Human society as an evolutionary process
Darwin’s ‘Origin of the Species’ came about from the data gathered during his voyage on the Beagle. A deeply religious man, Darwin was brought almost to the point of mental breakdown because his religious view of the world could not be reconciled with the evidence he had gathered. His book was as revolutionary as the proposals that the earth was round and not at the centre of the universe. The whole creation myth of Genesis, along with all other religious stories, were blown to pieces. Life had evolved, humans had evolved just as the planets and the rocks we stand on. And if humans had evolved then so too had their brains, their ideas and their societies. Now the work of archaeologists, anthropologists and historians could yield information to illuminate this story of humanity in its real, evolving past and give clues to the present.
I don’t want to go into the long history of thought about the nature of human society. Suffice it to say that most of the speculation about this were developed by members of a privileged elite who were blind to the activity that is the basis of all societies–how they create and distribute the things people need to survive and how the tools and equipment needed for this are controlled and managed. On top of this the ideas about human society were nearly always formulated within the ideological framework of gods and fairies and the value systems, the good and evils, which they enshrined.
Marx and Engels were among the first people to systematically try to understand this history of human society free from pre-conceptions, in a way that allowed all of the historical and contemporary data to make sense. They didn’t arrive at their mature conclusions in a straightforward way. Their own ideas evolved through collaboration and discussion between themselves and with others. They had to both absorb, critique and reject previous theories, theories that could not get to the heart of the processes that drove society forward or to collapse. Their motivation for this lifelong exploration of the evolution of human society was not simply to create a better account than others had made. They sought to understand society in order to see how it might be changed. Society had reached the point where it created the conditions for the human brain to see the totality of humanity as fellow human beings and to see that the way the majority were living was inhuman. They were not the first people to see this but they were the first who saw that change could not come about as the result of wishful thinking or painting a picture of a future utopia but only by human beings, en masse, becoming aware of the real dynamics of the society in which they lived and taking action to take control of these processes, to free them from the domination of ‘capital’.
Capital for Marx was not simply money or profits, it was the totality of human relations that in his day was becoming the predominant form of society and that today encompasses most of humanity, a form of human society that had evolved from previous forms, all themselves intimately connected to the evolution of production techniques.
You can read Marx’s own writings or the many later expositions of his ideas. Again, that is not the subject of this piece. I’m interested in how Marx and Engels arrived at their description of the society we all live in and how their ideas were later used and abused.
I have talked about the Greeks looking at the world in a new way that didn’t try to impose old beliefs onto new thoughts impinging on their brains. But this is not as simple as it sounds. Nobody can approach the world or an aspect of the world with a blank canvas in their head. We look at everything, try to analyse everything with all our prior knowledge, all our prior theories and conceptions. Anaximander didn’t just wipe his mind clean of all the old superstition and then sit down and say ‘hey, life must have begun in the oceans.’ Nor did Marx suddenly come up with the goods. Old ideas had to be tested out. How did they cope with the available evidence. Did this bit fit the picture and the other bits that didn’t just get ignored? If this was true what were the implications? Was a new explanation more able to assimilate and bring together all the phenomena observed? Marx first became a follower of the Utopian Socialists who saw the evils of life under capitalism but gave no satisfactory explanation of how any change might occur other than by preaching to the good and the great (a bit like many of today’s environmentalists) but this made no sense since they were the very people who had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo.
Marx and Engels came to see that it was the oppressed producers, previously ignored by all
‘thinkers’ as little more than dumb cattle, who were the potential agents of change. (It should be noted that workingmen of the time were coming to the same conclusion but without the benefits of Marx’s education and knowledge to justify their conclusions through the unravelling of human history). So, Marx’s writings were also a continuation of the outlook employed by Anaximander and Democritus, every bit as much as were the revolutions in understanding brought about by Newton, Darwin or Einstein.
