Is Human Nature a Barrier to Socialism?

Ante-Script

As previously when I've done talks like this, the below is more or less what I meant to say, any resemblance to my actual, stammering and highly eclectic delivery is purely coincidental. Enjoy...

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Every socialist will have heard this objection to socialism. You've got someone to agree that the current system doesn't work, that the credit crunch shows some basic problems with the system, that it's unfair that some have so much and others so little, but then you come to propose socialism as an alternative. 'Ah, but that's human nature, isn't it? You've always got to have leaders. Some people always rise to the top. People are naturally selfish/greedy/bastards.' That's why doing a speech on this topic is brilliant, because tonight we'll have the space to actually talk about why this is not an effective objection, rather than, as I usually do, to myself on the bus home.

In my experience, people believe that this is their trump card, the insuperable objection. It's all very well wanting equality, but in the end we're all a bunch of selfish buggers, right? Good point. From littering to murder we can think of all manner of examples of selfish behaviour. Indeed, the political party with the largest number of parliamentary seats is explicitly based on the politics of greed and self-interest. So how do we explain the fact that we are still socialists? There are only 2 options:

1. This brilliant objection had never occurred to us before
2. We think we have a good response.

Since every time you mention your politics this is brought up by someone, I think we can discount a, even if you don't credit us with the smarts to have thought of it ourselves (a point of view that implies that socialists emerge fully-formed from some kind of Damascene conversion). That leaves us with b. So what might a socialist response consist of?

There are really three aspects to the question:

1. What is human nature?
2. What is socialism?
3. Is 1 incompatible with the aims of 2?

Some people have argued that there is no such thing as human nature at all – that humanity is some kind of tabula rasa on which all behaviours are written by social and cultural influences. I won't be arguing this, but rather that although some human behaviours can be seen as universal, the expression of those behaviours does not sum up human nature and that social factors hugely influence some behaviours and completely determine others. This, I think, suggests that human nature is perfectly compatible with our idea of socialism.

Some human behaviours are universal. Language is the most obvious example – all human cultures have complex languages. We are speaking, and because of that thinking, apes. Other candidates for universal behaviour include play, laughter, and tool use. You will notice from my examples that these are broad and general formal categories, they describe a general form of behaviour but no specifics. All humans laugh, but do they all titter? I honestly couldn't tell you. All humans speak, but clearly not all humans speak about Peter Mandelson's autobiography, or the advantages of Python over Perl.

Not even the person who has told you that socialism is impossible because we're all too nasty or selfish would agree that all human behaviour is essential to our nature. There is no gene to code for writing Star Trek fan fiction. So we're talking about defining what is essential to humanity and what is not, in general terms. We've already looked at some things that all humans seem to do independently of culture. So what kinds of things are particularly socially constructed, other than fan fiction?

First off there are social institutions – these clearly have only social roots, responding to a social set of circumstances and defined entirely by social relations. Money, schools and religions fall into this category. But more than that we are, as Aristotle so neatly put it, 'political animals' – animals that by our very natures exist in communities, that are social not through choice but because it is one of the things that define us. We can only have a concept of selfishness at all because it stands in opposition to our ideas of communal behaviour: selfishness is a feature of our political natures, usually defined in a negative way against our presumed social obligations rather than in accordance with them – that, I think, is our intuitive understanding of selfishness.

The idea of the individual, isolated human as a major philosophical idea begins with the Enlightenment and Rationalist thinkers, such as Descartes, with his solipsistic evil demon, and the Empiricists like Hume and Locke, for whom individual perceptions were the building blocks of philosophy. This isolationist tendency in philosophy is mirrored in the phenomenon of alienation that is produced by capitalist society.

It is sometimes thought that Marxism is somewhat crass, that it reduces the complexity of human interaction to an economic basis, but of course for Marxists, economics form the base of what humans are able to do, and society is the superstructure built on top of this base. One of my favourite quotations from Marx is about just this phenomenon: men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please, they do not do it under conditions of their own choosing. In other words, how our society is structured is fundamentally governed by how we put food on the table – how society produces for itself. So, what is alienation, why does capitalism lead to it, and what does this have to do with human nature?

To take the last question first – from a Marxist point of view, any society will emphasise certain human characteristics over others, according to how it is organised. Theft, for example, is a big issue in capitalist societies, where most things are held as private property and therefore taking most things without asking, or paying: food from a supermarket, a train journey without a ticket, burglary, are seen as theft. A society which does not hold most things to be private property would of course not have such an obsession with who owns what. Alienation is not a conscious product of capitalism, but a result of the way people relate to each other under this form of production, and I will argue is a big factor in why people make the 'human nature argument' against socialism, although they may not be aware of it.

