asked: why has man, who has been so successful in developing his powers of production, made such a failure of history? The answer is that men have made bad history because they have been unable to prevent the means of production from conflicting with the relations of production. They have been so preoccupied with having to “make a living” in competition with others that they have had no control over the long-term consequences of their actions. The history and human nature that have resulted have thus been unplanned and mostly unintended.

In the process of controlling nature man has been scientific, in the widest sense. But in the process of making history he has not. Man makes a machine by manipulating suitable materials in a certain way according to a planned purpose. On the other hand, he makes history as an indirect result, almost a byproduct, of quite another activity—that of competing with his fellow-man to “earn a living.”

The conditions of property society have never been, and can never be, such as to allow men to solve their problems with a collective will or according to a collective plan. The dominating motive being individual self-interest, their efforts clash, what each individual seeks is obstructed by others, and what emerges is something that no one sought.

Man has had greater success in his efforts to master the forces of nature than those of society, which dominate him as a power independent of himself. Slave to classes and to the conditions of class society, man (whether as owner of property or non-owner) has been merely a class animal. He has not yet become truly human, in the sense that he has been passive instead of active in the historical process that makes human nature.

The case for Socialism amounts to saying that history, like the control of nature, ought to be planned and consciously organised. It ought to be produced, like any other product, for a purpose, and this purpose ought to be broadly human, not narrowly individual. It should aim at the transformation of human nature to make man integrated, complete, and balanced through the free use of his creative energies.

The role of the socialist consists in his capacity for understanding the world, for understanding its natural and historical movement, and for co-operating consciously with all the factors that are working towards classless society. We are able to speak of Socialism as a potentiality because it already exists in the minds of men in an ideal form, just as the house exists in the architect’s imagination even before the blueprint stage.

Without classes, human nature can at last become the product of human science rather than the by-product of class struggle. With the abolition of class control of economic forces, when the whole of society has gained mastery of the conditions of social life, man will be able to exercise real control over his own nature. With the release of his human powers from capitalist servitude, he will be able to shape his environment so that it promotes the fullest possible development of all his faculties.

Stan Parker

(Next Article: Capitalist Patterns of Behaviour.)

Nature (2025)

Book Review from the May 2025 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Nature of Nature. The Metabolic Disorder of Climate Change. By Vandana Shiva. Chelsea Green Publishing. 2024. 162pp.

This is a wonderfully eloquent treatise on the human relationship with food and how that relationship is being disrupted by the despoiling of the earth and biosphere that is taking place and by the earth being treated as ‘raw material for industrial production’. In essence, it echoes the famous line from Rousseau: ‘You are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody’ It imparts with the utmost urgency messages such as ‘biodiversity erosion has now become an extinction emergency’ and ‘the climate crisis has become a climate emergency’, not simply stating them as unevidenced opinion but backing them up with research and evidence gathered over decades from the most well-informed scientific sources.

The author is particularly scathing about ‘agribusiness’ (also referred to as ‘the chemical and industrial food corporation’ and ‘the Poison Cartel’) and the alarming rate at which it is not only destroying biodiversity and the environment with its methods of cultivation and extraction but is now also, in response to criticism of its activities and consumer concern, pretending to ‘decarbonise’ its industrial food chain by what it falsely calls ‘regenerative agriculture’. Even its investment in meat (and dairy and egg) substitute products as a supposed replacement for intensively produced food is, she argues, a way of bamboozling consumers into thinking switching to such products (referred to here as ‘fake food’) somehow helps to lessen degradation of the biosphere and pressure on natural resources. Most of it, she claims, even when plant-based, is in fact just as ultra-processed, chemically and resource intensive and harmful to health as food produced and marketed through the conventional industrial food systems and just as, if not more, wasteful of the earth’s natural resources. The result, she states, is that it ‘ignores our relationship with nature’ and ‘reduces the bio-diverse, self-organised, living earth to raw material for the money machine’.

All of this of course means that the author is profoundly opposed to the so-called ‘deep green’ agenda of renewability, regarding it as no more than a sop to the growth mantra of industrialised production. She sees the complex infrastructure needed to set up, deal with and maintain ‘renewable’ activities and technologies as both continuing to rely on fossil fuels and involving at least as much savage exploitation of the earth‘s fragile resources, both biological and geological, as in ‘non-green’ methods of production. So she is intensely critical of apparent environmental champions such as George Monbiot, referring to him as one of ‘the messiahs of fake food’ for his claim that ‘lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet’. Such a view she dismisses as ‘false at every level’, since ‘being energy, resource and capital intensive, the lab food and fake food economy is highly non-sustainable’. A ‘greenwashing operation’ pure and simple and a massive fraud is the way this book’s author sees all this – at best an exercise in rearranging the deckchairs. But, even worse, it is, she tells us ‘a fully fledged counterfeiting operation that aims to gain control over our diets by making food ever more dependent on the multinational companies that produce and patent it’.

All this constitutes a searing indictment of capitalist industrial production, even though the author does not once in this book use the word ‘capitalist’ or ‘capitalism’, preferring instead to use terms such as ‘maldevelopment’ or ‘the economy of greed’. This may be a deliberate choice on her part so as not to lay herself open to any accusation of political partisanship as opposed to following the evidence of facts and science. Nevertheless, it is still clear that she is describing what socialists call commodity production, i.e. the production of goods for sale on the market with a view to profit for the tiny minority class who own the means to produce them. And she does show that she knows of the existence of this class (she mentions ‘the 1%’ on several occasions), that they are ‘predatory’ and that their activity ‘places profits above nature and people’. Yet there is no evidence in her book to indicate that she is looking outside the framework of commodity production for a different way of doing things.

At the same time, she has ‘an alternative path’ to propose to the current system’s ‘chemically grown and highly processed’ methods of food production. This consists of methods of production that would be ‘ecological not industrial … conserving and regenerating the earth’s biodiversity’, and these would involve ‘following the ecological laws of the earth – the law of diversity and the law of return, shortening the distance between producers and consumers, deindustrialising and deglobalising food systems to reduce emissions and enhance health’, thus offering ‘solutions to the climate crisis, the extinction crisis and the hunger and health crises, because the health of the planet and our health are interconnected’. It must be said that this is nothing if not an admirable vision. The snag, however, is that the author seems to see it as achievable within the framework of the present system of buying and selling and production for profit – and this by means of social pressure and the goodwill and actions of governments. Unfortunately this ignores the reality that all governments of all kinds and stripes are servants of that system (i.e. the capitalist system) and their role is one of oversight and of attempting to make it run in the least worst way. They are not in the business of overthrowing it or regulating it for the common benefit – or indeed for anyone’s benefit other than that of the small minority who already monopolise the planet’s wealth.

The existing method of production and distribution, with its growth imperative and its commodification of everything, has, as this book so trenchantly informs us, seriously damaged and may well be on the way to completely destroying the natural environment. How can we prevent this going any further and reversing it? Not via tweaks to the way the current system works but by a democratic political movement expressing a majority will of the world’s people to cooperatively organise a leaderless, stateless society without governments, without markets, without buying and selling and with free access to all goods and services – a society which will recognise the necessity to produce and distribute sustainably while being sensitive not just to the needs of the human species but to the whole biosphere, the whole environment of which we are a part – the real ‘economy of care’ that Vandana Shiva so passionately advocates for but offers no realistic path to.