All of the knowledge previously gained by humanity about the world went into Marx’s unravelling of the ‘secrets’ of human society. And in line with all the other areas of knowledge here was a picture that saw things in motion, changing, evolving. And in common with all the other areas of knowledge, understanding was gained by going beyond the immediate appearance of things to look at what lay beneath the surface. Other historians had primarily looked at society from the point of view of ideas, the clash of ideas, of society being developed by ideas. Of course, these ideas were invariably the property of the elite. The ‘dumb cattle’ were too busy digging potatoes to have time for ideas.
I wrote earlier about the random, the accidental nature of events in human society but they do take place within certain frameworks that can be understood through investigation and it was these frameworks and dynamics that Marx began to lay bare. Human beings have to eat, have
to find shelter and educate their young. These necessities place restrictions and dynamics on the patterns of life. As society became stratified into classes with different forms of ownership of the means by which these basic activities were performed, then these basic dynamics dictated forms of behaviour, culture, politics and ideology with their own logic. For example, in the period of post war militancy that I described, it was entirely predictable that capital would seek to outflank and overcome the resistance from the exploited. All the left groups in the UK constantly produced their ‘World Political and Economic Analysis’ but so busy were they searching for evidence that corroborated their magnificent constructs, so busy predicting the upcoming and unavoidable revolutionary clash between the classes that could only be resolved by people following their lead, that they almost all failed to see the significance of capital leaving the UK by the back door and setting up shop in Asia, above all in China.
In 1985 I was working in an artificial leg factory producing the old hand shaped metal legs. The company had been set up by an American Colonel who lost his leg in the Civil War. Things had plodded along happily ever since. We were one of the most skilled and highly paid factories in London. Now the company got sold to an international conglomerate that quickly developed a type of leg using the newly invented carbon fibre. These new legs could be made by unskilled workers after 16 weeks training. The company provoked a strike and while everyone was picketing the factory gates all production was moved to the Philippines (I think it was) where they had already quietly established a factory. For many weeks, the London workers stood outside a now empty workplace while the new workers did their job at a fraction of the wage. Capitalism showed its internationalism, with all the benefits of a rapidly transforming transport and communications system, while the militant UK trade unionists slowly drifted off to the unemployment exchange with no communication or co- operation between the old and new work forces.
Marx’s ideas were revolutionary in every sense of the word. They transformed how many people saw the society they lived in and the history of how that society had itself evolved. It destroyed the mythical stories about the nature of profits and wages, about the rulers and the ruled. Above all it showed the down trodden and oppressed how they had the means to change things. Marx’s ‘Communist Manifesto’ was read by hundreds of thousands of people at the very time when the producers, the workers, were beginning to form themselves into a class – i.e., a section of society that saw and understood their common interests and were trying out different forms of organisation to further their own class interests, just as the elites in various forms of society had done for thousands of years. In 1917 these ideas had become influential enough to be centre stage in the Russian Revolution.
But even before the revolution something was happening to Marx’s writings that flew in the face of the process that lead to the Manifesto. Instead of his outline of the mechanisms of human society becoming a guide how to continue to understand society as it developed, day by day, it started to become a set of rules. Marx was the first person to try to lay out the driving mechanisms of society. How could his work be anything other than a first step in this ‘science’(knowledge). How could his work be anything other than partial, incomplete and even wrong in parts. All developments of human knowledge proceed like this. Knowledge is itself evolutionary. We never arrive at some absolute ‘truth’. We gain greater and great insight though slow accumulations and gigantic leaps. For Marx the job of the ‘revolutionary’, trying to liberate humanity from the inhumanity of capital, was to look every day at what was unfolding in front of their eyes. There is no plan for revolution in Marx, no blue print for the future, precisely because it was the developments within society, particularly in the developments of the working class’s own organisation and ideas that were to be found the only potential agent of radical transformation–from the class society of capital to the future ‘free association of the producers.’ But the work of Marx’s was only a foundation stone. The building had to be continued day by day.
