On Tue, 28 Sep 1999 14:16:56 -0400 (EDT) bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
(Rakesh Bhandari) writes:
>Yoshie and Carrol both expressed important criticism of my sense of
>Marx's
>theory of history with which they may have more trouble than my own
>views.
>Marx praised for Darwin for having driven teleology out of explanation
>and
>thus providing the basis for their world view.
Which was very perceptive on Marx's part since many of Darwin's readers upon reading *The Origin of Species* became convinced that evolution was a fact without being persauded to accept a fully non-teleological conception of evolution. For many years after Darwin's time, well into this century, many evolutionary biologists remain convinced that some sort of Lamarckism was required to flesh out evolutionary theory.
> I take this to mean
>that
>Marx's explanation for the emergence of capitalism is similarly non
>teleological and causal as Darwin's theory of the origin of new
>species.
I am inclined to agree that Marx intended his materialist conception of history to provide a causal, non-teleogical theory of history.
>However, at the same time I do think Marx was attracted to Darwin
>because
>of the progressivist implications (he wrongly thought) of the latter's
>theory of organic evolution.
It remains a question of how wrong Darwin was in seeing progressivist implications in Darwin's theory. Among contemporary Darwinians, Stephen Jay Gould has stood out in denying that Darwinism necessarily has progressivist implications. And Gould who comes from a Marxist background has on occasion even linked his rejection of a progressivist intepretation of Darwinism with a rejection of progressivist versions of Marxism. On the other hand not all contemporary Darwinians would go so far as Gould. For Gould there was not only nothing inevitable about the evolution of homo sapiens but even the emergence of some sort of intelligent life on Earth was not inevitable or even highly probable in his opinion. If we could dupicate the early Earth with the same initial conditions then chances are, intelligent life of some sort would not evolve there, in Gould's view. Other Darwinians (including I believe Dawkins) would disagree. While virtually no one sees anything inevitable about the emergence of homo sapiens, many Darwinians would argue that given the nature of the early Earth, the evolution of intelligent life of some sort was probable once life had appeared on the planet. They would argue that it is probable that over time more and more complex organisms would evolve. Thus to that extent they would see Darwinism as having certain progressivist implications without in anyway denying that the theory is strictly causal and non-teleological in character. I think that one could similarly make a case that the materialist conception of history can be similarly progressivist without it becomng teleological since in the struggle for survival between rival modes of production, it is the more productive system that is likely to prevail, other things being equal. If that is the case then history should in fact display a longterm tendency for more productive regimes of production to succeed and displace less reproductive one. Alan Carling in a couple of pieces that appeared in the joournal, Science & Society has even gone so far as to advance a selectionist interpretation of historical materialism that is analogous to Darwin's theory of natural selection. Carling, drawing upon Robert Brenner's analysis of the transition from feudalism to capitalism, seems to think it highly probable that in the West, feudalism would be succeed by capitalism while thinking that capitalism's emergence in the East was not very probable (Jim Blaut I think has a rather different take on this from either Brenner or Carling). So Carling as I understand him would see the materialist conception of history as having at least weakly progressivist implications.
Jim Farmelant
>
>At the same time, it is true that Darwin rejected Lamarck's argument
>of an
>inherent tendency to climb the ladder of nature (similarly I accept
>Yoshie
>and Carrol's warning against understanding history as an inherent
>freeing
>of the individual from social being). And to have explained the
>emergence
>of capitalism on account of an inherent human (or European) tendency
>towards bourgeois society would have been as vacuous as saying that a
>man
>is fat because he has an inherent tendency towards obesity. But I do
>think
>Marx (wrongly) understood Darwin to have provided a non teleological
>and
>causal theory of progress in nature. Today we know that a branching
>tree is
>a better metaphor than Lamarck's ladder of nature and that even
>complexification (as say with greater DNA content of the genomes of
>later
>organisms) or a mean increase in fitness (in RA Fisher's terms) do not
>result from the evolutionary process.
>
>But it seems clear to me that Marx understood capitalism to be
>progressive
>by some measure (complexification, productive power) over the modes of
>production that had preceded it. And it is also seems clear to me that
>he
>understood it for some time to be a gift that colonial powers were
>imposing
>on their subjects. For Marx capitalism was indeed higher on the
>evolutionary scale, however discredited such a metaphor may be today.
>I
>would love my claim to be disputed or at least nuanced.
>
>Thanks.
>Rakesh
>
>
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