Of course at this point many people cry foul over Marxist argument, as with the related idea of false consciousness: 'how can you tell me that what I think I'm thinking isn't at all what I'm thinking! I know I'm selfish sometimes and I'm not a capitalist, you're being very presumptive about being able to determine my psychological motivations here!' And it's important to distinguish between what we can say about the general forms of capitalism and the motivations of individuals. What we can say is that the way in which our society produces for itself means that the individuals in it are alienated in certain ways. This doesn't tell us how any individual will choose to act but it does tell something of the general ways in which people relate to each other.

So what is alienation? There are several possible ways of approaching it, but one which most people will recognise is that sense of disconnectedness from those around us, sometimes focused on the workplace, at other times more difficult to place. Alienation can be in the pointless meeting you've got to attend, or when watching the telly and realising that there is nothing on that was made with you or your tastes in mind. At these moments we feel disconnected from those we work with, disconnected from the culture that we should be able to identify with.

But alienation goes far deeper than this – consumer culture is itself a form of and response to alienation. Capitalism produces commodities at a rate far outstripping any previous mode of production, and the defining way that it achieves this is mass-production. Mass-production in a capitalist system forces redundancy (because capitalists compete with each other to generate profit and need to maintain growth in order to increase those profits) – resulting in endless iterations of objects and the idea of artefacts as inherently disposable. A good example of this is the iPhone, which although only launched about 5 years ago has gone through 4 iterations, each marketed as utterly superior not only to its competitors but also to the model that preceded it. So we come to think of objects around us as impermanent, transitory and without substance.

Mass-production creates millions of identical objects. When we see Toy Story, for example, the toys in it are instantly recognisable. Each Mr Potatohead or Barbie is after all identical to all the others. The result of this is that even the objects of play that we are presented with as children are throwaway – if my son has an Optimus Prime and his friend has an Optimus Prime, they have two completely identical toys. There is no uniqueness to the objects we purchase.

Mass-production places the actual making of objects, from the morning Weetabix we eat to the cars we drive, outside of most of our objects of experience. If I work on a production line at Toyota, I will may have a part in the making of the car I drive, but I will have had no part in making my Tesco's pizza. Most of the objects of our experience are obtained with no intervention from ourselves other than the exchange of currency. We are alienated from the things around us because we have no direct connection to them.

Perhaps most importantly, mass production places us in a position of powerlessness in relation to many of the objects that we own. If I need a table, it is still possible for me to go down to B&Q (other builder's merchants are available) and buy the wood I need to make it, and thus create an object purely for my own use. But I cannot put together a mobile phone or a computer in the same way. If I want a commodity I may be able to choose between different suppliers, but I cannot relate to the object as anything other than a commodity – it is produced to be sold more than it is produced to be used.

The wider system of capitalism alienates us from people around us. At work we are often in competition with our workmates, we are keenly aware that there are only so many jobs and more than that we in most cases have no control over our economic lives. We do not set our own wages, or our own hours. We do not choose who we work with or the way we approach our jobs. The lower the pay you're on, the more likely this situation is to be true. More than this, because capitalism is a very particular mode of production, where things are made not on the basis of need but on the basis that they will be sold, there is a sort of creeping tendency to assign everything a monetary value. Indeed, as capitalists have sought to find new markets to expand into, new arenas of profit, we have seen the creation of markets in water, in pollution – effectively parcelling up the air we breath, and even in government itself, through PFI and PPPs.

So capitalism is not only an economic model but one which defines the way society works and affects the way we relate to the people around us. The essence of capitalism is competition and private wealth. These are the driving motors of capitalism and why the logical endpoint of capitalism is Gordon Gekko's famous comment that 'greed is good' – it is somewhat telling of course that what was intended as an indictment of the relentless pursuit of profit was enthusiastically taken up as a slogan.

What effects might the profit motive have on human behaviour? In the USA people are paid for their blood donations. This means that blood is donated by people who are in need of money quickly, and is looked down upon socially. Another effect is that the blood is more frequently found to have infections – the only major illness outbreak resulting from transfusions in the UK, where blood donation is voluntary, came from a batch of blood bought from New York. Bringing in the profit motive can undermine the idea of public service itself, not just by changing the motivation from those involved in delivering it from public duty to personal enrichment, but by changing the general public perception of the nature of the service. Revelations about the levels of pay in the top levels of the NHS, or major charities like Oxfam, affect how people think about those organisations and reduce the public's support for them.

Just to briefly sum up, then: what does all this suggest? Well, along with the idea that we are animals whose nature is shaped by the social forces we encounter, and the idea that the social forces produced by capitalism do not simply encourage greed, but also alienation and commodity fetishism, there is the undeniable public-spirited side to human nature that is revealed in the reaction to inroads to public-sector work being made by the profit motive. Capitalism has no choice but to encourage the profit motive, and with it the selfishness, alienation and greed that characterises it.