Even in his own life time Marx despaired of many of the ‘Marxists’, who thought he had written some definitive text book about how things should develop. After the Russian Revolution, the process of turning Marx into the new god accelerated. Here is not the place to go into the history of the Russian Revolution, but suffice it to say that it did not lead to the ‘free association of the producers’. A hierarchical society emerged from the revolution. The Tsar and the aristocrats might have vanished but slowly all the significant elements of the old Tsarist society returned. Serfdom had been abolished in the 1860’s but under Stalin slave labour was reintroduced. Prison camps for dissidents were filled to overflowing. More people were sent to Siberia than had ever been sent by the Tsar. The most radical dissidents were executed. The Red Army slowly resurrected the old Russian Empire. Once again, the working class were exploited and oppressed. But all this was done in the name of Marx. Marx’s writings were used to justify every aspect of the ‘new’ Russia. And around the world millions of people joined the Communist Parties, inspired by the revolution, and were similarly encouraged to read Marx and to equate his works with the monstrous tyranny being erected in Russia.
I remember going to Prague, the capital of Czechoslovakia, as the Soviet Empire was collapsing. The streets were full of gatherings, people reading manifestos pasted on walls, people going to meetings. I met with a group of 20-year-olds, all political activists trying to create a new society as the old one collapsed around them. They all described themselves as anarchists. I asked them about the ideas of Marx. They laughed. They knew more about Marx than I did. They were forced to study him throughout their school and college years. But this was the state ideology. A state they knew as oppressive, that banned them from listening to the Rolling Stones, that censored art and literature, that was nationalistic and racist. Above all Marx was part of a state ideology that prevented free thought. Its method of reasoning was identical to the inquisitors of the papal empire. So, for these young people, Marx must have been supportive of all this shit.
Marx’s ideas had been transformed from an attempt to encourage people to investigate their
world in order to see how they might liberate themselves from class society into an ideology to reinforce an elite’s control of an oppressive society. The Soviet leaders didn’t burn Marx’s books as the religious zealots had done in the Library of Alexandria. They turned his writings
into their state bible and this was far more useful in an age when the growing power of the working class had to be constrained. What better way to do it than to dress up tyranny in the clothes of Marx and Engels.
’Scientific Socialism’
Just a little digression here on ‘science’ and Marx. I said earlier that science original meant knowledge but in the last few centuries it has become more and more used in connection with the scientific method of, say, chemistry or physics where certain rules can be defined, where experiments can be conducted and replicated. It is clear that a growing understanding of the evolution of human society has to follow a different path. All the evidence of history has to be incorporated – and that evidence grows everyday as society develops and more from our past becomes known – all aspects of written culture and thought have to be part of that explanation, all the various forms of human organisation have to be contained within our growing picture of the past in order to understand the present. And by past, I mean everything up to five minutes ago. But human society is surely one the most complex parts of the universe. The organisation of human beings with actions directed by that most complex form of matter – the human brain – is so accidental in its day to day development that while we can see patterns and underlying structures, we cannot talk about laws in the same way we can talk about the laws of gravity (though even those become more and more complex and unexpected as our knowledge of them advances).
Marx and Engels and their early followers were keen to distance their perspectives from those of the Utopian socialists who were devoid of the understanding of society that Marx developed. And this was in a period when the rapidly growing scientific knowledge of all the processes of matter were being revealed. So there was a tendency to try to put Marx’s discoveries on the same plane as the discoveries in chemistry or physics. In terms of the development of knowledge and the rational, humanistic means by which it was developed they were the same, but the development of society and the behaviour of atoms are very different. Even Marx and Engels at times failed to see this and there developed a tendency to talk about the ‘iron laws of history’, a tendency to believe that capitalism was as destined, by the ‘laws of history’, to give way to socialism as the Uranium atom was to decay. This is just wrong. There are simply too many variables, too many unknowns, too many ‘accidental possibilities’ in human society to know for sure what will happen tomorrow. We might in the future transform human society or we might be heading towards extinction. But this doesn’t in any way alter the fact that Marx’s study of human society, in order to see how change could come about, contributes to our knowledge of the universe in exactly the same way as developments in studies in human-prehistory or neuroscience or quantum theory. The tools and techniques in each sphere just happen to differ.
