I definetly agree.I think we should get the best out of Darwin to see
what is potential for Marxism. Developing a materialist conception of
nature is necessary for understanding the "historicity" of human nature.
While doing that, however, Marxists should be careful not to
assimilate Marx to Darwin. Instead, we should reject Darwin's
assumptions about the biological inferiority of blacks and women. I have
seen weird books named "Marx and Social Darwinism",which are misguided
comparisons of Marx to Darwin for the purposes of Darwinizing Marx in the
direction of biological determinism.
I don't know Foster in details. I was just wondering about his views
on the relationship of Darwin's ideas to the British ruling class of his
time (if he has any)...
Mine
>While John Bellamy Foster acknowledges Darwin's concessions to social
>Darwinism, the main stress is on the importance of developing a
>materialist
view of nature in defiance of the essentialist and teleological consensus
of the mid 1800s. That being said, I agree strongly with Robert Young that
social Darwinism has had an unfortunate influence on Marxist thought. In
"Marxism and Anthropology", Maurice Bloch states that Karl Kautsky read
Herbert Spencer before he read Marx and never seemed to have totally
renounced the former, as evidenced by articles written in the German Social
Democratic press filled with evolutionist notions inappropriate to Marxism.
The same is true of Plekhanov, whose "Materialist Conception of History"
tends to treat indigenous peoples like dinosaurs who became extinct because
they were ill-adapted to their environment (actually, as Gould points out,
dinosaurs were well-adapted to their environment but got creamed by some
kind of deus ex machina event, like a comet).
The most troubling symptom of this uneasy relationship between Marxism and
social Darwinism is the key role played by Lewis Henry Morgan in Marx's
Ethnological Notebooks and Engels' Origin of the Family, Private Property
and the State. While Morgan was sympathetic to the American Indian, he
essentially viewed them as dinosaurs. This view led him to become a
forceful spokesman for residential schools for the Indians, which were
sadistic attempts to "civilize" the Indian. Children were beaten if they
spoke their native tongue and forced to do menial work in order to "teach"
them about the superior value of wage labor. Hunting and fishing were
viewed as barbaric activities.
Louis Proyect
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