Howard Moss

Exhibition Review: In the Wild (2024)

Exhibition Review from the October 2024 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Manchester Museum (part of the University of Manchester) underwent a sizeable redevelopment last year. One result of this is a much larger space for temporary exhibitions, which is currently occupied by ‘Wild’, a display on until June next year.

It is a thought-provoking exhibition, featuring paintings, animals as taxidermy mounts, and information displays that focus on specific projects concerned with rewilding (‘letting nature take care of itself, enabling natural processes to shape land and sea, repair damaged ecosystems and restore degraded landscapes’, rewildingeurope.com). An interesting concept is the baseline, a time when an ecosystem was healthier, though this can be subject to various interpretations.

Beavers were hunted to extinction in the UK about four hundred years ago, but they are now being re-introduced, as they build dams and so on, being ‘natural engineers’. In Yellowstone National Park in the US, the last wolves were deliberately killed in 1926, but this led to there being too many grazing animals, and wolves were re-introduced in the 1990s.

Knepp in West Sussex (knepp.co.uk) is the first major rewilding project in England. Its soil made it unprofitable as a dairy farm, and from 2001 it was transformed into a naturalistic grazing system with a range of habitats and herds of cattle, ponies and pigs. But, of course, it still has to make a profit, and this is achieved by means of safaris, accommodation such as yurts, and selling meat. It has been criticised as not truly being rewilding, as the landscapes are not in any real sense natural.

The Isle of Arran off the west coast of Scotland now includes the South Arran Marine Protected Area (arrancoast.com), aiming to ‘protect and restore a diverse, abundant and beautiful marine environment’. In Lamlash Bay this includes a No Take Zone, where no fish or shellfish can be taken from the water, seabed or shore. This is intended, among other things, to protect beds of maerl, a coralline pink seaweed that forms a space where small species can find food and hide from predators.

The exhibition makes the point that there can be a contradiction between rewilding and using land for housing and food. At the end, three possibilities are set out: prioritise nature and leave it to do its own thing; prioritise the relationships between humans and nature; or prioritise nature for the benefits it provides to people. These are hardly mutually exclusive, and different ones could be applied in different areas, rather than there being a single global policy. But issues such as this may well form part of democratic discussions and decision-making in a socialist world.

Paul Bennett

Letter: Existence and purpose (1976)

Letter to the Editors from the August 1976 issue of the Socialist Standard

Existence and purpose 

George Pearson remains persistently puzzled about why man should glory in natural phenomena. This question is, for me, answered by the following quotation from Sir Walter Raleigh: “We are compounded of earth, and we inhabit it.”

The emotions that George Pearson describes as “spiritual” are entirely natural. There isn’t an atom of our being that is not a part of the natural universe. External factors such as natural or artistic beauty on the one hand or the degradation of the dole queue on the other will serve to trigger our reactions. But to ask why we react is meaningless, like asking why trees can’t walk.

Of existence the only meaningful statement we can make is that “existence is”. No reason, no purpose is implied in existence, only its reality. Likewise with our emotional reactions: they are as much a natural part of human life as the ability to breathe.

C. Skelton,

Woking

Producing and paying (1932)

From the December 1932 issue of the Socialist Standard

A correspondent asks if it is correct that “Labour is the source of all wealth.”

The answer to this question is “No.” To say that “Labour is the source of all wealth” would mean that Labour of itself is some kind of inexhaustible reservoir from which wealth (articles of use—or use-values) can be extracted, and would leave out of account the part played by Nature. It is the sort of loose phrase that might be justified in casual conversation if the part played by Nature is left to be understood, but as a definition to be used in studying economic laws it is useless and likely to lead to unsound conclusions.

Nature provides the materials to which labour is applied, and Nature and Labour play an inseparable part in the process of wealth production. Marx criticised the phrase “Labour is the source of all wealth.” He wrote: —

“The phrase quoted is found in all primers for children, and is accurate insofar as it is left to he understood that the work is effected with the aid of the appropriate object and means. But a Socialist programme ought not to permit itself the use of such bourgeois locutions; it ought not to ignore the existence of the conditions upon which the meaning of the phrase solely depends.” (“Criticism of the Gotha Programme.”)

The correct statement of the source of wealth is that wealth is produced by the application of human labour to Nature-given material.

Another correspondent, while agreeing with the above definition, thinks that it contradicts our contention that rates and taxes are not a burden on the working class or, as he puts it, that the workers “do not pay for armaments.”

Here, again, is need for precision. The idea behind our correspondent’s difficulty is that if the workers produce all wealth, then they must pay for everything. The ability to pay is associated in his mind with the ability to produce. But this is a mistaken notion. The workers do not produce for themselves but for their employers. The whole of the articles produced belong to the employers, who sell them and receive the proceeds of the sale. Out of the proceeds they pay away various amounts, including the wages of the workers and rates and taxes. If the armament burden could be reduced the capitalists would benefit by paying away less of their profits in the form of taxes for armaments. Not so the workers. The workers have no means of paying for anything other than the wages they receive (supplemented by charity, social services, etc). If taxes are reduced, and if, as a consequence, prices fall, the workers’ cost of living also falls, and with it their wages. The workers produce the wealth but do not own it.

The tax burden which the various groups of property owners are constantly trying to pass off on to each other, cannot be passed off on to the propertyless class.

DON.

'Wild Isles' (2023)

TV Review from the June 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

David Attenborough had, among his no doubt many friends, the Queen, so this and his advanced years, which cast him of another generation with all the expectations that brings, might excuse him from being too reactionary. I have to confess that he is, to me, the Bruce Forsyth of television nature programmes – a safe bet and someone the BBC can place before the viewing public in the knowledge that he is not going to ‘say it as it is’ and upset anyone.

I must also confess that I do not have a television and have not ever felt the need to own one; of course if you mention this people are quick to tell you how you are missing out on ‘all the wonderful documentaries’… maybe, but I take the view that I like to do things myself all the time I am physically able and not sit back eating a pizza with a remote in one hand watching someone else even if it is to see a wildebeest getting ripped to bits by a lion with the commentator telling you that ‘the wildebeest is getting ripped to bits by a lion’. It was, therefore, with some effort that I managed to find a friend who was happy for me to go over to his house and watch the ‘controversial sixth episode’ of the latest of David Attenborough’s wildlife documentary series. Despite not having looked at the media or listened to the news for the last nine months it was physically impossible not to have heard of ‘Wild Isles’ – his latest series in which he looks at nature ‘at home’. I suppose even the legendary Mr Attenborough can’t carry on lying around among a harem of gorillas forever, particularly in his mid-nineties.

Episode 6 was not shown on mainstream television and the word had it that it was ‘too controversial’. This, of course, fired up my interest; at last! Sir David was going to put things straight and he was going to catch me, King Charles and the BBC totally unprepared and whilst lying in some long grass in Epping Forest, hugging a badger, would say ‘The capitalist system is both dangerous to wildlife and to people. The wealthy are becoming more wealthy and the only way we can ensure that wildlife on our planet will thrive is to end the profit system now and smash the capitalists…. Workers of the World Unite!’

This sadly was absolutely not the case. I sat down as my friend fiddled with iPlayer and as the programme began I tensed up waiting for a purple-faced Attenborough railing against the system but on came the beautifully shot dolphins, flowers, eagles and ancient oak trees. The photography was, as always, absolutely stunning but no even slightly ‘edgy’ comment. It was like a balloon that you find behind the sofa 10 months after the New Year’s Eve party….