When Einstein reflected on Newton’s Laws of Gravity, he was able to see their shortcomings. Without any practical evidence he asserted that time and space would be bent in the presence of massive bodies. Many years later people detected light from sources that lay behind the sun, sources that according to conventional thinking should have been invisible. But time and space are warped by the sun’s mass and light was bent round it. We can investigate and try to understand the dynamics and unravelling of society but our analyses will never be ‘proved’ in the way that Einstein’s predictions were. We can uncover and understand the framework
and dynamics of society but tomorrow’s events are never totally without surprise.
This conflation of the laws of physics/chemistry with the development of society well suited the new rulers in the USSR. It eliminated the actions of the individual. It made irrelevant the thoughts of the workers and their ideas being the radical driver of change. It made class consciousness a mechanical outcome of circumstances, the ‘laws of history’. They trumpeted Marx’s one liner ‘Being determines consciousness’ and ignored the fact that human ‘being’–the sum total of human existence–includes consciousness. ‘Marxists’ stressed their ‘materialism’ and ‘objectivism’ in a battle against ‘idealism’. But their ‘materialism’ saw the objective world as something outside of human thought. They failed to see that thought, the product of the material brain is itself part of the objective material world. And they downplayed the role of thought, of ideas, in shaping the world. The ‘processes’ determined everything. Similarly, Darwin’s discovery of evolution, revolutionary as it was, tended to a one-sidedness with the environment acting upon life forms with not enough recognition that all life forms alter their environment. Humans alter their environment by their practice which is guided by ideas but ideas are not on some sort of one-to-one correlation with circumstances. Today’s materialism has to recognise there is no ‘observer’ standing outside of the ‘observed’. What we see as ‘reality’ is far more complex than simply stating it’s something which objectively exists outside of thought.
This elimination of the producers as the only agents of radical social re-organisation is hinted at in Lenin’s one liner–‘Communism is Soviet Power plus the electrification of the whole country.’ A misunderstanding that was to become fatal when Soviet Power became the arbitrary and fatal whim of Joseph Stalin.
Building the vanguard party of revolution?
Even as a young teenager I already saw the Soviet Union as a bastion of stodgy old men. I was in a youth hostel in France in 1968 and watched a large group of Czechoslovakian teenagers sit in numbed silence round the breakfast table glued to the news of Russian tanks pouring into Prague to suppress the movement for freedom, the Prague Spring. I knew of the Russian gulags through the writings of Solzhenitzsyn. You didn’t have to rely on western propaganda to gain a picture of tyranny, you could just read the Russian leader Krushchev’s speech to the Soviet Government after Stalin’s death. Hundreds of thousands of workers, probably millions had died at the hands of state repression. No, their ‘revolution’ and their ‘Marx’ was no different to the dull and oppressive society I saw all around me.
I was attracted to a ‘revolutionary’ party that was anti-Stalinist based on the writings of Leon Trotsky, one of the leaders of the Russian revolution who had criticised the direction the USSR took after the death of Lenin. Trotsky had been exiled and finally murdered by Stalin’s killers. Over the coming years I read Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and many others. I worked round the clock to build ‘my party’. A typical day was get up at 5am, go and collect copies of our daily newspaper and deliver them to regular readers’ homes, then go and sell the paper outside a factory near where I worked. Then go into work and in any free time sell the paper in my workplace and talk to people. After work go and sell the paper round the council estates (that’s social housing in newspeak though I can never see what’s social about them) then go and sell papers round the pubs and bars. Go to bed. Get up, (don’t rave) repeat. Of course, there were other things going on. I became a senior shop steward in just about every place I worked, first on the building sites and then as a metal worker. But ‘building the party’ dominated much of my life over many years.
This manic activity seemed necessary at the time. Only ‘we’ had the key to salvation. Looking back the real outcome of it all was not so much the new recruits, paper sales or money raised, but the lack of thought. There was no time to really examine the world we were living in or the ideas that guided us. Every new twist and turn of the party were just followed obediently by the party faithful. In the 1970’s Gerry Healy declared that we were living in a revolutionary situation. Anyone who questioned this was a ‘petty bourgeois individualist’. After the miners’ defeat, he announced Britain was heading towards a fascist dictatorship. All of these ‘evaluations’ had one purpose, to keep the membership’s nose to the grindwheel, not to really understand the changes taking place.