 |
| Pic courtesy www.butterflycycle.blogspot.com |
Karl Marx never proposed dedicating Das Kapital to Charles Darwin, so Darwin could never decline it, as the tall story goes, perhaps . Marx did say that Darwin’s work did suit his purpose in that it provided a basis in natural science for the notion of historical class struggle.
Struggle. That’s the word common to both. Darwin wrote about the survival of the fittest implying inherent struggle among species. Marx saw history as an unfolding of class struggle. Darwin, to my knowledge, did not see the natural world as a constant and unforgiving battle among and between species. This is why Marx observed that Darwin, dealt a mortal blow to teleology in natural science and also explained its rational meaning. Marx could not but notice struggle, but he was not ignorant of complicity and moreover envisaged cooperation.
There is, in the natural world and in human societies, a give and take. There’s contestation and agreement of one kind of another, admittedly very often to the advantage of one and the detriment of another. A union demanding higher wages for workers might agree to a ‘concession’ that falls short of demand, both parties essentially adjusting the terms of exploitation. Creatures mark territories. Humans have rules.
There’s too much made of ‘evolution.’ Marx and Darwin are both erroneously interpreted as championing life and society as moving inexorably forward from something less to something more. The entire ideology of modernism is founded on this idea.
Pyotr Alexeyevich Kropotkin, the Russian philosopher who is also described as an anarchist, socialist, historian and activist, addressed this issue in a book called ‘Mutual Aid: A Factor in Evolution.’ Using examples from both non-human animals and human society, he argued that cooperation and not competition is the most important factor contributing to the survival of organisms and therefore the evolution of species.
Here’s a quote: "If we ... ask Nature: 'who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?' we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest. They have more chances to survive, and they attain, in their respective classes, the highest development of intelligence and bodily organisation.”
Evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould acknowledges that Kropotkin’s basic argument is correct; ‘struggle does occur in many modes, and some lead to cooperation among members of a species as the best pathway to advantage for individuals.’
He grants that Kropotkin may have overemphasised mutual aid, but observes, ‘most Darwinians in Western Europe exaggerated competition just as strongly.’ He argues that ‘if Kropotkin drew inappropriate hope for social reform from his concept of nature, other Darwinians had erred just as firmly (and for motives that most of us would now decry) in justifying imperial conquest, racism, and oppression of industrial workers as the harsh outcome of natural selection in the competitive mode.’ I would add Marxists, Marx included, have similarly erred, to put it mildly.
So those who say ‘competition is good’ are not all wrong if (and that’s an if hardly used) the worth and reality and true value of cooperation is acknowledged in the same breath. Hardly ever happens.
Cooperation is not always pretty, let’s not forget. Western powers frequently cooperate to ensure a world order founded on conquest, genocide, cultural erasure, brigandry and plunder is kept safe for continued access to and plunder of resources. We see that kind of pernicious cooperation even in the United Nations.
['The Morning Inspection' is the title of a column I wrote for the Daily News from 2009 to 2011, one article a day, Monday through Saturday. This is a new series.]
Other articles in this series:
Neruda, Sekara and literary dimensions
Paul Christopher's heart of many chambers
Calmness gracefully cascades in the Dumbara Hills
Serendipitous amber rules the world