One of the questions I started this talk with was: what is socialism? It's a difficult question to answer, because socialism envisages a world without an exploiting class, one in which the workers enjoy real economic and political power – which of course unfortunately also means that we cannot say what a lot of it will look like, since the decision is not ours to make. As revolutionary socialists, we look forward to the day that we are no longer needed. What then, the question should perhaps be, does socialism offer? Socialism offers the opposite to capitalism. It is fundamentally co-operative, food is put on the table not by competing consumers but by the agreement of all, by workers who are in control and where there is no class of people profiting from the work of others. Since human nature is to be sociable, adaptable and co-operative, and since capitalism makes us so unhappy and unfulfilled, not only is human nature not incompatible with socialism, human nature will actually benefit from it.

Update: This may be of use.

Upcoming Attractions

Just a couple of upcoming demos/events:

Oh, That Old Thing

I'm speaking on human nature and socialism next week. Could be interesting. I'll post up the gist of it afterwards. Not done one of these for a while so it'll be interesting to see if I can remember how to speak to a room half-full of very argumentative people. Come along if you've got nothing better to do, why don't you?

I've not finalised what I'm going to say yet, but it'll probably have a bit of Vygotsky, a bit of John Molyneux, a splash of Wittgenstein, and some Toy Story 3 for good measure.

A Straw-Man Pissing Contest? How Very Gauche.

Ante-Script

A while ago I found a solution to the problem that certain displays of idiocy tend to push my rant button, resulting in the counterdispaly of a blogpost that itself displayed my compulsive need to respond to certain types of fuckwit in print rather than just my internal monoshout.

That solution was: stop visiting CIF.

Don't get me wrong, I love a good rant. But it was interfering with my life of lounging around on taxpayers handouts that, as a leftie, I almost certainly do.

Anyway, today I got out of the boat. Hence the following.

Script
So, every so often, people who were once broadly on the left, drift to the right in their old age. In Mark Steel's case this meant leaving organised Trotskyism for free-wheeling Trotskyism. More usually it marks a more drastic break with your past. Classic examples include: Christopher Hitchins, David Aaronovitch, and of course, Nick Cohen.

Today Peter Bracken* has decided to join this band of bluster and, as is traditional, he has bravely launched an attack on a strawman. There seems to be an inherent need when these people defect to vociferously attack some perceived holy cow, as though the Tories (who in this situation might be analogised to the big kid in the playground who's got all the Transformers to Peter's weedy but needy asthmatic) will welcome them into the Kool Kids Klub once the ritual beating of the little kid (who, as we thankfully reach the end of this oddly over-written analogy, is whatever right-wing idea about what the left is this time, or if the motive is sectarian, something that can be attributed to the many tentacled monster that is the SWP) is complete.

Of course, if you're going to do this sort of thing, it's vital that your screed attack some version of your enemy that everyone with 'common sense' (a term which in politics is an effective simile for 'ignorance') can agree to dislike.

In Peter's case, this is

the section of the left denies the mainstay of the authentic left's agenda: liberalism.

Which is of course, rubbish. Liberalism is not a left-wing position but a centrist, and crucially, non-ideological one. Liberalism is pragmatic and comfortable with the wielding of power over others, the left is revolutionary. Even the right-wing of the labour movement, the aim is to alleviate the effects of inequality and the worst of poverty, a sure recognition of the desire to change the status quo, that cannot be authentically called liberal. Liberalism is distinguished from reaction largely by its recognition of and compassion for the poor. To the extent that one attempts to change this situation it is a left position, because that is the extent to which the existence of class conflict is recognised and arms are taken on behalf of one side against the other. You will look in Marx in vain for support of the Whigs, but you can see the faint ghost of Marx when liberals defend the minimum wage.

Anyway, having made a mess of his political categories, Peter goes on.

a left that aligns itself against the west cannot be a progressive force, especially one which vents its opposition by finding cause with the grotesque illiberalism of theocratic and proto-fascist regimes

Of course, the left aligns itself against capital and its forces, not 'the west'. And who are these lefties that align themselves with theocrats? Well, Peter provides a list, but unfortunately they do not seem to mean what he thinks it means. 'The Left' (a mysteriously monolithic beast to someone who claims to be on the left and should therefore know better), is guilty of

morally depleted rationalisations that "explained" 9/11 (the US had got its comeuppance).

Funny, cos the article he links to says

there is also the feeling that all the ‘civilised world’ (a phrase which Western leaders seem able to use without a trace of irony) is paying the price for its glib definitions of ‘terrorism’ and its refusal to listen to what the ‘terrorists’ have to say. There are very few people on the planet who devise carnage for the sheer hell of it. They do what they do for a cause; because they are at war. We might not like their cause; but using the word ‘terrorism’ as an alibi for thinking what drives it will get us nowhere in stopping the violence.

which actually seems to be saying "if we mindlessly use the word 'terrorist' we will have no clue as to how this event happened." How terribly glib. Of course, Peter is in no way being glib by suggesting that the US did nothing to anger anyone, and conflating the US Government with its people (an error he has in common with Al Qaeda).

