Sans ceremony. (1908)

From the September 1908 issue of the Socialist Standard

The effect of the recent decision of Mr. Justice Neville in the case where action was taken against the Amalgamated Society of Railway Servants by one of its own members, on the ground that contributions by the Society to the funds of the Labour Party were illegal, is that any association of the working class has a right to do what it likes with its own. According to Lord Wolverhampton (Daily Chronicle, 21/7/08) “the whole complicated machinery of civilisation is carried on by the working class,” “upon whom society depends.”

***

The whole of society depends upon the work of the working class. The working class is entitled to do what it likes with its own—the wealth it produces as a result of its work. Therefore it is established that the working class may legally proceed to expropriate Lord Wolverhampton and the rest of the dependent capitalists who, without legal title, annex anything between two-thirds and four-fifths of the wealth produced by the workers.

***

As law-abiding and right-respecting citizens, Lord Wolverhampton and his fellow capitalists will, of course, cheerfully resign themselves to the process—I don’t think !

***

Much outcry has recently been raised by “humanitarians” against the method of feeding pythons in the Zoological Gardens with live kids. The Socialist outcry is against the capitalist python feeding upon live children. “Humanitariamsm,” when distinguished from Socialism, is cant or ignorance.

***

Mr. Vanderlyn, F.Z.S., claims against the “Humanitarians” that the feeding of the Zoological pythons is a satisfaction of Nature’s demands which has for its result “the survival of the fittest.” The anti-Socialist “Humanitarians” in the field of human effort make the same claim.

***

The survival of the fittest is an expression of a natural law operating under all conditions. The conditions prevailing at any given time determine the character of the product of the law. Under conditions of exploitation the biggest robber survives. Under conditions conducive to the production of muddle-headedness, the “Humanitarian,” the “Ethicist,” and the rest of them survive. Under Socialism the workers survive. Natural law justifies nothing. It explains many things.

***

Mr. Th. Rothstein, S.D.P. Executive, quotes (Justice, 11/7/08) from the organ of Bronterre O’Brien, this passage: “Oh, Baring, Baring! (Baring was the Chancellor of the Exchequer of those days) many a better man than you was hanged at the lamp-post; and our sincere prayer is that no Englishman may ever again suffer for burglary or sheep stealing so long as enormous culprits like you cheat the gallows of its due.”

***

We have a weakness in the Socialist Standard for downright language. Our delight is to call spades, spades, but when we do, we are, according to Mr. Rothstein’s fellow members of the S.D.P., merely abusive. Nevertheless, Mr. Rothstein properly applauds the “robust fashion” of Bronterre O’Brien’s criticism, and thinks it a “sickly generation” that is too respectable to emulate it. I hope now, that Mr. Rothstein will lead the S.D.P. to see that we are doing them a power of good by shewing them in “robust fashion” the error of their ways. Because they are still miles out of the proper track, and not being a “sickly generation” we shall not be too respectable to tell them a lot more unpleasant truths before we are through. I should be glad to know they are in a mind to appreciate the force of our criticism. Perhaps Mr. Rothstein will drop me a line when the conversion is complete.

Alegra.

50 Years Ago: “Racial Myths” – Pamphlet Review (2002)

The 50 Years Ago column from the January 2002 issue of the Socialist Standard

Whatever may be said about the sorry record of the United Nations in other spheres, UNESCO has certainly succeeded in implementing its resolution of 1948 to disseminate scientific facts designed to bring about the disappearance of race prejudice. Four of its recent publications on various aspects of this question [are titled] “Racial Myths”, “Race and Culture”, The Roots of Prejudice” and “Race and Psychology”. All are worth reading, but the first, written by Juan Comas, gives the most general approach to the whole subject, providing a useful introduction to the other three more specialised pamphlets.

The author shows that race prejudice is of comparatively recent origin, being developed as a doctrine only in the last two or three centuries. Before the 15th century the division of mankind was not so much into antagonistic races as into “Christians and infidels”. The colonization of Africa and the discovery of America, with the resulting demand for cheap and slave labour, let to the first real growth of racist ideas. Comas describes how the Darwinian theory of the survival of the fittest was suitably adapted at the time of great Colonial expansion to justify the enslavement of the “inferior” human groups:

“. . . the truth is that with coloured societies becoming potential competitors in the labour market and claiming the social advantages regarded as exclusively the heritage of the whites, the latter were obviously in need of some disguise for the utter economic materialism which led them to deny the “inferior” peoples any share in the privileges they themselves enjoyed.”

Thus the immediate cause of racial discrimination is acknowledged to be a social-economic antagonism. Yet having gone so far as to admit this, Comas is reluctant to go farther into the matter to determine the reasons for this antagonism. Possibly he regards this as being outside the scope of his subject, but more likely, at least from the point of view of the organization for whom he writes, he knows where to stop.

(From front page article by S.R.P., Socialist Standard, January 1952)

Simon the Sociobiologist (2008)

From the January 2008 issue of the Socialist Standard

Darwin’s Origin of Species (2006)

Book Review from the November 2006 issue of the Socialist Standard

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

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

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

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

Lew Higgins

Are We Prisoners of Our Genes? (2004)

Party News from the September 2004 issue of the Socialist Standard

A new pamphlet in book form (50 pages) refuting the arguments of the biological and genetic determinists that a socialist society could not work “because it’s against human nature”. Shows how recent advances in the science of genetics have confirmed that humans are “genetically programmed” to be able to adopt a wide range of learned behaviours; that behavioural versatility and flexibility is a key feature of human biological nature; and that humans could therefore live in a peaceful, non-hierarchical, co-operative society of common ownership and democratic control.

Price £4 or, by post, £4.75. Six copies by post £19. Cheques should be made payable to “The Socialist Party of Great Britain” and sent to: 52 Clapham High Street, London SW4 7UN.

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.

The Survival of the Fittest. Is Socialism the Gospel of the Unfit? (1904)

From the December 1904 issue of the Socialist Standard

Twenty years ago the principles of Socialism were certainly most imperfectly understood by the mass of the people, but the recent article in the Daily Mail entitled “The Gospel of the Unfit,” shows also that a large number of educated men are still ignorant of its simplest elements. Mr. Perceval Gibbon, confused no doubt by the fact that every philanthropist and “labour leader” or any one else who expresses sympathy with the poor and oppressed, is dubbed a Socialist, has hardly grappled the “pure principle of Socialism” of which he writes. He is undoubtedly correct in his assumption that the Cause has attracted to its ranks many would-be politicians who find therein an outlet for their own personal ambitions, and who, obtaining a following, use the power thus obtained for their own ends. This is a parasitic growth common to all great movements ; and in all countries it has been recognised by the Socialist parties as unavoidable. Meanwhile the Revisionists and “labour leaders” are being vigourously attacked; the Liberal, who tries to conceal his identity under a cloak of Socialism, is like the ass in the lion’s skin, and betrays himself when he begins to bray.