I am baffled as to why this episode was not shown… a little research suggested that the BBC had only ever intended five episodes, odd… then why make six? Others say that they could not be seen to show an episode linked to charities. Apparently the WWF, National Trust and Greenpeace were involved. Well, I suppose the National Trust do have some very revolutionary coffee cakes, perhaps that’s why? While the viewer was entertained with wonderful camera work Sir David spoke in short simple statements: ‘The Cairngorms are a wonderful place’…. (20 second dramatic pause)…’Just enough of the natural world remains to recover’… (20 second pause)…’It starts with us’…. (20 second pause) … ‘Vast swathes of countryside are now silent’… (20 second pause). Rachel Carson was saying that over 60 years ago, I wanted to shout, and nothing’s bloody changed…! And so it went on, tame, totally dumbed down – nothing that could be considered a rallying call or reason to do anything other than scoff the pizza and call for another lager.

I’d like to say more but what can you say… ? Okay, perhaps I should try… the programme left me feeling the same old way, once again here we are faced with a person who has nothing to lose (at his age) and who is in a prime position to get a message over, to really say some hard-hitting truths but instead, like so many people who really could exploit their privileged platform, squanders the chance with some meaningless platitudes.

Am I being unreasonable? Can capitalism really be made to work in the interests of nature and wildlife? Surely the answer is staring us in the face – everywhere I look, everything I hear, ALL the evidence points to the profit motive coming before the environment, so, clearly, no!

I have no doubt that Sir David cares for the life he has so deeply involved himself with over all those years but why is it that such an obvious answer to the plight of all the animals he has talked about and seen during his long life has not occurred to him? Like so many others he believes that reforms are the answer.

I decided to look a bit deeper and see if he really had not considered how the system itself was the cause of the decline wildlife. A quick search reveals that, indeed, he has expressed thoughts on the system and, indeed on capitalism itself, so here are a few:

‘Human beings have overrun the world’

‘Greed does not lead to joy’

‘Our system is based on profit but capitalism is not dead’

Make of these what you will. Furthermore, and in the series itself, he does, as is often the case in the media, resort to the ‘guilt trip’ approach. I have to admit that this is one of my pet hates and I have railed against it before; he says things like ‘Do we really not care for nature’ or ‘Our blind assault’ (on nature) or ‘We have just enough nature (left) to save our wildlife’ and ‘Real success can only come if there is change in our societies (note the plural here – he is not saying society as a whole) and in our economics and in our politics’.

The latter says both all and nothing and still begs the question – well what do you want to replace it with? The former do the usual thing of turning the problem to the sort of abstract ‘we’ or ‘our’ as if we as individuals are personally responsible for albatrosses choking to death on plastic or ancient woodlands being cut down to shave 5 minutes off a train journey to Birmingham… Maybe Sir David really does want to explain the real problem but has his wings clipped… just as he is straightening his tie and the makeup artist dabs on the last of the greasepaint the producer says ‘steady on with the socialist stuff Dave, we don’t want a bloody revolution, just give them the cuddly take, and remember the series is running a hefty profit so stay off the red, eh?’

It really doesn’t take a naturalist to tell us that nature is endangered but it will take socialism to put it right.

Glenn Morris

Humans and Nature (2023)

Book Review from the February 2023 issue of the Socialist Standard

Life As We Made It. How 50,000 Years of Human Innovation Refined – and Redefined – Nature. By Beth Shapiro. Oneworld, 2021. 341pp.

The author of this book is an evolutionary biologist with a special interest in the uses of ancient DNA and genetic engineering. She attempts to trace – and to characterise – the ways in which homo sapiens has used and manipulated nature over its history and, with modern biotechnology, can continue, for good or for bad, to do so more than ever. Profound understanding of how humanity has fashioned the natural environment since earliest times coupled with dazzling technical knowledge and experience in a variety of scientific fields allows her to paint a picture of human social evolution that is as extraordinary at it is often horrifying and to project into the future ways in which the careful use of what she calls synthetic biology can help to fashion what she sees as positive social developments for humanity.

One part of the history of humanity in its relationship with other species is dramatically summed up by the author when she writes: ‘Within the last 50,000 years, our ancestors hunted, polluted, and outcompeted hundreds of species into extinction’. A reasonable qualification to this, however, should be that they did most of this in the last 10,000 years or so, that is once settled agriculture took over from nomadic hunter gathering. And whether this move to farming was meant, as she says, ‘to improve the reliability of their next meal’ is also a matter of debate. A number of recent studies suggest that this transition, very gradual as it was, happened more by serendipity than by deliberate decision, especially as the effect of it was to make the majority of people actually worse off in very many ways than they had been as hunter gatherers. This was then made even worse when the new agricultural societies led to fixed hierarchies and then states with a small number of wealthy and powerful at the top and the vast majority forced to work at their behest and under conditions not of their choosing. This kind of set up remained as agricultural living was transcended by competitive industrial societies leading to colonial rule for millions in the less economically developed parts of the world and the factory system and wage labour as a means of survival for the vast majority elsewhere.

But, if we return to the time, 10,000 years ago, when settled agriculture in its various forms took over, the process of mass extinctions of both people and flora and fauna accelerated to a massive extent. Beth Shapiro, in a highly compelling and readable style, documents much of this history, striking examples of which in recent times are the demise of the bison in North America (from 60 million in the mid 18th century to fewer than 1,000 in 1884), the complete destruction by the end of the 19th century of the billions of passenger pigeons whose ancestors went back 10 million years, and the virtual elimination from the whole of the Americas by the mid 20th century of the pumas and panthers which had once been widespread throughout the continent.

But the author’s main purpose in writing this book is not so much to lament the loss of species or human carelessness in conserving the environment in the past as to propose ways in which humanity can make a better fist of things going forward. As she puts it: ‘We must use our increasingly advanced technologies to shape the future into one in which people can thrive alongside other species.’ She talks about the need to ‘restore ecosystem health and save species from extinction’. These are obviously laudable objectives, but the way she sees them being most effectively advanced is via massive changes – often laid out in enthralling scientific detail – she sees as possible by the use of genetic engineering and synthetic biology. She recognises that many people question this but is not sympathetic to their objections, brushing them aside as either ill-informed or based on conspiracy theories (‘cacophony of lies and distorted half-truths’).

While she may be right about this, what she does however fail to recognise (or at least nowhere mentions) is that, in the society we live in, neither the massive impact human activity is having on ecosystems nor the inability to decently feed, clothe and house many millions of people is caused by a failure to use the most up-to-date well-researched techniques of production to their best potential but is much more to do with production needing to take place with a view to cost-saving and profit rather than human welfare. This means that all attempts to ‘green’ the environment and benefit flora and fauna in any form face the formidable obstacle of a profit needing to be turned and that feeding people the world over is not a question of our inability to produce sufficient food but rather of people not having sufficient money to buy that food.

So, in referring to the need to develop biotechnologies such as artificial insemination and embryo transfer of animals to increase food production and deal with what she calls ‘global food shortages’, she surprisingly fails to take account of the wealth of information available showing that enough food is already produced to feed the world but that, in a world system based on the market and buying and selling, food is not available to the millions who need it. She shows no signs of being aware that, even in the USA, the most economically advanced country in the world and the one she lives in, the top 0.1 percent of the population hold as much wealth as the bottom 90 per cent put together and some 47 million people live in poverty. She refers to ‘United Nations estimates that farming production will need to increase by 50 percent to feed the projected 9 billion people that will inhabit the planet in 2050’, yet this flies in the face of a large swathe of studies estimating that, using current knowledge and techniques, the world can be fed many times over, up to 23 according to one estimate. So it’s not more advanced biotechnology that’s needed, nor more industrial agriculture, nor the continuous and increasing use of animal experimentation to improve biotechnology (something the author clearly sees as essential), but rather, and quite simply, a more advanced social system that does away with the market and buying and selling and produces for human need not economic profit.