The rest of his bobbins isn't much better, I'm afraid. Having made his exceedingly palpable hit by finding Comrade Beard's secret communique to the Supreme Soviet, outlining Teh Left's Like Totally Universal Position on 9/11, he moves on to attack people who support the Palestinians. This isn't really worth bothering to come back on, as it's a permanent feature of these kinds of articles that you have to side with the aggressor against the victim: it's all part of the posturing. Notable that he doesn't provide a link for that one though.

The ones that there are links for are so misrepresented that it's easy to see why he couldn't even quotemine them. For example, he complains of

the fanciful opinion – expressed only recently by Seumas Milne – that China, far from being an exemplar of human rights abuses on a colossal scale, is in fact an exemplary bulwark against a rapacious, capitalist hegemony.

Curious, as the article is about the strikes that have undermined the state recently and what this means for the economy. At no point does he defend Chinese state repression. Seriously, go read it. I'll wait.

Done? OK, so next up is an attack on Zizek and Callinicos. Fine, except that again, he just displays stupidity. When Zizek says

The problem is that such a simplistic liberal universalism long ago lost its innocence. This is why, for a true leftist, the conflict between liberal permissiveness and fundamentalism is ultimately a false conflict.

he does not mean, as Peter implies, that the Iranian government doesn't kill people, he's saying that calling your society a liberal democracy does not wash the blood off your hands. You'd really have to be remarkably obtuse not to see that.

Amazingly he then manages to be even more facile.

Alex Callinicos himself is a member of Socialist Workers' party, which implores Iraqi insurgents to "use whatever means necessary" to defeat the western coalition. He is a supporter of an organisation, in other words, that apparently condones the use of terror to destabilise a fledgling democracy. An honourable opposition to the war in Iraq is one thing; an express wish to see Islamist insurgents prevail is quite another.

Here's why this has teh stoopid:

• If you're opposed to the war in Iraq, it is in no way inconsistent to support the Iraqi people against their occupation. In fact it seems, if you're genuinely progressive, the obvious response to the unchecked aggression of a superpower. Peter doesn't like the word 'imperialist' when applied to the US, but if he can think of a more appropriate one, I invite his submission.
  
• A genuinely leftist critique of Iraq would have to talk about the nature of the invasion and its effect on the people, otherwise it is not leftist or even political, but handwringing drivel.
  
• It ignores the consistent, genuinely terrifying use of terror used to both topple the Iraqi government and then to impose a neoliberal nightmare of the occupiers' choosing.
• The use of the phrase 'Islamist insurgents' is particularly telling. 'Islamist' is in no way implied by support for the Iraqi people. 'Insurgents' is a funny way of talking about Iraqis. If there are insurgents in Iraq it is surely the foreign military powers that are imposing the new political order. Foreign fighters in Iraq even at the height of the 'insurgency' were relatively few, though a flood of arms into the country did seem to be noticeably present. You know, in amongst all those American invaders.
• Fledgling democracy is a lovely turn of phrase, but in the context of Iraq can only mean the successful imposition of a regime approved of by the victors. The Iraqis did not make a revolution against Saddam and they did not choose the form of their new government. They are being asked to participate at gunpoint.

He then has the nerve to call those on the left who genuinely support self-determination for the Iraqis 'nihilistic' and claims for himself the mantle of defender of freedom. Sometimes, one is tempted to think that some people would really benefit from a bit of extraordinary rendition, if only to remind them of what 'support for a fledgling democracy' really means.

To conclude:
I didn't like this very much, and I don't think much of its author either. This is a reductivist, dishonest and ignorant account that wears its simple-mindedness on its sleeve.
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*No, me neither.

Farewell to All This

I'm changing location. I'm leaving my beloved North East behind and going to the midlands. Obviously there are a lot of problems with this, chief among them being that I won't be in the North East, with its vibrant music and political scenes, cool buildings and sea view.

Instead I will be in a miserable, accent-less limbo that for reasons best known to themselves, quite large numbers of people have chosen not to leave. So I thought I'd mark my leaving with some photos of my last weekend on Tyneside, which it has to be said was as close to perfection as you can get. Dear reader, I know you're fascinated, so I will tell the story in stages.

SATURDAY



Saturday kicked off with the anti-EDL demo, which was the largest and most confident that I've ever been on in Newcastle - and one where we outnumbered the racist scumbags. This is a good thing, obviously. Also they were effectively contained by the rozzers and there was no violence, at least during the day. Certainly though their boasts of getting 2,000 hooligans to the Toon were idle ones. It's hard to estimate numbers accurately but when I and a comrade left our demo to have a quick snoop it looked like there were 4-500 tops. Still a lot, but considering how big they've been trying to make this, not as bad as it could have been. I'd say there were about a third as many again of us on the UAF demo, and there were another couple of hundred or more up at Monument where the TUC were doing their event. So all in all a successful day, and hopefully the twats won't be coming back.