The false idea of Socialism is still further increased by the action of that Press which sees Socialism in every measure touching the working-class. Even the late Labour Ministry in Australia was described as “Socialist,” despite the absence from the Senate and House of Reprsentatives of a single Socialist member.

It is admitted that these misleading statements have riveted the attention of the public on self-seeking individuals to the neglect of the “pure principles of Socialism.” This, too, Mr. Gibbon finds “noxious and hostile to the natural tendency of the human race to growth in all directions,” for, “by opposing the law of the survival of the fittest it rallies the unfit to its side.”

This statement is the portion of Mr. Gibbon’s article which needs serious consideration. Now, if this hostility to Nature be really present, the scientists—and there are many—who support Socialism must be in a somewhat difficult position, for it is on scientific grounds that the Socialist bases his principles, and it is from the Theory of Evolution that he draws his conclusions ; in fact the Theory of Evolution forms the bed-rock of his Economics and Philosophy. How then can his Socialism be in opposition to the natural tendencies of the human race ? The mistake, only too often made, is due to a narrow interpretation of the Darwinian theory.

The word “fittest” is made to apply always to the individual instead of to the community or species. The “fittest” then, in the modern state of “civilised society,” is the cunningest, even though physically and morally rotten ; that is to say, the big financier, the swindler, etc ! No doubt such folk are the fittest under the present conditions, but let the present conditions be altered, and the fittest to survive will be a totally different being. And the present conditions must alter, for modern competition between man and man is largely a hot-house product, forced on by artificial means, and unfitted to survive long in the open field of Nature.

Further, this suicidal struggle does not eliminate, but creates, the “unfit” and “unemployable.” Strenuous competition is apt to throw out the capable and fit as well as to increase the degradation and misery of the “unfit” by heredity. It must be remembered also that it is from the section of the “unfit” that Socialism draws none of its recruits, while it is from the loafer and parasite at both ends of the social scale that the Movement meets with most of its opposition. On the other hand, it is from the more intellectual and capable of the citizen class that Socialism receives its chief support.

What then is this “Gospel of the Unfit,” and at what system of Society does it aim ? It demands, broadly speaking, a Society in which social production shall be for social use. This involves the forming of the Co-operative Commonwealth. The questions to be considered are, therefore, whether co-operation on a large scale is in accordance with the Laws of Evolution, and whether it will tend to aid the advance, intellectual, physical, and moral, of the human race.

The Theory of Evolution as put forward by Darwin, still remains the clearest conception of the origin and development of the various organic kingdoms, but it must not be forgotten that his theories were largely influenced by two important forces, namely, the desire to prove that man had evolved, and the teaching of Malthus. These two considerations led him to ignore, for the most part, a factor of evolution into which he had not the time to fully enquire. This factor was the Law of Co-operation, which perhaps played a more important part in the development of species than any law of struggle or competition. Most of Darwin’s followers have, however, been too narrow-minded to follow out a train of thought often suggested in his works. In the third chapter of “The Origin of Species” he says, “I should premise that I use the term ‘Struggle for Existence’ in in a large and metaphorical 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.”

We find too, in “The Descent of Man,” that “those communities which included the greatest number of the most sympathetic members would flourish best,” and he points out further that co-operation leads to the highest development of the intellect and morality needful for the survival of the species.

If we examine carefully this “dependence of one being on another” and “the success in leaving progeny,” we find that the former results in the latter, and that co-operation regularly takes place during the breeding season for the sake of protection against a common enemy—the combination of several species of birds to attack a bird of prey is one of the commonest sights in nature. This same “dependence of one being on another ” results in the highest development of the individual, for we find that individual intelligence and activity are conspicuous wherever the members of the species co-operate.

Among insects none are of higher intellect than the bees, ants, and termites. Their great works—their roads, their storehouses, are all marvels of workmanship, and each member of the community is capable of performing any part of the necessary work. Nor is any greater or less than another: an ant that refuses to help with food a fellow ant in need of it is killed.

Among birds, none are of greater intelligence than the parrots and cranes, who always live in communities and practise mutual help.

Among mammals there are few that do not associate with their species. The happy lives of the members of the marmot communities, and the wonderful powers of the beaver are notable examples of the development attained through co-operation.

We find, too, that the monkeys, which show the highest development of all mammals, except man, live almost wholly in societies. Finally, among primitive men, savages, and barbarians, communism was the rule, and it is undoubtedly to this that we owe the high development of the human race.

So then, the “survival of the fittest” does not imply mutual competition, which leads to the destruction and weakening of the species, but rather mutual help. This, however, can only be properly practised in a Society where social production is for social use instead of for individual profit; and where the individual, freed from the degrading and destructive struggle for the means of existence, may have time and space to fully develope his own individuality without depriving the other members of his species of the necessaries of life. For Socialism by no means aims at reducing all men to the same dead level— a sheer impossibility—but rather seeks the development of a Society in which Nature, with her laws of natural selection, may have perfect freedom from all artificiality, and in which the mutual law shall be, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.”

Sydney Chase

Gould v. Dawkins (1999)

Book Review from the October 1999 issue of the Socialist Standard

The Darwin Wars by Andrew Brown. Simon and Schuster. £12.99.

This is a journalistic account of the arguments that have gone on recently amongst biologists in the Darwinian tradition, between those Brown calls the “Dawkinsians” and the “Gouldians”, so-called after Richard Dawkins, author of The Selfish Gene (1976) and Stephen Jay Gould, author of The Mismeasure of Man (1981) and of a series of collected essays on various aspects of evolution.

Although both sides have done original work in the field of biology and evolution, the argument is not really about the facts but about their interpretation. It is in fact a continuation of the old argument between the “Social Darwinists” and their opponents. The so-called Social Darwinists argued that the laws of biological evolution applied to humans in society and that in the social struggle for existence those who came out on top—the rich and the powerful—were entitled to their privileged social position as by achieving it they had proved to be “the fittest”.

Socialists were amongst those who opposed this apology for capitalist rule, arguing that Darwinian natural selection only applied in nature not to human society; because humans had acquired (as a result of course of their evolved biological make-up) the capacity to use tools their social development was driven not by biology but by technology, with social struggles not being a struggle of individuals against each other to survive but a struggle of classes over the control of the tools humans had developed.

Social Darwinism was revived in the 1970s under the name of “Sociobiology” which claimed, once again, that the laws of biological evolution applied to human society and that the behaviour of humans in society was governed by their biological nature; this, they said, was aggressive and anti-social as such traits had been necessary for human survival and so had evolved as part of the human biological make-up.