Howard Moss

Thoughts on Climate Change (2022)

From the August 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A few days ago, I saw a drift of Cardamine pratensis by the roadside – not pink, not violet, but an indescribable blend of them both. Known to most, and first named when our relationship with plants was much closer, as the Cuckoo flower or Lady’s smock, these flowers have never grown there before; certainly the species can be found at the same roadside location each April, but not the same flowers. Each year, new flowers appear, equally beautiful and equally fresh.

Beauty, particularly the beauty of nature, so valuable to us all and yet with no actual monetary value, is transient. Beauty, a universal feature of our natural surroundings, is disappearing gradually and inexorably. Climate breakdown caused by human activity is now a major cause of species and habitat loss. However, climate breakdown (or change) is not the only, or indeed primary, factor leading to the destruction of our environment; it is, rather, a symptom of our means of organising world society – a symptom that sits alongside pollution, warfare, homelessness, poverty and many other inexorable outcomes of a society based on profit and endless growth. We are, in fact, a species at war with ourselves and the very necessities of life itself. This is a needless war, as the system that gives rise to such outcomes can be changed; it only requires individuals to believe that it is not working and to want to change it.

I hope that, if you have read this far, you will not see these words as a pointless ‘rant’ or feel that by writing these thoughts I am in any way suggesting that the opinions you hold about climate change or the causes of climate change are invalid or wrong. I am, however, hoping that you will agree that the existing manner in which we organise society does not work and is dramatically failing to protect both us as humans and the species with which we share the planet – the only planet available to us. Yes, this is a political problem and politics is a difficult subject, but for a moment imagine that all the political parties, groups and ideas that we know were gone; there was no ‘right’ or ‘left’ but instead a new order of things that put nature and people first. No economy, simply the careful and considered organisation of the world’s resources to the mutual benefit of all. Would this not be welcomed? In my opinion, ‘left’ and ‘right’ political thinking suggests a wall at which you can only turn one way or the other, and at which there is no escape from the system – one which still puts the economy first. I want to get over the wall, look at all the wonderful things the human race can do, put beauty first and allow our children to look back with thanks that we chose a new path into the future.

It is not helpful to focus blame for climate change (or indeed all the other ills of society) on each other or individuals; yes, as individuals it is mutually beneficial to play our part, but no amount of reforms, charities or tweaking will curtail the trajectories we are experiencing. Change is needed – world change – and change is frightening, but is it more frightening than the alternative?

Glenn Morris

Socialism and nature (1992)

From the June 1992 issue of the Socialist Standard

We publish below a criticism from a Marxist viewpoint of the so-called “Deep Greens” or “Deep Ecologists” who see nature as a force to which humans must submit.

Our ecological crisis, say the “deep” Greens, stems from a fundamentally unhealthy relationship between society and nature. In this relationship, inherited from attitudes and philosophies developed during the Enlightenment and the industrial revolution, we regard ourselves as separate from and superior to nature. We think we can constantly change, develop and destroy it for material benefit. Such alienation and exploitation result, Deep Greens say, from human arrogance and greed, which are displayed equally in capitalism and socialism.

They argue that a healthy, holistic, organic relationship with nature would, by contrast, regard humans as part of it, not separate from it—subject, like any other species, to the same ecological laws. We therefore must observe the natural limits on human activity imposed by finite resources. We should respect, celebrate and revere nature in its own right (the “bioethic”)—regardless of its use value to us. This means abandoning materialism and “living lightly on the earth”, while conserving virtually all species from highest to lowest.

Socialists, too, condemn Western attitudes to nature. However we relate them not to human “sin” but to the specific workings of capitalist economics (state or private). We reject the Deep Ecology approach in favour of a dialectical Marxist one.

Dialectical approach

A dialectical view of the society-nature relationship says, first, that there is no separation between them. They are part of a unity. There is not a self-contained “humanity” counterposed to a self-contained “non-human” world. The two are so un-self-contained that you cannot define one without the other (try it!). They are really aspects of one another: what humans do is natural, while nature is socially produced.

Second, as they develop they constantly interact to change each other, in a circular, mutually affecting way. “Non-human” nature, and human perceptions of it, affect and change human society. The latter then changes nature, which, changed, affects society to further change it, and so on.

Underlying human interactions with nature is the process of production, which is a defining characteristic of being human. In production we change nature with forethought, into forms more useful to us than in their “natural” state. Labour incorporates our essential human forces into nature, which therefore gains social quality in the form of use values. Under capitalism, of course, the value of nature is not judged simply by its use, material or aesthetic. It is expressed as exchange value: the value which its products realise when bought and sold in a market place.

Over time, our work on a nature which existed before humans were present—a “first nature”—has produced the material creations of society together with its institutions, ideas and values—a “second nature”. Here, we should recognise something which most Deep Ecologists do not (or if they do, they do not welcome it—see Bill McKibben’s Death of Nature). This is that wherever there are humans it is no longer meaningful to distinguish between first or second nature: everything is the latter. Marx certainly recognised this:

Animals and plants, which we are accustomed to consider as products of nature, are, in their present form, not only products of, say, last year’s labour, but the results of a gradual transformation, continued through many generations, under man’s superintendence and by means of his labour. (Capital Vol. I).

The nature that preceded human history . . . today no longer exists anywhere . . .

(German Ideology).

In these days of concern about ubiquitous global atmospheric modification the truth of these observations becomes clear upon a moment’s reflection. Even “wilderness” areas and wildlife preserves are not “natural”. They have been artificially segregated from normal development processes by human decisions.

Because socialists accept all this with equanimity, Deep Ecologists often accuse them of sharing with capitalism an arrogance towards the rest of nature. And, indeed, Marxism was, like liberalism, born of the Enlightenment view that saw nature as something to be understood in order to use its laws, principles and resources for the material benefit of humans.

But the society-nature dialectic does also acknowledge human dependence on non-human nature as well as vice versa. This is fundamental in the recognition of nature as one of the forces of production: a recognition which should beget, in socialists, sensitivity to the objective existence of ecological laws. It should also beget kindness and humane (i.e. like humanity) treatment of animals. For, if in changing nature we change ourselves, then acts of cruelty to animals create cruel humans.

This all means that as the productive forces of technology develop, what it is to be human and to be “natural” both change. In production

Man sets in motion arms and legs, head and hands—the natural forces of his body—in order to appropriate nature's productions in a form adapted to his own wants. By thus acting on the external world and changing it, he at the same time changes his own nature. (Marx. Capital).

So through learning how to farm nature’s products we changed ourselves from nomadic hunter/gatherers to sedentary humans. Through learning how to manufacture things we changed ourselves to an industrial society. As our ability to use resources has grown we have developed new needs: housing, energy, telecommunication. As we have changed our power to do things (e.g. via transport and computers) we have changed the things we want and need to do (e.g. travel).

This interaction is not just material. Through changing nature and making things, we have changed ourselves into creatures who appreciate the beauty of what we create: buildings, machines, art, landscapes. Included in all this are our intellectual senses. As we transform nature, we get to know nature’s laws in order to do it more effectively and usefully. As this happens we develop our own intelligence.