After that, on to the Doctor Who exhibit at Centre for Life. This was ace. You must go. YOU MUST GO.

Following which, Evolution Emerging was on - a load of free gigs down the Ouseburn. Got to see the amazing Let's Buy Happiness again and the even more amazing Mammal Club, followed by the lovely Soundtracks for a B-Movie, who once their technical problems were sorted out turned out to be purveyors of beautiful instrumental music.

SUNDAY
On Sunday the weather was manky but Evolution proper had started, and luckily I'd got my grubby mitts on one of these...
Which meant I could actually see and hear the Futureheads, unlike people who were inside the venue...

MONDAY
Then Monday, it was Slow Club, Brilliant Mind, Mammal Club again and De La Soul. Fucking ace.

So, although I'll deeply miss Tyneside and all those who've been kind enough to put up with me at various points over the last decade, seriously: what a way to go.

Politics of the Street*

Overheard whilst doing the paper sale on Saturday:

Daughter: "Who won the election then?"
Mother: "No one."

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*Northumberland St to be exact.

Upcoming Events

Been meaning to put this up for a couple of days as well - I should probably have added 'absent-minded' to 'semi-active' in the last post...

Internal Party Bobbins

So, in the last few weeks I've been too busy to go to branch meetings, and I've missed a couple of paper sales. There's no political reason for this, I've just had a lot of work on and it hasn't left much time for anything else.

So I was quite surprised to read, via Laurie Penny*, that Lindsey German had left the party, and that it was events up here in the toon that sparked it.

So, as a local, semi-active, rank-and-file party member, here's my ha'pennorth on the whole thing: it's internal party bobbins. I love the SWP and am proud of what it stands for, but I just can't be having with the 'internal squabbling' spectator sport where other members of the disunited left gather round to tell us all how rubbish we are.**

There's two reasons for this: firstly, I actually think it's pretty sad when comrades can no longer work together as they used to, not least because it takes us further away from our shared political goals. There's never a shortage of people who want to put the boot in, especially on the magical insult-generating troll that is teh intertubes, but in all seriousness it fills me with more despair than a thousand speeches by George Osborne. Second, it's just a particularly yawn-inducing piece of political theatre, he-says-she-says, not the bread and butter of the party work.

This weekend we'll be on the streets, selling the paper and organising for a public meeting in the wake of the Corus mothballing announcement. That's the bread and butter stuff. Why Lindsey left will have two mutually incompatible narratives and in the end I'm not going to choose either of them. The party is still here, the work still needs to be done, and who-said-what-to-who-when is just an excuse not to do it. This isn't to say I don't have opinions on the things that happen in the local and national scene, it would be brazenly disingenuous to say such a thing. All I'm saying is, what's the point of getting involved in a squabble? That's why we have meetings and delegation and decisions, so that we are active, not wasting our time in a vicious circle of discussion. All it does is turn left-wing activism into a talking shop, and there's plenty of that around already.

If I do a blog post on Plato, or apple crumble, well that's trivial but hopefully not unamusing or dull. This stuff, it's both.

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* I'm not going to bother with Laurie's 'The SWP is sooo sectarian' stuff, I've heard it all before, am yet to be impressed, and Lenin's done a better response than I'd do anyway, except to say that in my experience the SWP is sectarian to the extent that we are a distinct political party, that we've never made any secret of our principles or agenda, and that if we get involved in broad front work - which we do, often - we do so in so far as it is compatible with our politics. If that's sectarian then we are all sectarians. We don't, for example, demand that Labour amend its other horrendous policies before we'll work in a broad front anti-fascist movement with them, but we will insist that the UAF is combative in its approach to the fascist problem. I'm afraid that all seems perfectly reasonable to me.

**Yes, I'm aware that this amounts to a blog post in which I tell anyone reading that I'm not going to do a blog post, but at least it's not a meeting of the Tautology Club, OK?

Great Street Conversations

The weekly paper sale is often good for a laugh, as you can bump into pretty much any kind of person that humanity in its many splendour'd glory has managed to produce. Although, as a fringe political organisation there's always one or two representatives of the Jungian archetype that I like to call 'confused nutters with an axe to grind.'

The petition on our stall today was about defending pensions and increasing the Winter Fuel Allowance. An old lady stopped and came up to me.
"I agree with that, but before I sign it, can I ask you one question?"
"Sure."
"Do you agree with letting all them immigrants into the country?
"Yes. Yes we do."
"Right. Bye then." and off she bustled in a state of righteousness, having prevented the blight of multiculturalism spreading further down Northumberland St.