This was an attack on the up-to-then fairly widespread view amongst social anthropologists that there was no such thing as human nature in the sense of no such thing as biologically-determined human social behaviour since human behaviour in society was socially determined by the culture of the society they lived in. The findings of these anthropologists still stand but times had changed. The post-war boom had come to an end and, with states no longer able to sustain “altruistic” social reforms at previous levels, rugged individualism and no pity for the poor were back on the agenda.

Dawkins’s book The Selfish Gene appeared in 1976. It was a brilliant title to capture the spirit of the coming period. His basic argument was that Darwin’s “survival of the fittest” takes place not between individual organisms but between their individual genes (a controversial proposition in itself) and that genes could therefore be metaphorically described as “selfish” in struggling to survive. The title, however, left itself to being interpreted as saying that humans were genetically selfish and that there was in fact a human gene for selfishness. As a biologist Dawkins knew this to be nonsense but he nevertheless let the title stand.

In the dispute between the “Dawkinsians” and the “Gouldians” it is clear on whose side Socialists don’t stand. Although Dawkins is a militant atheist who makes mince-meat of religion, he is wrong in so far as he lets it be suggested that human social behaviour is genetically determined. This argument has been refuted years ago and has only been revived recently for non-scientific, ideological reasons. This, however, does not make us uncritical “Gouldians”. Gould’s books contain valuable material, but we are not obliged to follow his view that evolution does not mean “progress”, nor his view that there is no inherent incompatibility between science and religion.

Adam Buick

After Darwin (1998)

Theatre Review from the October 1998 issue of the Socialist Standard

After Darwin by Timberlake Wertenbaker. Hampstead Theatre.

Timberlake Wertenbaker, perhaps best known for her inspirational play about the transportation of prisoners to Australia, Our Country’s Good, now offers After Darwin, another drama set mainly in the 19th century. I say “mainly” because Wertenbaker both follows Darwin’s famous voyage on the Beagle—noting the cataclysmic effects of his discoveries on the ship’s captain, FitzRoy, a man of absolute religious conviction—and she also offers these insights as scenes from a play which we see in rehearsal in contemporary Britain.

The play abounds in irony and paradox. FitzRoy is scrupulous in his precise, scientific observations, but cannot accept the validity of Darwin’s observations and inferences, because they undermine the basis of his belief in God. Later, however, he was to become one of the founding fathers of the modern science of meteorology. And he it was who named those familiar weather zones around Britain: Fisher, German Bight, Humber, Thames, Dover, Wight, etc. By comparison Darwin’s own observations are often short on facts and full of value judgments. Moreover, when faced with evidence pointing to the evolution of species he is careful not to place himself in an exposed, heretical position. Rather he uses the discoveries of other scientists as props and supports. FitzRoy, who is clear that the nature of human kind has been fixed immutably by God, nevertheless believes that the “poor wretches” he finds in distant parts of South America, are capable of infinite adaptability. The Beagle carries sets of exotic cutlery, embroidered antimacassars, copies of novels of Jane Austen, etc, which will be used in an attempt to resocialise the natives. Darwin is hot on the fight against slavery, but indifferent to the native people he confronts seeing them as “abject, filthy and ugly”. When reminded by FitzRoy that they are human beings, Darwin retorts, “I feel closer to these beetles.”

The actor we see playing Darwin turns out to be a disingenuous, feckless rogue, whose behaviour nicely demonstrates the absurdity, not to mention the dangers, of social behaviour which is underpinned by the idea of “the survival of the fittest”. He wishes to abandon the play in favour of appearing in a film of stupendous crassness. He claims he is thus “adapting to his environment” the better to survive. On the other hand the actor playing FitzRoy chooses to be principled, loyal and dependable.

Does Timberlake wish us to take any lessons from this? It is difficult to know. But whatever her intentions by setting the drama as a contemporary play in rehearsal, she leaves the audience wondering about the consequences of applying ideas which seem to have considerable power when explaining the origin of species, as providing a relevant model for social behaviour.

I enjoyed the evening. It is rarely that a play entertains and informs, stimulates and amuses, and leaves its audience with so much to think and talk about later. But I have a cavil, and it is a substantial one.

I can see the attraction of Wertenbaker’s format, especially to a dramatist. Using a rehearsal room performance to inspect both the subject of a drama and the actors’ reaction to it, is an imaginative idea. But if the intention is to look seriously at the world “after Darwin”, perhaps more time needs to be spent looking at the impact of the theory of evolution. What about social engineering, eugenics, the tendency to see human society as a biological system, and to use imperatives derived from the natural sciences to explain social behaviour? Habermas and Marcuse have been keen to point out the dangers of using “scientism” to bolster the ideological basis of capitalism; to reduce matters which properly lie in the province of values, to the merely technical. I would argue that such things are much more central to the world “after Darwin” that those which Wertenbaker seeks to discuss. Wertenbaker’s analysis, enjoyable though it is, is sadly both insufficient and incomplete.

Michael Gill

Mutual Aid (2022)

by Clifford Harper

From the May 2022 issue of the Socialist Standard

A recent edition of the BBC Radio 4 programme In Our Time featured a discussion on the Russian anarchist Peter Alekseevich Kropotkin. The focus was not primarily on his political advocacy, rather it was his book Mutual Aid: a factor of evolution that was the object of consideration.

Published a couple of years before the Socialist Party of Great Britain was founded, it is an examination of the role cooperation and mutuality has played in evolution. There was an aggressive strain of Darwinism, personified by Darwin’s bulldog, T.H. Huxley, which emphasised the war of all against all as the motive force behind natural selection.

This view has often been deployed as justification for capitalism being the expression of self-interest as the prime motivation of human economic, political and social relations. It has been a persistent theme, running from Hobbes’s Leviathan, that seemed to draw biological justification from Darwin’s work.

In common parlance, this thinking is often expressed as socialism being a nice idea, but against human nature. If evolution depends on natural selection being driven only by self-regarding motives, then socialists are setting themselves against nature.

Kropotkin however, along with many, many others internationally, insisted that it was this brutalist view that disregarded the actuality of nature. Rather than begin by justifying human potential for cooperation, which might have been regarded as a plea for human exceptionalism, his approach was to examine nature more broadly to see if there was evidence of mutuality being fundamental.

His was no sentimental view of nature, as is demonstrated in the opening lines of the Introduction. ‘Two aspects of animal life impressed me most… One of them was the extreme severity of the struggle for existence which most species of animals have to carry on against an inclement Nature; the enormous destruction of life which periodically results from natural agencies’.

This is the antithesis of unbridled idealism, a realistic view based on his own extensive travels, experience and observation. The second aspect arising from his observations is telling:

‘…even in those spots where animal life teemed in abundance, I failed to find – although I was eagerly looking for it – that bitter struggle for the means of existence, among animals belonging to the same species, which was considered by most Darwinists… as the dominant characteristic of the struggle for life, and the main factor of evolution.’