Lewis Mumford described aspects of this dialectic, in Technics and Civilisation. He argued that creating machines produced new moral values in Western societies. These elevated practicality, thus favouring a meritocracy which swept aside a feudal caste system. And new cultural values were created. Nature was transformed into a human work of art: its beauty and wonder being augmented by the quantitative and analytic appreciation which a machine culture induces. The human imagination has also been enlarged by scientific, technological fantasising, and by a new machine aesthetic: a second nature of cranes, skyscrapers and microscopes. Cubism was the first style to reflect the beauty of the machine. Photography enhanced our appreciation of pure form in nature, while films brought distant environments near, recreating symbolically a world beyond our immediate reach.

This unfolding society-nature dialectic is an evolutionary process. In it, industrial, technological society is not some unnatural aberration, but a natural stage in social development and a social stage in the development of nature. It follows that changing our nature changes our needs. If most needs are thus socially produced, so too are the resources to fill them. Coal, oil, quartz, then, are not fundamental, basic resources: they did not become resources until we developed the technologies to use them. So we should be less concerned about whether they are going to run out. Rather, we should ask whether we wish to fulfil needs for energy, transport and telecommunication through these particular resources or others. Alternatively, we may wish to change our view of what we need; consequently our view of what constitutes “resources”. The point is that the choice is ours: we are not the helpless playthings of natural or economic forces that Greens sometimes would have us believe.

We should appreciate that this dialectical perspective is profoundly holistic. It contains no dualism of society and nature, but a monism in which both are defined by each other and are constantly co-cvolving:

Nature is man’s inorganic body—nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. “Man lives on nature” means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is part of nature . . . (Marx: Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts).

As Fritjof Capra, the Deep Ecology physicist who is not a friend of Marxism, has conceded, this is a deeply ecological view of the society-nature relationship.

Alienation from nature

The socialist conception of nature, then, is not as a mere stock of economic goods (capitalism), nor as a source of intrinsic worth or good (deep ecology), nor as an endangered ecosystem (tragedy of the commons survivalism). It conceives of nature as a social category: though there was an “objective” nature it has been reshaped and reinterpreted by one aspect of itself, human society.

Since alienation means separation from aspects of the self, then alienation from nature means a failure to realise that it is an aspect of the self, i.e. a social creation. This implies that the environmental crisis results from failing to see nature as our own creation and to understand that we can exercise conscious social control over this creation in order to make it a more desirable environment. Instead, we tend to view change towards unpleasant environments as substantially inevitable—a result of economic and technological forces (like the market and mechanisation) that are (we imagine) largely beyond our control. Reformist environmentalists and politicians try to wrestle with such forces, introducing taxes and legislation to soften their environmental impact. But they consider that a truly socialist society—an egalitarian, productive community of society and nature in which both are mutually benign—is quite beyond their reach.

For Deep Greens, “alienation” from nature means something quite different. It means asserting the naturalness of humans by “living in harmony with nature”, i.e. effectively conceding that natural laws (c.g. carrying capacity) have immediate determining power over us. Nature is seen as the source of worth (it “knows best”) and we endanger it unless we follow its rules. This view, says Steven Vogel, by seeing human activity as encroachment on or violation of nature

seems to be curiously guilty of just the sort of dualism it ascribes to the project of dominating nature. Somehow the activity of humans in transforming their environmcnt, alone of all other species, is ‘‘unnatural". ("Marx and Alienation from Nature", Social Theory and Practice, Vol 14, No3).

Vogel might well be thinking of Greenpeace's 1990 recruiting leaflet, which accuses “man” of multiplying “his numbers to plague proportions . . . and now stands like a brutish infant, gloating over this metcroric rise to ascendency".

Deep Ecologists would have us revere nature, preserving it to acknowledge our “one-ness” with it. But, as Murray Bookchin suggests, such worship mystifies nature, actually placing humanity far apart from it. It is a "Supernature with its shamans, priests, priestesses and fanciful deities". Reverent mystification really separates us from nature: we the “impotent and terrified mortal before a jealous and angry god", Gaia as an inhuman force we cannot change but to which we must adjust for our survival.

So Deep Ecology’s view of alienation from nature really rests on a dualistic conception of the human-nature relationship: a conception it is supposed to reject. The socialist dialectic, however, is not dualistic, and therefore, as Vogel says, “the question is not whether what we do ‘accords with nature’, it is whether we like what we have wrought”. And, as Reiner Grundmann says, in communism (socialism) humans will “dominate” nature but only in the sense of being in total control of their relationship with it. This in fact is the precondition for avoiding ecological crises.

David Pepper

A Diverse World (2021)

From the December 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Big Butterfly Count takes place every year in the UK: volunteers record how many they see in a period of fifteen minutes. The numbers have been going down: an average of nine per count this year, compared to eleven last year and sixteen in 2019. Some species are unable to cope with a warmer climate, and other hazards include habitat loss and the use of pesticides. You may feel that this is a bit of a shame but of no great importance. It is, however, an everyday sign of the global reduction in biodiversity, which has major implications for the future of the planet and of humans.

Elizabeth Kolbert’s book The Sixth Extinction makes the point that there have been five great extinction events, starting with one 450 million years ago and including the wiping-out of dinosaurs in the Cretaceous period. Something along similar lines is already happening, resulting in a possible sixth extinction. A number of species have become extinct in relatively recent times, or rather been made extinct by human actions. For instance, the last examples of the great auk, a large flightless bird, were killed on an island off Iceland in 1844, after a mass slaughter had resulted in them being extirpated from North America by 1800. They were killed for their meat, for use as fish bait, or so that their feathers could be used for stuffing mattresses. The Chinese paddlefish was officially declared extinct at the start of last year, the result of over-fishing and dams blocking the route to its spawning grounds.

So there were five catastrophic events over several hundred million years, with seemingly another in progress right before our eyes. But the current one is very different, happening faster than previous ones and caused primarily by the actions of humans. ‘Almost half of Britain’s natural biodiversity has disappeared over the centuries, with farming and urban spread triggered by the industrial and agricultural revolutions being blamed as major factors for this loss’ (Guardian, 10 October).

Animal and plant life is of course essential to human survival and progress, and diversity is crucial, for a number of reasons. Soils need to be protected, nutrients stored, and in general ecosystems maintained. Species depend on each other: crop by-products feed cattle and cattle waste feeds the soil; bees fertilise plants; large carnivores prey on herbivores and so prevent them from grazing more and undermining the environment.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) maintains a Red List of Threatened Species, using categories such as Vulnerable, Endangered and Critically Endangered. According to their website, ‘Currently, there are more than 138,300 species on The IUCN Red List, with more than 38,500 species threatened with extinction, including 41% of amphibians, 37% of sharks and rays, 34% of conifers, 33% of reef building corals, 26% of mammals and 14% of birds.’

It is estimated that altogether around a million plant and animal species are at best insecure, around half of these being insects. The causes of all this include the loss of natural habitats, over-exploitation such as over-fishing, climate change, pollution, and the spread of invasive disease and other species. Humans rely on a relatively small number of food crops, and billions rely on just three (maize, rice and wheat); global heating may place these in a precarious position, with greater diversity one way to combat this. The loss of animal pollinators will reduce crop outputs. It is not just food, for many medicinal plants are under threat, and billions rely on them for combatting disease. Snowdrops have been used against headaches, and an alkaloid derived from them is used to treat Alzheimer’s. But over-harvesting has led to many snowdrop species, and others, being under threat. Penicillin is one of many medicines derived from natural sources.