Upcoming Events

Marx and Darwin

As promised, a little late due to hard drive issues, here's the talk I gave just before xmas. Well, I said most of this stuff anyway - I may have truncated it a little to avoid comrades slipping into a coma. A brief warning: if you find your eyes growing heavy seek medical advice immediately, or watch this.

It's entirely possible that I'm dead wrong on some or all of the below so please correct me if you know better. Cheers.

Update: I've tried to tidy up a few quotes here and there. You always spot these things after you hit publish, don't you?

MARX AND DARWIN

Welcome to tonight's talk on Marx and Darwin. I thought it would be interesting to do a piece on Marx and Darwin, partly to tie in with the 150^th anniversary of Origin of Species (and the 200^th of Darwin's birth) and partly because there are a lot of ways in which evolution was revolutionary and impacted on political ideas. The problem with this is that it is such a huge subject it was hard to know how to focus on it or an SWP meeting. Should I focus on its revolutionary character for religion, or for the way biologists thought about the natural world? Should I look at how Marx related the idea?

In the end I thought that I would take a brief look at the theory itself, and a couple of broad trends in political thought that have used their interpretations of Darwin's ideas to define what it means to be human (and hence what kind of psychologies and societies we have).

Although it won't be the main focus of the talk, I think we should start briefly with the theory because it is important to be clear about what the theory of evolution does and does not say; what it is and is not for. This will help when we look at the broader arguments about human nature. Politically, because I think it's undeniable that Darwin's work has been both used and abused for political purposes since its development 150 years ago, and as Marxists we should want to understand its uses and limitations in public debate.

I've therefore chosen three ways that Darwin's ideas have been used, in the hope of bringing out what I think are some of the important lessons to take from the theory of evolution. We'll look at the errors of determinism, of humanity as a 'special case' in the universe and of misconceptions about the meaning of 'survival of the fittest,' the most famous slogan of evolutionary theory.

What is evolution?

Firstly, what is evolution? What does it actually say? Last time I gave a talk it was on the subject of Marx and religion, and I suggested that Marx's most famous comment on religion, 'the opium of the people,' told us very little about Marx's actual position on religion, and in fact was usually used to distort Marx's views by his critics. Darwin's most famous phrase is, of course, 'survival of the fittest,' and I want to say that this suffers from precisely the same problems.

Darwin expressed his theory far better than I could, so I'm going to quote probably the most famous passage from Origin of Species in its entirety.

It is interesting to contemplate an entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth, and to reflect that these elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner, have all been produced by laws acting around us. These laws, taken in the largest sense, being Growth and Reproduction; Inheritance which is almost implied by Reproduction; Variability from the indirect and direct action of the external conditions of life, and from use and disuse; a Ratio of Increase so high as to lead to a Struggle for Life, and as a consequence to Natural Selection, entailing Divergence of Character and the Extinction of less-improved forms. Thus, from the war of nature, from famine and death, the most exalted object which we are capable of conceiving, namely, the production of the higher animals, directly follows. There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

(Darwin 1998:368-9)

So these are key features of the theory of evolution, a set of processes that are observable everywhere we look in the world around us. A favourite example of mine is Nylonase, a protein that could only have developed in the last 50 years. Bacteria in waste pools outside Japanese Nylon plants were found to have adapted to produce a protein that broke down nylon. These plastic eating bacteria responded in only a few decades to be able to derive a brand new food source for themselves and created a brand new protein in the process. But of course the same process of change and adaptation is everywhere we look in the natural world, and is shown in the fossil and genetic record.

This is one reason why I think that 'survival of the fittest' is not a very useful way of thinking about evolution. It is too general an expression to convey the real heart of the theory. In any given ecosystem advantageous characteristics will allow a given species to survive, and give it an advantage over others, yes, so in that sense the fittest will survive, but what evolution really offers us is an insight into just how dynamic life is: conditions of life change all the time. Let's take an example. One of Darwin's arguments for the non-existence of a benevolent God was the parasitic wasp. These are wasps which lay their eggs inside the cocoons of caterpillars. As the larvae grow they do so by feeding on the caterpillar, devouring it from the inside. The larvae are struggling against each other for resources as they grow, they have to struggle to survive their own natural enemies such as birds, but equally the very niche that they occupy is dependent on plentiful supplies of caterpillars, which are dependent on wider environmental factors – food supplies, stable temperatures, lack of predators and so on. Any of these factors can change the fundamental nature of the existence of the parasitic wasps themselves.

But the scope of evolution immediately gives it a political dimension in a way which, say, Newton's laws of motion or even Galileo's observations do not. Because there are unavoidable issues that it raises about what it means to be human: what are we, what are we here for, and are there limits on the kinds of societies we can build for ourselves? Sometimes science has unavoidably huge political consequences, and evolution falls into that category, along with astronomy, geology and particle physics. These areas of study have all shown our universe and ourselves in a new light, often with the potential to challenge the ideas laid out by ruling classes that justify their rule.