Then, chapter by chapter, he goes on to demonstrate how it is mutuality amongst animals of the same species that is the primary, and crucial, factor in survival and evolution. He begins with invertebrates and progresses through ants, bees, birds to mammals.

On reaching humans he presents what evidence there is that cooperation in the Palaeolithic period was a necessity for survival in a hostile world, continuing to be so in both the Mesolithic and Neolithic periods. Primitive communism was not some fancy of Marx and Engels.

He goes on to trace this important feature of human life as it expressed itself, often in adverse political situations, from pre-history into history itself, into the medieval free cities and guilds. He cites examples of insurgent warriors taking land by force who eventually swapped spears for spades and operated cooperative farming communities.

Even in the 19th century he found expressions of mutuality in village communities and the nascent labour movement, although it is through the 19th century and the rise of industrial capitalism that private property became predominant and protected by the state. The mutual gave way to the individual.

While Mutual Aid is an anarchist constructing a scientific basis for communism rather than the historical materialism of Marx, the two approaches are surely not exclusive. Marx gives an understanding of how we arrived at the society we have and identifies the mechanism for change, the conscious action of the working class acting on its own behalf. The object being the establishment of a worldwide socialist system based on meeting need not profit. The question as to its viability will undoubtedly continue to be raised until socialism is actually realised.

Kropotkin indicates that rather than being alien to nature, biology demonstrates the contrary. Modern research and observation has found cooperation to be fundamental in nature. Plants provide each other with nutrients, fish groom each other for parasites, ants work together to build nests, bees sacrifice their lives for the good of the hive and predators hunt in packs.

Evolution requires groups of organisms to act together for mutual benefit. In 2016, research using a new conceptual evolutionary model at Tomsk State University was published. Competition and the struggle for existence were found not to be the main drivers of evolution. Rather, the avoidance of competition is important (bit.ly/3xkTOK9).

So, Kropotkin is vindicated by research in the land of his birth, as well as research more widely throughout the world. His own book refers to many researchers and observers from a plethora of nationalities, just as he draws evidence from every continent. By doing so he not only makes the case for mutuality, but also demonstrates human progress to be a global phenomenon, as socialism, as the practical realisation of mutuality, must be.

This book review might seem to be 120 years late, but not so. There is an abiding interest in the premise of Kropotkin’s argument and it continues to have a resonance for those advocating a radical alternative to capitalism.

Eighty years after Mutual Aid was published Stephen Jay Gould’s essay (1988), Kropotkin Was No Crackpot (marxists.org/subject/science/essays/kropotkin.htm) examines the controversy around the meaning for society of Darwinism at the turn of the Twentieth century.

Gould expresses how seemingly contradictory positions do not have to be polarised: ‘Reproductive success … works in many modes. Victory in battle may be one pathway, but cooperation, symbiosis and mutual aid may also secure success…’

He goes on to outline Kropotkin’s work, setting it in the mainstream of Russian thinking as exemplified by N.I. Danilevsky whose expertise in both population dynamics and fisheries led him to critique Darwinism as ‘…the credo of a distinctly British ‘national type’ as contrasted with old Slavic values of collectivism.’ The ‘national type’ he referred to was the line of thought running from Hobbes through Adam Smith to Thomas Malthus, the developing philosophy of capitalism.

In September 2021, to mark the centenary year of his death, PM Press/Kairos published a new edition of Mutual Aid with a new Forward, Introduction, Afterword and Postscript. Some of the terminology is anachronistic – references to savages and red Indians – but it is of its day. When he uses such nomenclature, it is not to disparage, rather to show mutuality to be universal.

Those who would change society need to counter assertions rendered as indisputable facts, such as competition is fundamental to human nature. What Mutual Aid demonstrates, along with subsequent biological research showing cooperation at the cellular level is vital for organic development, is that advocacy of a system based on people voluntarily contributing their abilities so all can receive according to their needs is not utopianism, but natural. Mutual aid indeed.

Dave Alton

Pathfinders: Digging Up Old Bones (2007)

The Pathfinders Column from the June 2007 issue of the Socialist Standard

Politics and ideologies are in reality best understood not as imponderable excursions into the deeper truths of society but as products mass-produced off a production line and sitting on ideological supermarket shelves with brightly coloured labels, often red, blue, yellow or green or some novel mix thereof. One thing which you cannot fail to have noticed about commodities generally, and which these ‘soft’ commodities share with ‘hard goods’ like washing machines, cleaning products and tinned spaghetti is the inane compulsion to keep rebranding themselves with the legend NEW! in a big starburst banner just next to the price. As with NEW! pasta shapes, so with NEW! Labour. As with NEW! blue-whiteness, so with NEW! blue sky thinking. As with ‘revolutionary’ NEW! hair colour, or our special NEW! improved recipe, the manufacturers are challenging you to do what is probably impossible, and spot a difference that doesn’t exist, due to a change they didn’t make on a formula they didn’t modify. Why the manufacturers do this, in a fast-changing world where novelty has a short shelf-life, is too obvious to need spelling out, but one has a deep-rooted suspicion that many consumers too are so accustomed to these everyday revolutions that they would manage to find a difference between ‘old’ cola and ‘new’ cola even if there wasn’t one. This may be because they desire to see themselves as sophisticated and discerning customers with subtle palates that can detect changes at homeopathic levels, and thus they delude themselves and their peers, and in so doing become accessories to the grand illusion, perfectly trained pavlovian customers of capitalism.

Anyone who remembers, say, the adverts of the 1970s will have a strange feeling of detached deja-vu when seeing modern commercials for ‘revolutionary new products’ such as sunglasses that react to light (aka ‘reactolites’ in the 1970s ), but the feeling is somehow detached because nobody seems to remark on the fact that this is yesterday’s leftovers being served up as fresh. Perhaps to the extent that we stop bothering to protest, we join those consumers who can detect non-existent changes to recipes and in our own way become complicit in the grand illusion, finally for the sake of a quiet life pretending we don’t remember or don’t care. Meanwhile those who don’t remember previous incarnations will of course be under the happy impression that they are getting the newest and the brightest and the best of everything.

So it is part of the heavy labour of any forward-looking revolutionary to be backward-looking as well, in order to recall all the previous times society, debates, ideas and individuals have trod the same paths and been down the same blind alleys, and to remind those who are listening that the most heavily signposted routes are usually the ones that don’t go anywhere. And where politics, or its twisted and malicious great-aunt, religion, impact on the one truly novel field of human endeavour, science, the same dead hands of bigotry beckon us down the same old cul-de-sacs, winding along scenic back roads that skirt the evidence and obscure the real lay of the land.