Wasps may strike you as a bit of a nuisance, liable to sting you. But in fact they play a major role as pest controllers: they hunt caterpillars, locusts, spiders and flies. More generally, insects pollinate plants, recycle organic material, keep soil healthy, disperse seeds, and are a source of food for many larger creatures. Predators are an essential part of nature, limiting the numbers of animals lower down the food chain. Apex predators, such as wolves, can play an important role in reducing the impact of the animals they prey on, and of those that their own prey consume. Climate change can also have a major impact on biodiversity. Up to sixty percent of coral reefs are dying because of global warming, yet they support thousands of species and provide both food and medicines to humans.

Many efforts are being made to combat species loss, or at least to discuss how to approach it. In September a big biodiversity meeting was held in Marseille, organised by the IUCN and there will be a UN summit on the same topic next year in Kunming, China, following an online get-together this October.

Many countries have established national parks as one means of protecting wildlife and maintaining biodiversity, but these have not always been straightforward in their effects. In Africa, for instance, many national parks led to the eviction of local people, while in Peru the lives of indigenous people have been transformed in negative ways, such as being forced to use Spanish rather than their native languages and being cut off from their traditional sources of food and medicines. In the words of one Peruvian activist, ‘They are oppressed in the name of conservation’.

Many conservation projects have met with some modest success in enabling species to survive, albeit often encountering problems too. Whooping cranes in Canada and the US were down to just twenty-one birds by the mid-1940s, but a captive breeding programme that began in the 1960s has boosted this number to over eight hundred. The Sumatran rhino may have as few as thirty specimens in the wild, and even attempts at captive breeding have proved challenging. In Sicily the Zelkova tree has been subject to much research into how to raise new saplings, but getting them to acclimatise outdoors has so far proved difficult.

What are the implications of all this? The loss of species is not itself a bad thing, as it has been happening for hundreds of millions of years. But the current rate is, to say the least, very concerning. For the fact is that humans and other animals need a diverse planet to live and thrive on, and biodiversity loss is rendering the natural world less supportive of life, less able to feed and cure its population. It is clearly a major problem, of an order of magnitude comparable to global warming, which is itself a contributory factor. There is no simple criterion or goal such as net-zero carbon or being climate-positive, or a target of limiting temperature rise to 1.5 degrees, but the idea of stopping or slowing biodiversity loss is clearly important. We cannot say that a socialist society would be immediately able to solve biodiversity problems, any more than that it would immediately solve climate change. But a society based on meeting human need and working in harmony with the environment is a far better place for tackling these problems than capitalism, which has been the major contributor to them and is concerned with profit rather than the wellbeing of the planet and its inhabitants.

Paul Bennett

Resources: New Internationalist January-February 2021; www.iucn.org.

Nature, production and system change (2021)

From the November 2021 issue of the Socialist Standard

System change not climate change. Yes, but how and why do social systems change? What is behind this?

What do we mean when we say we ‘produce’ something? What are we doing? Basically, we are changing the form of something that originally came from nature (or, rather, the rest of nature, since of course we are part of it ourselves). We are changing nature, with the ultimate aim of surviving better within it. All animals, in fact all living things, do. Nature is not something static. Like everything else, it is changing all the time – not just through physical forces like the weather, volcanic activity, solar activity, but also through the activity of living things, both plants and animals.

All living things work, in the sense of expending energy, to extract from the rest of nature what they need to survive. Humans are no exception. We have to as well.

Although other animals are better at doing many things with their bodies than humans are (better eyesight, hearing, sense of smell, but also other abilities we don’t possess), our particular nature as an animal (symbolic thought, vocalisation, writing, prolonged maturation and passing on knowledge) gives us one advantage over all other animals. We are not dependent just on our own bodies – our hands, arms, legs, etc – to extract what we need from the rest of nature. We can make instruments (from materials found in nature) to help us do this:

‘The use and construction of instruments of labour, although present in germ among certain species of animals, is characteristic of the specifically human labour process, and Franklin therefore defines man as ‘a tool-making animal’ (Marx, Capital, Vol 1, ch 7).

Benjamin Franklin’s definition is a good one. We are tool-making animals, i.e, we are animals, but specifically animals which make and use tools. These tools have evolved and developed over time:

‘Darwin has directed attention to the history of natural technology, i.e, the formation of the organs of plants and animals, which serve as 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?’ (Marx, ch 15, section 1).

It does, because:

‘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 the production of the social relations of his life, and of the mental conceptions that flow from those relations.’

This is the ‘materialist conception of history’. Today, all serious theories of history are ‘materialist’ in the sense that they analyse history in terms of material causes. The idea that history is the working out of some god’s plan or that some god intervenes in history – what might be called ‘the creationist conception of history’ – is as absurd as creationism is in biology.

The ‘matter’ of the materialist conception of history is how humans are organised to meet their material needs, how they are organised to produce these from the rest of nature. The different technologies used by human societies to obtain from nature what they need give rise to different forms of society and as technology changes so does society; in fact as technology develops and progresses so does human society.

But how exactly do changes in technology – changes in the way humans interact with nature to live – lead to a change in the structure of society?

Chapter 1 of the Communist Manifesto of 1848 famously opens with: ‘The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.’ How, then, are class struggles related to changes in technology?

‘It is the development of tools, of these technical aids which men direct, which is the main cause, the propelling force of all social development. It is self-understood that the people are ever trying to improve these tools so that their labour be easier and more productive, and the practice they acquire in using these tools, leads their thoughts upon further improvements. Owing to this development, a slow or quick progress of technique takes place, which at the same time changes the social forms of labour. This leads to new class relations, new social institutions and new classes. At the same time social, ie, political struggles arise. Those classes predominating under the old process of production try to preserve artificially their institutions, while the rising classes try to promote the new process of production; and by waging the class struggles against the ruling class and by conquering them they pave the way for the further unhindered development of technique’ (Anton Pannekoek, Marxism and Darwinism, 1909, Chapter II).

The materialist conception of history explains the change from one system of society to another, not just in terms of slow technological changes, but in terms also of a class struggle, with one class championing a new technology against an entrenched class benefiting from institutions relevant to an outdated technology. Such a disconnect exists today, and has done for some 150 years, between already ‘socialised’ methods of production, a vast cooperative effort linking people working in different parts of the world, and property institutions dating from a time when production was still local and individual. Before humanity can organise its current relationship with the rest of nature in a rational and sustainable way this contradiction has to be ended.

Adam Buick

Materialism and Art. by George Plechanoff (Part 2) (1926)

From the November 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Concluded from last month.)