Marx and Darwin

Marx wasn't slow to see the importance Darwin's work had politically and in discussions on 'human nature,' (although the same can't be said for Darwin's perception of the importance of Marx. When he died, the copy of Capital that Marx had sent him was found in his study, its pages still uncut – obviously never read. This shouldn't surprise us: Darwin's idea may have been one of the most radical the world had ever seen, but he himself was a solid member of the Whig establishment, a liberal bourgeois with no desire to change the social order. In fact one of the reasons Darwin delayed publication of his theory for so long was because he was worried that it would undermine the social order).

But to return to Marx. He was well-placed to absorb Darwin's theory, because Marxism is an historical materialist political philosophy, which is to say that it seeks to understand the world through its objective and material features. The contention of Marx is that history is based not on ideas or Great Men or supernatural intervention but rather material factors which are themselves influenced by prior factors. In Marx's own words,

The first premise of human history is, of course, the existence of living human individuals. The first fact to be established, therefore, is the physical constitution of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of Nature.

(Marx, German Ideology, quoted in Bottomore and Rubel 1963: 69)

For Marx, Darwin's great achievement is in providing a plausible, materialist account of life and the origins of humanity. For many of his contemporaries, that was its danger.

I don't want to go too much into Marx's views here, as my main focus is going to be on the wider political repercussions of the theory, but he spends a significant proportion of his book Anti-Dühring taking on some early misconceptions about evolution and affirming its scientific status. He is careful to highlight evolution's role in explaining the natural world and, importantly for any scientific proposition, the limitations of the theory thus far advanced:

There is in fact a peculiar correspondence between the gradual development of organic germs into mature organisms and the succession of plants and animals following each other in the history of the earth. And it is precisely this correspondence which has given the theory of evolution its most secure basis. The theory of evolution itself is however still in a very early stage, and it therefore cannot be doubted that further research will greatly modify our present conceptions, including strictly Darwinian ones, of the process of the evolution of species.

(Marx 1877:I:5)

Darwin and Religion

It's generally thought that Darwin faced a lot of opposition from the Church when he published Origin of Species. The reality is that the establishment did not take long to accept the theory, and Biblical literalism had been on the decline for much of the previous century, as the development of science had led to advances in geology and biology.

Already before Darwin biologists such as Bouffon, Lamarck and Charles Darwin's grandfather Erasmus Darwin had started to come up with explanations for changes in species over time, although none were as complete as Darwin's and they were all wrong in certain key respects.¹

That is not to say that there were no vociferous opponents of evolution, but these quickly became marginalised voices, especially in the Church of England.²

The modern controversy in religious terms is very much at the fringes of mainstream religion. Particularly in Christianity, the main established churches all agree with the scientific consensus on the origins of humanity.

Nevertheless, the claims of evolution obviously did challenge certain ideas about human beings, particularly our apparently special status in the universe. We seem to be the product of the same blind forces that produces earthworms, nylonase and parasitic wasps. It does provide an unanswerable problem for literalists, in the same way that Galileo's observations had 200 years earlier.

Evolution and Eugenics

Today, one of the most common criticisms you can hear of Darwin's work is the legacy of the eugenics movement. At it's crudest, the objection runs something like this: you know who else believed in Darwin? The Nazis, that's who!' This is the idea that evolution undermines our moral sense of ourselves. The eugenics movement in general and the Nazis in particular seemed to have a Darwinian take on the world. In eugenics, it was thought that 'undesirable' traits could simply be bred out, as though humans were so many pea plants. Undesirable for eugenicists like Galton meant things like 'idiocy' and other characteristics that not only have a strong social component in their formation, but also in their definition. The classic example might be the 'proof' that native-born Americans were smarter than immigrants, following the administration of IQ tests to army recruits in World War One. Standard questions included:

Christy Mathewson is famous as a:

writer, artist, baseball player, comedian

(Selden 1999:88)

An easy question to answer I'm sure you'll agree. But what I'm trying to bring out here is the fundamental problem that anyone following Darwinian ideas looking for moral precepts must face: the world shown by evolution is highly dynamic. Anyone seeking to look to 'survival of the fittest' as a guide for how we should live ultimately faces the problem that evolution is about adaptation and change. If there is a moral to draw from evolutionary theory, it is that only change is permanent in nature. Eugenics looked to the idea of purifying human stock, but the obvious problem with this is that purification means nothing, especially for creatures as widely spread and as socially sophisticated as human beings. As Marxists we should look to be careful about the limitations of a biological theory in describing social phenomena and be critical of ideas that conflate the two, as eugenics did so crudely.