So it is with the ‘controversy’ over Darwinian evolution. Just when you think, after the recent court judgments in America against it, that creationism is becoming a laughing stock and the American public are finally becoming tired of being caricatured as vegetable-brained hicks who praise the Lord and marry their sisters, the debate convulses once again, a bubble emerges from the fetid swamp, and a NEW! argument explodes over the scenery. Neoconservatives, it seems, are now at war with the religious right in an attempt to reclaim Darwin as the ideological figurehead, not of the scientific liberal progressive agenda, but of red-blooded two-fisted Republican screw-the-other-guy frontier capitalist values (‘A Split Emerges as Conservatives Discuss Darwin’, New York Times, May 5). The argument of the neo-cons is of course that evolution, being ‘red in tooth and claw’, and involving the ‘survival of the fittest’, is perfectly suited to the conservative view of capitalism. Never mind that the first of these phrases was coined by T H Huxley and the second by Herbert Spencer, Darwin is held up as the perfect justification for any amount of callous disregard by the rich of the vast majority of the world’s poor population, and the only people persistently getting in the way of this wonderful ‘proof’ of capitalism’s natural and therefore inevitable provenance are those silly religious evangelists who don’t seem to understand how to intelligently design capitalism’s propaganda machine.

And it is at this point that the reactolite factor sets in. People new to this debate might screw up their eyes, dazzled by the spectacle of conservatives being pro-Darwin and fighting their own religious brethren. But there’s more. What would they make of the logical extension to this scenario, which is the emergence of a liberal progressive element opposed to evolution? Yet the world has seen it all before, where the conservatives championed Darwin and the liberal progressives championed creationism. It was a sell-out gig, it was a set-up, it ruined careers, and it made history. It was the Scopes Monkey trial of 1925, a trial so bizarre that the defendant deliberately got himself accused as a teacher of evolution even though he was actually a football coach, where his friends were on the prosecution counsel, and where the jury was instructed by the defence not to find him innocent. The story of this world-famous publicity stunt, engineered entirely by the defendant and his team of bible-baiters, is hugely entertaining and too long to indulge here (but look it up in Wikipedia).

Why the pro-evolution lobby, and people like Clarence Darrow and H L Mencken, would want to crucify the religious right in public is not difficult for any scientifically-minded progressive to comprehend, especially one with a sense of humour. But, asked Stephen Jay Gould, in his perceptive article on the subject, what on earth possessed a liberal and progressive, three-times Presidential candidate like William Jennings Bryan, a man who had devoted his life to social reform, to lead the prosecution, in what he must have known was an ambush (see Rocks of Ages: Science and Religion in the Fullness of Life, 1999)? Bryan, ever since lampooned as the villain of the piece, was according to Gould motivated not so much by any fondness for the theory of creationism or its adherents as by a truly messianic hatred of the iniquitous implications of what had already by then become known as Social Darwinism, a vicious ideology of social callousness which owed more to Spencer than Darwin and whose consequences in social inequality and poverty Bryan had spent his life trying to battle. Gould, himself a lifelong bitter opponent of creationists, nevertheless manages to paint a sympathetic portrait of a decent man consigned to history as a buffoon, who found himself on the wrong side for the right reasons.

To socialists this is all old hat now, and they won’t be tempted into the debate between neo-cons and evangelists in the neo-neo-Darwin saga. They know that Darwin wasn’t a social Darwinist, that capitalism doesn’t show the survival of the fittest but in fact destroys the healthy host and preserves the degenerate and useless parasite, and also that the enemy of your religious enemy is not necessarily your friend. Those addicted to the NEW! however might end up scratching their heads over this one.

Paddy Shannon

The Case for Equality (1990)

From the June 1990 issue of the Socialist Standard

In a socialist society all human beings will be equals. Without equality there could be no society which could accurately call itself socialist. So, the class-divided, extremely hierarchical nations such as Russia and China, which have a class of privileged party bureaucrats ruling over the majority of the population who are wage slaves, are clearly not socialist—they are part of the social inequality which characterises capitalism.

What do we mean by social equality? We mean that we seek to create a condition of social organisation in which no person is entitled to be regarded and rewarded as superior to others and no person is to be condemned to the disadvantaged position of being socially inferior. In a society of equality there will be no socially superior or inferior people.

We are not advocating a social situation in which no person is superior to another person in any respect. In a society of human equality one person might be a better violinist than another. The inferior violinist might be a better poet or bricklayer than the superior violinist. The significant point is that such differences of achievement (which are almost certainly conditioned rather than innate) will not lead to social inequality. In a society of equals the better violinist will have no opportunity to live a more confortable life than the violinist whose music sounds awful. The person who is an expert at cutting up human bodies (a surgeon) will have no greater access to pleasant accommodation or decent cigars than the person who is skilled at fixing motor cars (a mechanic). Society needs surgeons and mechanics, violinists and poets.

Just as a society of equality will include people with different levels of talent and skill in various areas of life and work, so it will be a society of humans who are different from each other. The distinction must be understood between equality and sameness. If the present writer is asked whether he prefers the plays of Chekhov or Pinter he will reply that he enjoys them equally; this does not mean that he regards them as being the same—in fact, the two writers are very different from one another. The two playwrights (in the view of the present writer) are worthy of equal respect. To say that the dedication of a nurse and a firefighter is equal is not to suggest that both types of work are the same. Equality does not imply conformity or uniformity. On the contrary, it implies that our appreciation of our fellow human beings is not governed by a monolithic value structure, but that we have the capacity to respect different abilities without subordinating one to the other. Rather infantile critics of the case for social equality suggest that we are advocating some kind of absolute natural equality. Jerome K. Jerome wrote a rather foolish satire about utopia in which he depicted a society in which everyone had to be the same height and weight. Clearly, social equality will not require the elimination of natural human differences. If one person has natural advantages over another (such as the physical strength of the young over the old and feeble) that will not allow such a person to have social domination over those who are so-called natural inferiors. Natural differences such as gender or skin colour are no basis for social differences; it is only in a society of human inequality that these natural distinctions become parts of a battle for power

The facts of social inequality
Only a fool or a liar would contend that we are now living in a society of human equality. World capitalism has as its first characteristic the unnatural, artificial inequality between class and class. In Britain today the richest 1 per cent of the population own more of the marketable wealth than all of the poorest 80 per cent added together. The richest 10 per cent own between them more than half of all the wealth in Britain. In short, even if the 90 per cent joined together we would still be poorer than the richest 10 per cent. Approximately one in four humans alive today are malnourished because they cannot afford to buy food. In Britain and the USA one in four children live on or below the official poverty line. The most recent World Land Census, carried out by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation, showed that 2.5 per cent of the people who own land of over 250 acres own between them 75 per cent of all the world's privately owned land.