Another example. Some writers have expressed the thought that in the appearance of man that seems ugly which reminds him of the features of lower animals. This is right in applying it to civilised people, though even here are many exceptions : a lion’s head to none of us seems ugly. Nevertheless, despite such exceptions, we can assert that civilised man, conscious that he is an incomparably higher being in comparison with the creatures of the forest, is afraid to resemble them and even tries to exaggerate his unlikeness. [14] But in applying this to primitive man we find a large and sweeping contrast. It is known that primitive men often pull out their own incisor teeth, in order to resemble ruminant animals; others file them sharply in order to resemble ferocious animals; some plait their hair so that it resembles the appearance of a horn. Often this tendency to imitate animals is connected with some religious faith of primitive man. But this does not in the least change the matter. Had primitive man looked upon the lower animals as we do, then there would have been no place for animals in religious performances. [15] Primitive man, then, looks upon them differently. Why? Because he stands on a different step of culture. That means if in one case a man tries to resemble animals and in another he is trying not to, then the different attitudes depend upon the conditions of his culture, i.e., again upon the social conditions above mentioned. Besides, we can express ourselves much more clearly if we say it depends upon the degree of development of his productive forces, upon his means of production. And so as not to be blamed for exaggeration and unilaterality of vision, we shall cite some quotations from the learned German traveller, Von-den-Steinen :

We will only then understand those people—says he about the Brazilian Indians—when we begin to view them as the products of a hunting state of existence. The most important parts of their existence are bound up with the life of animals, and from this experience their outlook and, correspondingly, their artistic motives have been formed. It is possible to say that their wonderfully rich art has originated entirely in their hunting life.

Chernyshevski wrote in his dissertation, “The Aesthetic Relations of Art to Reality” :

In plants we like the freshness of colour and the splendour and richness of form, which reveal a life full of energy and strength. The withering plant is not good, nor is a plant with little life juice good.

Chernyshevski’s dissertation is extremely interesting and singular in setting oppositions to questions of aesthetics according to the general principles of Feuerbach’s materialism. But history has always been a weak place for this kind of materialism, as is well seen from the above-quoted lines. “We like plants.” But who are the “we”? The tastes of people are extremely changeable, as Chernyshevski many times indicated in his book. It is known that primitive tribes—such as Bushmen and Australians—never ornament themselves with flowers, though they live in a country redolent with their presence. It is said that Tasmen were an exception, but it is impossible to verify the truth of this : the Tasmen have all died. At any rate it is quite well known that in the ornaments of primitive hunting people who had taken their motives from animals, plants are entirely absent. Contemporary science can explain this in no other way than upon the plane of productive forces. “Motives of ornaments, taken by hunting tribes from nature, consist exclusively of animal and human form,” says Ernest Grosse. They choose only phenomena which have for them a practical interest. The picking of plants, which, of course, to the primitive hunter is an occupation of a lower kind, is relegated to the woman and he himself takes no interest in it whatsoever. This explains why in the art of ornamentation no sign of vegetative motive is richly developed among any civilised people. In reality the passing over from animal ornaments to vegetative presents a symbol of great progress in the history of culture : “the transition from the hunting state to the agricultural.” [16]

Primitive art so clearly reflects in itself the conditions of productive forces, that now in doubtful moments the state of those forces is judged by art. Thus the Bushmen very willingly and with comparative ease draw people and animals. In the places inhabited by them some grottoes represent very picturesque galleries. But they never draw plants. In only one known exception of the rule : in representing a hiding huntsman in a bush, the crude drawing of the bush shows how unusual this subject was for the primitive painter. On this ground some ethnologists conclude that even if the Bushmen ever had a culture of a higher standard than now, which talking an general is impossible, then they most certainly have never known agriculture.

If all this is correct, then we can formulate the conclusion made by us above from the words of Darwin : the psychological nature of the primitive huntsman creates his aesthetic tastes and conceptions, and the state of productive forces, his hunting state, determines that only these and no other tastes and conceptions are formed. This conclusion, throwing a bright light upon the art of hunting tribes, is also another argument for the validity of the materialist conception of history.

Among civilised people the technique of production more rarely shows direct influence upon art. This fact, to the superficial observer a contradiction to the materialist conception of history, in reality, when considered in the profound manner of a sociologist, gives it brilliant support.

14  Lotze. Geschichte der .Aesthctiken, Munchen, 1868. IS. 568.)

15 Compare J. G. Frazer. “Totemism,” 1898, {P. 39), and Schweinfurth, ” In the Heart of Africa.” (P. 381.)

16 The Beginning of Art. (P. 149.)

Translated for “Modern Quarterly” by Bessie Peretz.

Materialism and Art. by George Plechanoff (Part 2) (1926)

From the October 1926 issue of the Socialist Standard

(Continued from last month.)

PART II.

Let’s go further. In discussing imitation, we mention as directly opposing it the inclination of contradiction.

This should be studied carefully.

We know what an important role the “beginning of antithesis” plays in the feelings of men and animals, according to Darwin.

“Certain states of mind lead, as we have seen in the last chapter, to certain habitual movements which were primarily, or may still be, of service ; and we shall find that when a directly opposite state of mind is induced there is a strong and involuntary tendency to the performance of movements of a directly opposite nature, though these have never been of any service.” [1]

Darwin brings many examples which convincingly show that “with the beginning of antithesis” very much is explained in the expression of feelings. We ask : Is its action visible in the origin and development of customs?

When a dog throws himself on his back before his master, then his pose, combining all that is possible to think of as a contradiction to antagonism or resistance, is an expression of obedience. The beginning of antithesis is obvious here. That is also seen in the case described by the traveller Burton. The negroes of the Vuaniamuazi tribe, passing by the village inhabited by their enemies, carry no weapons, so as not to inspire a quarrel. Nevertheless in their homes, where they are comparatively out of danger, every one of them is armed at least with a club. [2] If, remarks Darwin, a dog turns on its maw, as if to say to his master, “Look, I am your servant,” then the Vuaniamuazi negro, disarming when it seems he should be armed, in the same way tells his enemy : “The thought of self-defence is far away from me; I wholly rely upon your generosity.”

In both cases there is the same meaning and the same expression, i.e., expression through action, directly contrary to the one which would be inevitable in a case where instead of obedience, inimical intentions existed.

In customs serving to express grief there is also evident the beginning of antithesis. According to Du Shalie, in Africa after the death of a man who had occupied an important place in his tribe, many negroes attire themselves in dirty clothes. [3] David and Charles Livingstone say that a negress never leaves home without ornaments except on those occasions when she is clad in mourning. [4] In the negro tribe of Niam Niam, when a relative dies the near survivors cut off their hair, as a sign of grief. [5]

In all those cases the emotion is expressed by an action contrary to the one which is considered useful or agreeable in the normal course of life. And if there are many such cases to be pointed out, then it is clear that a great number of customs owe their origin to the action of the beginning of antithesis. And if this is clear, then we can suppose that the development of our aesthetic conceptions is also accomplished under its influence.

In Senegambi rich negresses wear slippers, which are so small that the foot does not go in fully, with the result that these dames are distinguished by a very awkward gait. But this awkward gait is considered extremely attractive. [6] How could it become such? In order to understand this, it is necessary first of all to remark that the poor, working negresses don’t wear the above-mentioned slippers and have an ordinary gait. It is impossible for them to walk as the rich coquettes do, because it would cause a loss of time. And it is only on account of this distinction that the awkward gait of the rich women is so attractive ; time is not valuable to them, for they are released from the necessity of work. In itself this gait has no sense or value, but becomes significant only in its force of contrast to the gait of the working woman. The beginning of antithesis is obvious here, but notice that it is called forth by the existence of inequality in property among the negroes of Senegambi.