Evolutionary Psychology (EP)

This is a large and complex field, seeking to establish evolutionary causes to psychological phenomena. Clearly this is a controversial thing to be doing, because of the sheer complexity of drawing out what you might want to call 'root' psychological structures, thrown up by evolution and on which general social conditions have little impact. In fact for some the temptation is to reverse the picture: to look at particular social conditions and suggest that they arose because of inbuilt psychological traits. I'm not going to suggest that these things shouldn't be looked at; what I'm going to suggest is that there is sometimes an excessively reductionist agenda behind evolutionary psychology to 'psychologise away' real problems. For example, two pioneers of EP, Cosmides and Tooby take the following to be one of the foundations of the field:

The brain is a physical system. It functions as a computer with circuits that have evolved to generate behaviour that is appropriate to environmental circumstances.

(Wikipedia, quoting Cosmides and Tooby 1997: Evolutionary Psychology: A Primer)

In some ways this might seem reasonable. The brain is undoubtedly physical. But it is not necessary for the mind to be. To get an idea why, it might be a good idea to look at one of Marx's key concepts: value. David Harvey is fond of saying that value is 'immaterial but objective'³ – it objectively exists, it is a function of the way that society produces for itself; but it cannot be analysed atomically or as part of the physical universe. In the same way, just because brain activity is necessary for consciousness, it does not follow that consciousness is only brain activity. A large social component seems likely to be involved. I won't go into the philosophy too heavily, because what I am trying to get at is the problem of views on evolution that are too reductive: reducing humans to isolated individuals whose behaviour is computationally generated and runs to a large extent on pre-determined lines. In Anti-Duhring, Marx is scathing about Duhring's interpretation of evolutionary theory because he sees it as reading far too much into what is said and not really understanding what it means, as Duhring pulls a spiritual, Hegelian sense out of it. EP can go the other way, and try to understand humans without looking at the concrete circumstances they experience. At its crudest this manifests itself in the common criticism of socialism, that it wouldn't work because 'people are too greedy' – something I'm sure every socialist has heard from the bore at every party they've ever been to. Of course, this absolutely fails to take into account the particular historical development of capitalism, seeing it as an inevitable outcome of our inherent greed rather than that the system that has evolved reinforces selfishness. It also fails to take into account that the notion of 'selfishness' is itself socially constructed: is it selfish to vote for strike action in your union? I'm sure that anyone who has ever seen media coverage of a strike will have heard that argument, but it fails completely to take into account the options open to workers facing cuts in living conditions under capitalism, and the dire consequences that might have.

Conclusion

What I've tried to argue is that evolution is a powerful explanatory device, and that it can help Marxists in presenting a materialist conception of natural history, in showing that we don not need to appeal to a supernatural explanation for our origins and that we can't rely on any such intervention for justice on our behalf – we have to do it for ourselves.

However, it is important to avoid naïve readings of evolution. We should not be worried by our lack of a special, favoured status, but equally we cannot make evolution either a moral compass or a source of deterministic writing-off of our problems. We need to recognise that social constructions play a huge role in our perceptions of the world around us and focus on the concrete situations in front of us that Marxist analysis can provide.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Bottomore, TB and Rubel, M 1963. Karl Marx: Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. Pelican.

Darwin, Charles 1998. On The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, The Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Wordsworth Editions Ltd.

Harvey, David. Reading Marx's Capital lecture 2 available at http://davidharvey.org/2008/06/marxs-capital-class-02/. Accessed 09/01/2010.

Marx, Karl 1852. The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte. Available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1852/18th-brumaire. Accessed 09/01/2010.

Marx, Karl 1877. Anti-Duhring. Available at http://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1877/anti-duhring/index.htm

Russell, CA. 1973. Science and Religious Belief: A Selection of Recent Historical Studies. Hodder & Stoughton Educational.

Selden, Steven 1999. Inheriting Shame: The Story of Eugenics and Racism in America. Teachers College Press.

Wikipedia, Evolutionary Psychology article. Available at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolutionary_psychology. Accessed 09/01/2010.

1For further information on this, see Buffon, Lamarck and Darwin: The Originality of Darwin's Theory of Evolution, by JS Wilkie in Russell (Ed.) pp 238-281

2See for example Evolution and the Churches, by Owen Chadwick, op. cit. pp 282-293

3See his lectures on Reading Capital – details in Bibliography.

Upcoming Events

Hi, sorry it's just another list of stuff that's happening. I'd say it's just being very busy with other things at the moment, which it partly is, but also I just don't seem to be on top of my game at the moment. Still, the Darwin meeting is one I'm doing, so I'll post my musings on that, whatever they're worth, afterwards. No, I really will this time.

Anyway, here's some upcoming stuff. Click for a bigger.*

*Is it just me or does that sound like the header for an email that your spam filter would automatically delete? Have my standards always been this low?