These are the dry statistics of inequality. The more visible and emotionally comprehensible features of inequality are before us every day. The sight of kids sleeping on the streets on cold nights while estate agents advertise six-bedroom houses for over a million pounds—often as suitable second homes for the useless rich. The queues in the casualty departments of NHS hospitals where the poor must wait for serious injuries to be treated, while round the corner in the private wing there are comfortable lounges for the rich to wait in while they demand the very best in health care, regardless of whether they are ill or not. The mothers who cannot afford to feed their children and keep them warm on £40 a week, while a couple of miles away five-star hotels are serving dinner to parasites at £250 a head. Only the socially blind will deny the existence of social inequality: only the socially brutalised will regard it as a desirable condition of affairs.

Is social equality possible? Some have argued that it is not. and if we are to argue scientifically we must examine and dispose of their claims. We can commence with the most stupid argument against equality; the religious objection. In 1784 George Pitt argued against the doctrine of equality";

  A doctrine, the fallacy of which is proved by the experience of every day. by the concurrence of all history from the earliest times, and above all by the contemplation of all the works of the Creator, the very essence of which appears to be gradation or inequality. (Letter To A Young Nobleman.)

In short, humans are created to be unequal. The Church has pursued this propaganda with vigour: The rich man in his castle, the poor man in his hut. God made them high and lowly . . . Apart from the fact that this nonsense ignores the first 40,000 years of human society (the great majority of our history) in which classes did not exist, its entire reasoning depends upon the completely unproven and utterly unprovable belief that the world was designed by an over-seeing being who decided how it would be organised. The religious defence of inequality is an ideology designed by the defenders of the rich who offer a creationist account of human inequality as a way of keeping the ignorantly—believing inferiors in their place. Lest there be any doubt about this we can turn to the writings of the prominent 18th century Christian and conservative, Edmund Burke, who spelt out the religious purpose in clear terms:

   The great body of people must not find the principle of natural insubordination . . . rooted out of their minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportionate to the endeavour, they must be taught to console themselves with the prospect of divine justice.

The claim that inequality was designed by a god requires a belief in an unprovable. immaterial deity, and then a respect for such a supernatural being who designs poverty and social misery for the majority class in society.

Biology not determinant
Different from the religious case against equality—but not all that different—is the biological theory. The infamous Professor Eysenck states that "biology sets an absolute barrier to egalitarianism"; we are all born with unequal capacities to become intelligent; this intellectual inequality is genetically inherited and determines our status in life: "Clearly, the whole course of development of a child's intellectual abilities is largely laid down genetically" (The Inequality of Man).

This biological determinism replaces genes for gods and contends that we are all born to fit into an intellectual hierarchy and must make the best of what our genes allow us to become. Eysenck and others have attempted to link superior genetic abilities with white skin colour. Others, such as Steven Goldberg in The Inevitability of Patriarchy, have tried to make a case for the biological inferiority of women. The case for biological inequality rests upon some very weak reasoning. Firstly, its conception of "intelligence' is a very narrow one, rooted in the limited history of European and American capitalism. If Professor Eysenck was left to survive in an African desert region we wonder how "intelligent" he would be in relation to the people who were brought up in such an area. The best evidence regarding human behaviour points to the fact that humans learn to be what we are: the extent to which we inherit genetically any mental aspects of our being is negligible. Even if there was some truth in the Eysenck theory, there would be no more reason for a society of human equality to discriminate against less intelligent people than it would be to discriminate against those who are physically disabled.

Davis and Moore have constructed a sociological theory which is simply an updated version of last century's Social Darwinist defence of social inequality:

  Social inequality is . . . an unconsciously evolved device by which societies insure that the most important positions are conscientiously filled by the most important persons. (Some Principles of Stratification).

According to this theory, society offers rewards to the people it needs most. Superiority is a reward for usefulness. If you are socially useless you will become inferior. The fittest will survive and thrive. The only problem with this theory—a pretty major problem for a would-be scientific analysis—is that it bears no relationship to the experience of how capitalist society actually does run. We know very well that under capitalism the useless stockbroker is rewarded (by income) much more than the nurse; the parasitical Royals are rewarded with billions of pounds for waving at people, while workers who grow food are often so poor that they cannot afford to eat properly. The belief that life is one great competition in which the capitalists win because they are the most able is a nice idea if you are a millionaire, but a lot of rot if you consider that most millionaires inherit their fortunes, and that these were obtained in the first place by exploiting the labour skills of others.

Free society of equals

It will not take long for the thoughtful reader to detect that all of the arguments against social equality are unhistorical. The god-myth has no basis in material history and entirely ignores the thousands of years during which humans lived in a condition of what social anthropologists call primitive communism. Were these humans (the majority of those who have lived on the planet) built by god with a design fault? The biological theory relies upon unproven notions of inherited intelligence and defines intelligence in an unhistorical manner. The modern Social Darwinists can see no further than the social order of the capitalist jungle.

There is one further argument against social equality which is sometimes put by capitalism's defenders and which does make sense. It is said that equality can only occur by limiting certain liberties which currently exist. This is quite true. The liberty of the least needy to push in front of the most needy in the queue for food, clothing and shelter will be taken away in a socially equal society. The liberty to destroy food and take land out of cultivation in order to keep prices and profits up will no longer exist. The liberty of humans to compel others to work for them (or starve) will be ended. In short, a socialist system of human equality can only occur once the expropriators have been expropriated—once the capitalist class has been dispossessed of its monopoly of the earth's resources. This threat to the capitalists' liberty to own and control the world is seen by them as something to be resisted at all costs—including the reputations and lives of those who dare to advocate social equality. The capitalist minority use every means of propaganda at their command to distort the case for equality, to defame its advocates and to defend their own privilege in the name of popular liberty and democracy.

To the majority of us, who are not capitalists but live by selling our mental and physical energies for wages and salaries, the awful danger of the capitalists losing their liberty to be the top dogs ought not to appear as such an awful threat. On the contrary, the removal of the liberty of the capitalist to be superior is the necessary precondition for the liberty of the wealth producers not to be inferior. The right of the worker not to be a wage slave requires the abolition of the right of anyone to be a capitalist. Freedom and equality have the abolition of class society as their social basis.

The only free society will be one where all human beings, without any distinctions of race or sex or age, have free and equal access to the common wealth of the world. Once goods and services are freely available to all, on the basis of self-defined desires, without the interference of money or markets, humans will be able to say in honesty that we are members of a human family—a family of equals.

Steve Coleman

50 Years Ago: On Eliminating The Unfit (1973)

The 50 Years Ago column from the April 1973 issue of the Socialist Standard

You will remember the immortal lines of Edward Lear :

“They went to sea in a sieve they did ;
In a sieve they went to sea.”

And then, after extravagant and variegated adventures, in the last verse he informed us:

‘‘In forty years they all came back,
“In forty years or more.”