Let’s recall what we said earlier about the morals of the English nobility during the Restoration of the Stuarts, and you will agree that the inclination to contradiction displays a peculiar reaction in the social psychology of Darwin’s beginning of antithesis. Such virtues as industriousness, temperance, strictness of family morals, etc., were very necessary for the bourgeoisie, whose aim was to occupy a much higher social and political position. But were the vices contrary to the bourgeois virtues necessary for the struggling nobility? No, these vices sprang up not as a means of struggle for existence, but as a psychological result of this struggle : hating the revolutionary inclinations of the bourgeoisie, the nobility began to feel a disgust also toward their virtues and therefore began to demonstrate vices just the contrary. The action of the beginning of antithesis also in this case was brought on by social causes.7

It is known from the history of English literature how strongly the psychologic action of the beginning of antithesis, brought about by class-struggle, has reflected itself upon the aesthetic conceptions of the upper classes of society. The English aristocracy who lived in France during their exile, became acquainted with the French theatre and literature which presented a standard quite singular in character, and in its way the product of the refined aristocracy and therefore suited more to their own aristocratic tendencies, than the English literature and theatre of the Elizabethan age. After the Restoration, French tastes began to predominate on the English stage and in English literature. Shakespeare began to be treated as the French treated him afterwards, as strongly holding to classical traditions, that is as a “drunken savage.” His “Romeo and Juliet” was considered then as bad; “A Midsummer Night’s Dream“—”foolish and ridiculous” ; “Henry VIII” was found too “naive”; “Othello”— “mediocre.” [8] Such criticism of Shakespeare does not fully disappear even in the next century, Hume thought that Shakespeare’s genius seemed large in the same way that all ugly, disproportionately built bodies seem large. He blames the dramatist for his total ignorance of all theatrical art and conduct.

Pope regretted that Shakespeare wrote for the people and did without the protection of his prince and the encouragement of court. Even the famous Garrick, the worshipper of Shakespeare, tried to ennoble his “idol” in his performance of the grave-digger ; to “King Lear” he added a happy conclusion. But the democratic part of the public in the English theatres continued to feel the deepest devotion to Shakespeare. Garrick confessed that in changing Shakespeare’s plays he risked a wild protest from this part of the public.

His French friends paid him compliments in their letters regarding the “courage” with which he met the danger; “Car je connais la populace Anglaise,” adds one of them. [9]

The licentiousness of manners of the nobility of the second half of the seventeenth century was reflected, as is known, on the English stage where it took indeed extreme measures. According to Edward Engels, comedies written in England between 1660 and 1690 almost all without exception belong to the domain of pornography. [10] After all this we can say a priori, that sooner or later in England, at the beginning of this antithesis, the appearance of dramatic productions whose main aim would be the representation and exaltation of bourgeois virtues was inevitable.

As far as it is known, Hippolyte Taine noticed and more ingeniously than others emphasised the significance of this in the history of aesthetic conceptions. [11]

In his illuminating and interesting “Voyage aux Pyrénnées” he related a talk with one of his “table neighbours,” Mr. Paul, because it adequately expressed the author’s point of view.

“You go to Versailles,” says Mr. Paul, “and are perturbed by the seventeenth century tastes. But cease for a moment to judge from the point of view of your own needs and your own habits. . . . We are right when we are charmed by a wild landscape, as they were right when such a landscape seemed tedious. There was nothing uglier than this mountain for the people of the seventeenth century. [12] It evoked many unpleasant pictures. People who only recently lived through the epoch of Civil Wars, and semi-barbarism, in view of this mountain, called to mind hunger, long rides on horseback under snow and rain, black bread half mixed with husk, served always in dirty, greasy hotels. They were tired of barbarism, just as we are tired of civilisation. These mountains give us a chance of retreat from our pavements, offices and stores. This is the only reason why you like this landscape and if it were not for this reason it would seem to you as ugly as it once seemed to Madame Mentenon.”[13]

We like the wild landscape as a contrast to city views, of which we are tired. City landscapes and trimmed gardens were liked by the people of the seventeenth century as a contrast to a wild site. The action “of the beginning of antithesis” is here undoubtedly patent. But just because there is no doubt, it clearly shows us to what extent psychological laws can serve as a source of explanation of the history of ideology in general and of the history of aesthetics in particular. The beginning of antithesis played an important role in the psychology of the people of the seventeenth century, as it plays an important role in the psychology of contemporaries. Why then are our aesthetic tastes contrary to the tastes of the seventeenth century? Because we live in an environment entirely different. Therefore we come to the known conclusion : the psychological nature of man makes it so that he can have aesthetic conceptions, and that Darwin’s beginning of antithesis (Hegel’s “contradiction”) plays an immense role, to this time unappreciated in the mechanism of those conceptions. But why does the given man have only these and not other tastes ; why does he like only these and not other things?—this depends upon his environment. The illustration given by Taine also shows well the character of those conditions; how the social conditions determine the nature and course of man’s culture.

The illustration by Taine shows social conditions, as a cause that makes the fundamental laws of our psychology, but in this illustration the discourse is only about our relations to the impressions made by nature. But the fact is that the influence of such impressions changes in accordance with our own relations to the change in nature, and our own relationship is determined by the course of development of our social culture. As an example Taine gives a landscape. It is to be remarked that in the history of painting a landscape in general takes a place far from perpetual. Michel Angelo and his contemporaries neglected it. It developed in Italy only at the end of the Renaissance, at the moment of its decay. Also for the French artists of the seventeenth and eighteenth century it had no substantial meaning. In the nineteenth century this is abruptly changed; the landscape is beginning to be esteemed for the sake of a landscape, and such young painters as Fleur, Kaba, Th. Reausseau seek for inspiration at the bosom of nature, in the outskirts of Paris, in Fauntenebleau, and in Medon; the possibility of such inspiration was not suspected by the painters at the time of Le Brens and Bouche. Why? Because the social conditions of France changed and as a result the psychology of the French changed. And in various epochs of social development man gets for nature different impressions, for he looks upon them from different points of view.

The action of general laws on the psychical nature of man do not cease, of course, with only those epochs. But, as in various epochs, in consequence of variety in social relations, since different materials come into human minds, it is not strange that the results of its finish are different.

1 “Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals.” (P. 50.)

2 Voyage aux grands lacs de l’Afrique orientale, Paris, 1862. (P. 610.)

3 Voyage and Adventures in Equatorial Africa. (P. 268.)

4 Exploration du Zambèse et de ses affluents, Paris, 1866. (P. 109.)

5 Schweinfurth; In the Heart of Africa v 2 (P. 33.)

6 L. J. B. Berenger-Ferand. Les peuplades de la Sénégambie. Paris, 1879. (P. 11.)

7 It is necessary also to remark that only because of their social position the nobility could put their brilliant vices against the common virtues of the bourgeoisie. In the psychology of the struggling peasantry or proletarian class the action of the beginning of antithesis could have been displayed in the same fashion.

8 Beljam. (Pp 40-41.) Compare Tains. (Pp. 508-512.)

9 About this see an interesting investigation by J. J. Jusserand. ”Shakespeare sous l’ancien regime.” 1698. (Pp. 247-248.)

10 Geschichte der englischen Litteratur. 3 Auflage, Leipzig, 1897. (S. 264.)

11 Tarde had a wonderful occasion to examine the psychological action of this beginning in his book, “L’Opposition universelle, essai d’une théorie des Contraries,” which came out in 1897. But for some reason he did not make use of it, and limited it with only few remarks about the indicated action. It is true, Tarde says, (P. 245) that his book is not a sociological treatise, but even in a treatise especially devoted to sociology, he certainly could not have mastered this subject had he not gotten rid of his idealistic view.

12 We must have in mind that the conversation is carried on in the Pyrenees.

13 Voyage aux Pyrénées cinquieme edition. Paris, 1867.

Translated for “Modern Quarterly” by Bessie Peretz.

(To be concluded).