I mention this to introduce you to the great thought that has struck Professor Arthur Thomson! He thinks we should all go into the sieve again; and, unlike kindly Edward Lear, he doesn’t want us all to come back. 

#    #    #    #

The readers of “John O’ London’s Weekly’’ for March 17th were informed, under the large heading, “Mankind Must Be Sifted,’’ of the pickle we are in.

  'There is too little sifting. If ten biologists were asked what feature in modern civilisation gave them most anxiety . . . we are inclined to think all would agree in placing first the relative slackness of selective processes working in the direction of progressive evolution.'

Now to his remedies, his sieves :

  'The multiplication of the radically undesirable must be checked.  . . . selection which takes the form of insisting on efficiency requirements. The more of this the better when the requirements are reasonable, and when they tend to make life more difficult for unreliable types whose multiplication is not in the interests of the race.'

#    #    #    #

Notice how the changes are rung on desirable and undesirable. By whom and for whom? Why is the question never once raised as to who and what are the defectives; whence they come or how they arise. I have seen it stated by another of the professorial fraternity that in spite of all hereditary taint 99 per cent. are born perfect. What happens after birth?

#    #    #    #

The employing class as a whole never says, “Low wages mean stunted men, starved women and defective children." It never says, “Long hours and intense toil mean premature age, empty lives and high accident rates for the toilers.” But they do mean so. For every defective born there is a hundred made by capitalism. For the defective born there is a hope of cure; for the defective made there is none—except Socialism. 

(From an article "Any More For The Sieve?" by W. T. Hopley in the Socialist Standard, April 1923.)

Letters: Is socialism against human nature? (1997)

Letters to the Editors from the May 1997 issue of the Socialist Standard

Is socialism against human nature?

Dear Editors,

I have been reading the Socialist Standard for a year now and I find myself in not inconsiderable agreement with most of the views expressed in it. I have a question regarding the relation between our ideals and some fashionable trends in science and philosophy nowadays. It's a familiar question, but for me a most important one. So far I have not found a satisfactory answer in the Socialist Standard, but this may be due to my own negligence.

As you know from many publications, neo-Darwinism holds that human beings, just like all other beings, are determined to fight for everything that enhances their own well-being, but not for things that don't. Conservatives and liberals use this idea to defend their economic principles.

On the other hand, we think that a socialist society will only come about as a result of people's determination to take as much as they need, and to contribute as much as they can. But neo-Darwinism says that, generally speaking, people will never be prepared to act in this way. Indeed, it believes that the inclinations of some people (such as the members of the Socialist Party) to act as real socialists must be explained in terms of underlying drives and goals that cohere with neo- Darwinism philosophy. Compare with the thought that altruists arc really egoists in a more sophisticated way.

So it seems that, if neo-Darwinism is right, socialism must be wrong. Or do they not contradict each other? What do you think? It will not be sufficient to answer that current attitudes will change once we will have changed our institutions and our educational system. For neo-Darwinism will counter you by saying that institutional and educational change could not possibly change our genes. If neo-Darwinism is right, do we therefore have to change our own biological constitution in the process to socialism? This is where things become really interesting. Please enlighten me.

Dirk Boecxx, 

London SE23

Reply:

If those you call "neo-Darwinians” hold that humans are prepared to struggle for everything that enhances their own well-being but not for a society where people contribute as much as they can and take according to their needs then they are being inconsistent.

This is because such a society would enhance people's individual well-being. Socialism does not require people to be altruists acting against their own self-interest. Socialism is in people’s self- interest. It is certainly not against it.

What those who claim that there is something in our genes that would prevent humans living in a socialist society are in effect saying is that humans are genetically programmed to behave against their best interest. Which is absurd.

So their argument is logically flawed but it is also factually wrong. There is no evidence that human behaviour is genetically determined. In humans genes don't govern complex social behaviour patterns like greed or, for that matter, generosity; they only govern physical characteristics like hair colour or a prospensity to develop certain diseases.

Human behaviour is distinguished from that of all other animals precisely by its high degree of flexibility and adaptability. In so far as the genetic make-up of the members of the species homo sapiens governs our behaviour it is through allowing it to be flexible.

Further, we are — again, biologically — social animals. We live in societies and could not develop on our own as lone individual or family units as some animals do. For instance, speech and all that this enables us to do that other animals can't — construct cultures and civilisations — is a social product and can only be acquired in and through society.

Both speech and the physical ability to speak could only have evolved through co-operation in an animal group that was capable of practising co-operation. Without this ability to co-operate the human species would never have evolved. Which is why some anthropologists see co-operation rather than the struggle of each against all as being the characteristic human behaviour pattern.

You ask for evidence of all this. Read The Evolution of Culture by Leslie A. White or any book by the anthropologist Ashley Montagu. Read sensible Darwinians such as Stephen J. Gould. And for a thorough refutation of the view that human behaviour patterns are governed by particular genes read the collective work Not In Our Genes (by Steven Rose. R.C. Lewonkin and Leon J. Kamin).

Finally, when Desmond Morris. Robert Ardrey. Konrad Lorenz and the others were peddling these ideas, the Socialist Standard published a number of articles refuting them. If you—or anyone else—are interested in them copies arc still available.

Editors

Reformist?

Dear Editors,

The article "The Kurdish Question" was excellent (Socialist Standard, January). But how does maximizing "trade union and democratic rights" become a "springboard" for attaining socialism?

I though that was what the World Socialism Movement was for. Otherwise it sounds like capitalist reformist politics to me.

Thomas Alpine, 

Grand Rapids, 

Michigan, USA

Reply:

We have always said that the best framework for the growth of the majority socialist understanding needed before socialism can be established is political democracy, limited and distorted though it must be under capitalism.

We have also always said, following on from this, that socialists in countries where political democracy docs not exist should campaign for this as well as for socialism. This is not reformism because such socialists would not be campaigning for capitalist political democracy as an end in itself with their own reform programme for achieving power nor would we envisage them joining with non-socialists to campaign for this in these countries. What we envisage is socialists — such as any hypothetical Kurdish-speaking socialists in Turkey, Iraq. Iran or Syria — campaigning independently for this at the same time as campaigning for socialism. Certainly they cannot campaign for setting up a Kurdish State and still be regarded as socialists. That's what we’d call capitalist reformist politics.

Editors

Reallocating resources

Dear Editors,

The Rev. John Papworth who described stealing from a supermarket as a reallocation of resources has done a great service in drawing our attention to the nature of society, and how our concepts of behaviour and morality are related to our material circumstances.

While stealing may be regarded as immoral according to Christian teaching, there is much greater immorality in our economy in that it allocates resources in accordance with profit rather than need. It is understandable that a person with little or no monetary resources is tempted to steal in order satisfy his or her needs.

In a different, alternative kind of society, where people would have the freedom of access to the wealth produced, taking what you want would not be regarded as stealing and would, therefore, not be regarded as immoral.

George Pearson, 

London SW20

Reply:

What would Michael Howard. Jack Straw and all the other defenders of capitalist morality and legality make of the following news item sent us by a reader in Canada?

"STATE OF NEED" SUCCESSFUL AS THEFT DEFENCE IN FRANCE

A court dismissed shoplifting charges against a woman who admitted stealing food to feed her children, based its ruling on a turn-of-the-century law favouring the needy. 

Supermarkets where the theft occurred said they would appeal the decision by a court in Poitiers. 320 kilometres southwest of Paris. 

Annick Grippon, 36, admitted shoplifting meat and sausages on several occasions to feed her three-year-old son and teenage daughter. 

Her lawyer, Philippe Brottier, found a nearly century-old "state of need" defence used by courts to dismiss cases against hungry citizens who stole bread.

(Times Colonist, 2 March)

Any More For The Sieve? (1923)

From the April 1923 issue of the Socialist Standard

You will remember the immortal lines of Edward Lear :

“They went to sea in a sieve they did ;
In a sieve they went to sea.”

And then, after extravagant and variegated adventures, in the last verse he informed us :

‘‘In forty years they all came back,
“In forty years or more.”

I mention this to introduce you to the great thought that has struck Professor Arthur Thomson! He thinks we should all go into the sieve again; and, unlike kindly Edward Lear, he doesn’t want us all to come back.

We welcome the appearance in popular journalism of the man of science. It is good and fitting that those who have been enabled to withdraw from the cut and thrust of commercial life and pursue the search for knowledge exclusively should repay their debt to society in this way. It is to be feared, however, that with the standard of popular journalism fairly low, the scientific contributor is apt to follow suit. But to return to the sieve. The readers of “John O’ London’s Weekly’’ for March 17th were informed, under the large heading, “Mankind Must Be Sifted,’’ of the pickle we are in.

  “There is too little sifting. If ten biologists were asked what feature in modern civilisation gave them most anxiety . . . we are inclined to think all would agree in placing first the relative slackness of selective processes working in the direction of progressive evolution.”

Professor Thomson apparently does not agree with Viscount Grey, who in a recent lecture said that the great question which transcended all others in importance at the present time was the relationship between Capital and Labour. But that is merely by the way. Each to his taste, as it were. He summarises in an able and popular way the successive conquests of poor, puny man over rugged, titanic, barbaric Nature.

  ‘‘These were ages of stern sifting; they lasted long, and they had good results. Man was lifted to good purpose.”

But Professor Thomson almost deplores the fact that in the contest, microbe versus man, it is the microbe which is increasingly taking the count. There are some diseases, he tells us, that weed out the weaker and leave the stronger surviving.

  “But this is a rapidly dwindling process, for the progress of hygiene and preventive medicine tends to eliminate the eliminators; and if we devise methods for saving useful lives, . . .  we have to use them for saving weakly lives as well.”

How sad! How Professor Thomson must have cursed his article of the previous week, wherein he praised the work of Jenner and his conquest of smallpox. That’s the worst of this journalism business; your stuff’s in print before you have time to think. However, at the time of going to press, pending the publication of a further article on a new dilemma of civilisation, there seems to be a case for the scrapping of our sewage system and the return of the cesspool. Let Nature do the sifting. The weakest to the wall, that’s Nature’s way. There are sections of mankind who, so other professors have told us, do give Nature a chance with the sieve. Babies not up to market size are exposed to the vultures, or thrown to the crocodiles. Elderly people who feel the strain of living getting too much for them have their brains beaten out with clubs by their sons. The natives of India treat as sacred the poisonous reptiles which wipe out a few thousand of them every year. They decline to resist the claim of the bubonic plague germ to a place in the sun.

I fear I am doing Professor Thomson an injustice. He sees the other horn of the dilemma. Space precludes quoting in full, but he says :

  "Now, the throwing off of the yoke of Natural Selection without substituting for it any processes of sifting that can pretend to be adequately testing or consistent or well thought out means for man a difficult dilemma and a great danger . . .  the growing solidarity or integration of society makes it easier for the inferior, or defective, or undesirable slacker, to continue to live and multiply. ”

Now to his remedies, his sieves :

  "(1) The multiplication of the radically undesirable must be checked. (2) . . . re-education of public opinion in the lines of the old-fashioned eugenic ideals of pride of race and pride in having a vigorous family. (3) . . . selection which takes the form of insisting on efficiency requirements. The more of this the better when the requirements are reasonable, and when they tend to make life more difficult for unreliable types whose multiplication is not in the interests of the race. (4) . . . To put an end—so gradually that the process is not cruel—to the less desirable occupations. (5) Perhaps the sifting may come sooner than we think, and in an undesirable form.”

He does not mean warfare, for, as he says, war thins rather than sifts, and works in the wrong direction by removing the bravest and best. He concludes rather nebulously by saying :

  “Perhaps it is safer to say that man must more resolutely seek to discover rational and social modes of selection to take the place of Natural Selection, whose rule Is almost over—What is needed is a progressive evolution of sieves."

Nebulous certainly seems the aptest adjective. Notice how the changes are rung on desirable and undesirable. By whom and for whom? Why is the question never once raised as to who and what are the defectives; whence they come or how they arise. I have seen it stated by another of the professorial fraternity that in spite of all hereditary taint 99 per cent. are born perfect. When one thinks of the lives led by millions of workers, this figure is surprisingly low. What happens after birth the war recruiting strikingly revealed, for to get an army of any size, the deaf, the half-blind, the half-witted, and the epileptic were roped in by the hundred. Reflect upon the thousands of dentists, tearing out the teeth of the nation; upon the thousands of oculists attending to our eyes; the battalions of doctors waxing fat on our unhealthiness; our huge and overcrowded hospitals, asylums, yes, and prisons; and then ask, is it sieves we want? Many “enlightened" employers have found that garden cities, well ventilated factories, fatigue reducing methods, staff athletic clubs, canteens, etc., result in higher efficiency, reduced sickness and greater contentment. They have found that the manufacture of defectives does not pay in their particular business. In scores of other businesses it does not matter. Any lapse through the non-operation of these factors is speedily remedied through the Labour Exchange. The employing class as a whole never says, “Low wages mean stunted men, starved women and defective children." It never says, “Long hours and intense toil mean premature age, empty lives and high accident rates for the toilers.” But they do mean so. For every defective born there is a hundred made by capitalism. For the defective born there is a hope of cure; for the defective made there is none—except Socialism. Professor Thomson would chuck him in the sieve. The Socialist would render the sieve unnecessary by ceasing the manufacture of defectives. The scientific professor is concerned with effects, the Socialist with causes. Judge you between us.

W. T. Hopley